Pino Daniele

Giuseppe "Pino" Daniele (19 March 1955 – 4 January 2015) was an Italian singer-songwriter and musician. His influences covered a wide number of genres, including pop, blues, jazz, and Italian and Middle Eastern music.

Biography

Daniele was born to a working-class family in Naples, his father being a harbor worker. A self-taught guitarist, he began his career as a musician playing for other successful singers of the 1970s. His debut in the Italian music world was in 1977 with the album Terra mia, which proved to be a successful mix of Neapolitan tradition and blues sounds. Daniele defined his music with the term "tarumbò", which indicated a mix of tarantella, blues and rumba. His lyrics also attracted critical praise: written and sung in an intense Neapolitan, they contained strong and bitter accusations against the social injustices of Naples, as well as Italian society in general, and included melancholic personal themes. Several of the later songs are characterized by a free intermingling of English, Italian and Neapolitan passages.

Daniele's talent was confirmed on the following album Pino Daniele (1979). He scored his greatest success in 1980, with Nero a metà ("Half-Black"), which was noted by some authorities as the hallmark of the rebirth of Neapolitan song. In that year Daniele opened the Bob Marley concert at the San Siro stadium in Milan. In 1981 Vai Mo was released. The presence of some of the most renowned musicians of the Neapolitan musical milieu, including James Senese, Enzo Avitabile, Tullio De Piscopo and Tony Esposito, as session men on his albums has also been widely praised.