Antonio Onorato - Neapolitan Avantgarde (2025)

With Neapolitan Avantgarde, Antonio Onorato signs a bold album deeply rooted in his musical identity: a jazz that looks forward without ever turning its back on tradition. In this new project, the Neapolitan guitarist reinvents the Neapolitan sound heritage through a contemporary filter, mixing the rituality of popular forms with free structures, urban sounds and world suggestions, without ever losing sight of the groove and singability.

The beating heart of the album is precisely a sort of dialogue between tradition and innovation: songs like “Tammurriata Nera” and “Chi Tene ‘O Mare” bring the Neapolitan popular melodies and rhythms back to the forefront, but they are dressed in new harmonies, unpredictable metrics and experimental timbres. How can you not remain in liturgical silence while listening to “Chi tene ‘o mare” or literally surprised and captured when an icon like “Tammurriata Nera” turns towards a sound, rhythmic and dynamic avant-garde.

In “Neapolitan Minor Blues” and “Taranfree”, the compositional approach becomes freer and more improvisational, with a strong tension between structure and flow. The first moves between the canonical form of the blues and Neapolitan modal scales, while the second is a deconstructed tarantella, where Salvatore Tranchini’s drums and Angelo Farias’ elastic bass draw hypnotic trajectories on which D’Argenzio’s sax and Onorato’s guitar-breath intersect in “relentless” evolutions. In “3/4 E Un Po’”, Onorato and his original Neapolitan-jazz sound take the stage for a high-speed excursion, (in)followed by a very solid band. As in “Arabesque”, “slower”, lyrical, contemplative, almost hypnotic, with guitar-breath still tracing a path then taken up and further developed by D’Argenzio.

The album closes with “Palummella” and “Luandando”, songs where the melody returns as the protagonist, but always filtered by a personal vision that blends Afro, Latin and Mediterranean elements in a subtle balance. Here Onorato reaffirms his poetics: a narrative and spiritual jazz, capable of making roots and future coexist with surprising naturalness.

Neapolitan Avantgarde is a manifesto of a unique musical vision in the Italian panorama: Antonio Onorato confirms himself not only as an excellent and expert guitarist, but also as an author and musical thinker capable of giving voice, international and experimental, to the soul of Naples, taking up (and winning) the challenge of welcoming influences, filtering them, absorbing them and returning them in a completely original way. A bridge between Vesuvius and the streets of New York, with a strong Mediterranean breath.