Today, Wednesday 29 October 2025, at 07:05 Gaetano Senese, aka Jamespassed away at the Cardarelli Hospital in Naples at the age of 80.
The funeral will be held Thursday 30 October at 12:00 in the Parish of Santa Maria dell'Arco in Piazza Madonna dell'Arco 8 in Miano, in the neighborhood where the artist lived all his life.
JAMES SENESE
JAMES SENESE he was not only a musician, singer and composer. It was a unique, unmistakable voice from a Naples that expressed creativity, imagination, depth and culture.
Born on 6 January 1945 in Naples, he experienced firsthand all the difficulties that a boy “child of war” (his father, an American soldier, never knew him) had to face.
This suffering, combined with a poor childhood, pushed him to seek redemption and find his place in the world, and he did so in almost sixty years of career, dozens of albums, and thousands of concerts around the world. James Senese was not only an artistic but also a human point of reference. His coherence and discipline, his escape from the logic of the market, his incessant musical research, made him a model, an inspiration for anyone who wanted to aspire to become an artist.
He was the first to believe in a very young Pino Daniele, to whom he offered a position as bassist (and an electric bass, which James himself bought for him) in Napoli Centrale, the band with which Senese carried out a musical revolution, starting that Neapolitan Power which since the beginning of the seventies has made Naples an international musical capital. Pino Daniele will then pay tribute to that idea of sound and cultural mix, as well as to the seminal Showmen (the band founded in the sixties by Senese and Mario Musella, another son born from the union of a Neapolitan woman and an American soldier) with an epochal album, Nero a Metà, in which the timbre of James' sax is central, unmistakable and indelible, in the heart and in the memory.
He leaves hours and hours of music, his artistic testament, which are everyone's heritage, and a certainty: Art does not allow compromises.
In these words James Senese himself some time ago contains the heart of his thought and philosophy:
“Time is something that takes on meaning as the years go by; when you are young you pay little attention to it, you don't care about it. But then when it starts to run you try to fix it, to slow it down. I do it armed with sax and feeling.
I was born in 1945, the year the war ended, to an American father and a Neapolitan mother. Since I was a child I have always tried to counteract what I considered unfair, first of all prejudice. Surely the color of my skin contributed to developing this feeling. Imagine how a fifteen-year-old Neapolitan boy might have felt in 1960 looking in the mirror, seeing himself different from my peers, and from what post-war society imposed. In short, I had my share of complexes to overcome, trying to feel equal to others who often did not fail to point out my “diversity”.
Then one day I discovered the instrument that changed my life forever, the saxophone.
There I condensed all my anxieties, my fears, blowing them away, literally. I understood that I could free myself from all the problems, that I could chase away the fears that gripped my soul. I come from a modest family, not to mention poor. While playing I decided that I wanted to talk about the last ones, those who can't make it, that part of the people who live with their heads down to bring home the loaf of bread; but I would also have liked to talk about love and respect for people.
I've never been interested in money. I gave up important contracts which however would have made me betray what I believed in, and still believe; coherence and artistic honesty.
I believe I have become a good musician and a good composer, with strong feelings, leaving aside selfishness and personalism; thanking instead for what I have achieved in almost sixty years of music.
For this I must say thanks to God, to my family, who gave me the strength and the right values.
I believe that only respect and acceptance of others, of those who are different, can contribute to the pacification of people, and give us that part of happiness necessary to love others.” James Senese
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
