50th anniversary limited edition. First-ever 24Bit/192kHz remaster from the original tapes. 180g black vinyl, numbered. His father was an American soldier from North Carolina who left Naples when James Senese was eighteen months old and never came back. What remained was a saxophone, a surname that didn't fit the neighbourhood, and two musical worlds that Italian society had no language to reconcile. Senese found that language himself - first in the soul and R&B of the Showmen in the 1960s, then in Coltrane, in Miles, in Weather Report, and finally in something that belonged entirely to him: a sound that was neither American nor Neapolitan, but both at once, pressed together until they fused. Mattanza is that fusion at its most concentrated. The second album by Napoli Centrale - the band Senese built with drummer and lyricist Franco Del Prete out of the wreckage of the Showmen - appeared in 1976, a year after a debut that had already unsettled the Italian scene. Where the first record carried an almost exuberant energy, this one moves differently. Tighter, more deliberate. The title is itself a statement: a mattanza is the traditional ritual slaughter of bluefin tuna off the Sicilian coast - collective, violent, deeply ancient. Nothing about the name promises comfort.

The rhythm section locks in with extraordinary discipline. Agostino Marangolo and Marvin "Boogaloo" Smith share drum duties; Kelvin Bullen holds the bass end with the kind of restraint that creates rather than fills space. Pippo Guarnera's Fender Rhodes circles overhead, sinuous and cool. Into all of this Senese releases his saxophone - long, searching lines that pull Coltranian modalism toward Mediterranean melody without ever quite arriving anywhere. Del Prete's lyrics, in Neapolitan dialect, deal in the things the music circles around: work, poverty, identity, the slow violence of the South. "Sangue Misto" coils like a dispute that won't resolve. "'O nonno mio" lasts under two minutes and says more than the longer pieces dare. A young Pino Daniele would soon enter the band's orbit - hired first as a bassist, before departing to transform everything he had absorbed into something entirely his own. That a band like this played support for Weather Report in Rome, and performed at Montreux, suggests how clearly the wider jazz world heard what was happening. Nino D'Angelo would later call Senese the Miles Davis of Naples. It wasn't hyperbole.

Senese died on October 29, 2025. This reissue - first-ever 24Bit/192kHz remaster from the original tapes, 180g black vinyl, numbered, limited edition - arrives in the fiftieth anniversary year of the album, and months after his passing. The timing is not incidental. Mattanza is the record to start with, or to return to. Either way, it holds.