Cesare Basile

Cesare Basile is definitely one of the most distinguished and innovative Italian artists of the past decades. Throughout the thirty years of his career ha has successfully created a unique and original language of “Blues”, eventually settling on the use of a dark and archaic Sicilian dialect which he uses to represent the affliction of human people and the scream of pain of a population robbed of its dignity and self-determination. Basile’s preferred subjects deal with stories of love and of anarchy, aiming to describe the defeated and the miserable, drawing the right inspiration from certain types of African music and creating a common theme uniting the Sicilian language, the pain of the defeated and the oppressed, and Africa, considered universally as the cradle of human civilization. Sicily thus becomes like the Mississippi Delta, and Basile becomes a modern Skip James or Robert Johnson. All this is substantiated by his irrevocable rock attitude which fully embraces Sicilian popular music, folk, blues, and – in his own personal way – punk. Alan Lomax would have gone to any length to meet him. Over the years, Cesare Basile has published a total of 11 albums, which have become a guarantee of his reliability and prestige, going so far as to already win the Targa Tenco twice, being the most illustrious and desirable Italian recognition for new songwriting.