Enzo Avitabile Music Life

A portrait of Neapolitan saxophonist and singer-songwriter Enzo Avitabile (b. 1955), who combines his love of world music and jazz fusion with forgotten instruments and local folk drum rhythms. Oscar winner Jonathan Demme () has previously made documentaries about Neil Young and the Talking Heads. Demme discovered Avitabile's music on the radio in 2006, as he was driving over the George Washington Bridge in New York. He painstakingly records the inspirational musical meetings in a baroque church between Avitabile and musicians from all over the world, including Daby Touré, Gerardo Núñez and Amal Murkus. Traditional instruments and rhythms play a major role in this, as do songs about hard lives, struggle and protest, and of course love. Demme also follows Avitabile's travels around Naples with a lively handheld camera: from his messy workroom in a working-class neighborhood to a visit to the poor suburb of Marianella, where he grew up. In the meantime, the energetic Avitabile talks about his turbulent life: about meeting living legends such as James Brown and Tina Turner, losing his wife, his conversion to Buddhism and return to Christianity, and the period when he was blind.