Music: after 45 years, a new version of ‘La Torre di Babele’ by Edoardo Bennato is released

45 years after its publication, the new version of ‘La Torre di Babele’ is released for Sony Music – Legacy Recordings, one of Edoardo Bennato’s greatest record and artistic successes, perhaps the most iconic record of his career, in a special edition celebratory with the remastering of the original tapes and with 16 live tracks. Out on Friday 8 October, it is available for preorder on all digital platforms from today. Bennato published ‘La Torre di Babele’ in 1976: a record whose cover, designed by the singer-songwriter himself, depicted the progression of man in his research and construction of weapons in all its evolutionary phase. “With the Tower of Babel I wanted to try to explain the biblical meaning of a blind humanity in its pursuit of arms, such as to challenge the divinity itself in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable escalation. Men came to conceive of building such a tall tower to reach heaven and God “, explains the Neapolitan singer-songwriter. The album was released in a historical era characterized by social unrest, student demonstrations and political instability, at the gates of the lead years of terrorism. Of great historical and narrative value are the two recordings made between 1976 and 1977, in company by the bluesman Roberto Ciotti and Tony Esposito, recovered by Edoardo Bennato and his brother Giorgio, present in the new edition of ‘La Torre di Babele’: sarcasm and irony are distinctive features of the work of the singer-songwriter from Bagnoli, who turns the spotlight on a troubled and chaotic period. Paolo Maiorino, record company who oversaw the project, says: “The tower of Babel meant for Edoardo Bennato the album of the definitive artistic maturity. It precedes by a year ‘Puppet without wires’, another masterpiece destined to become the best-selling album of 1977. But the musical and thematic importance of this 1976 work plays a fundamental role not only in the Bennatiana record, but of the whole Italian music of the 70s “. For Maiorino,” retracing the genesis of this iconic record together with Edoardo allowed on the one hand to reconstruct its history and anecdotes, but also to focus the spotlight on a political and socio-cultural phenomenon such as the linked one. to the autoreducers, a movement that characterized and conditioned a substantial part of live music in our country for an entire decade. Thus, the story of Edoardo Bennato is a mirror of what also involved other artists, from Francesco De Gregori to Eugenio Finardi, from Antonello Venditti to Lucio Dalla and many others “. The two episodes recovered thanks to the archives of Giorgio Bennato,” testify not only in a narrative way, but also and above all in a musical way, a period of profound social tensions that would soon lead to the so-called Years of Lead. Once again music as an instrument of analysis and historical memory of facts and events that characterized an era “.