Marco Parente

Critics have long labeled Marco Parente a singer/songwriter, a label that captures only part of an artist who has repeatedly pushed past conventional genre lines by folding in jazz phrasing, Balcanic brass-band textures, and forays into literature, visual art, and theater, making him one of the most singular and wide-ranging Italian musicians of his era.

Although born in Naples in 1969, Parente developed his musical voice in Florence, beginning as a drummer first in the band Otto'p'notri and later as a session player for C.S.I. and Andrea Chimenti; those associations yielded the respective 1996 albums Linea Gotica and L'Albero Pazzo. His own debut, Eppur Non Basta, arrived in 1997 and revealed an artist drawing from the most experimental wing of Italian songwriting alongside American figures such as Tim Buckley, Jeff Buckley, and Shawn Phillips.

Testa, Dì Cuore, issued in 1999, ventured further into experimental territory while retaining verse-chorus-verse frameworks, most audibly under the spell of Radiohead, evident in tracks such as “Karma Parente.” In 2000 Parente joined the itinerant production Pullman My Daisy alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Giorno, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and he composed the music for Tempesta di Sogni, a Blue Danza ballet drawn from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Trasparente appeared in 2002, produced by Afterhours’ Manuel Agnelli and widely regarded as Parente’s most ambitious and fully realized statement to that point; that same year he shared the Grinzane Cavour prize with Agnelli and Cristina Donà for the poetic caliber of his lyrics. A recording of the three artists’ concert from the award event was later issued in 2004 as a supplement to the Italian music magazine Il Mucchio Extra. A 2003 appearance with Millennium Bugs’ Orchestra reached listeners in 2004 as the album L'Attuale Jungla.

Parente then assembled a fresh ensemble featuring members of the Italian experimental group Mariposa and released two distinct yet thematically linked albums, both titled Neve Ridens, across 2005 and 2006. Concerts in Florence supporting the first of those releases supplied the foundation for the 2006 DVD Neve Ridens un Giorno, which also captured segments of the music-and-literature program Il Rumore dei Libri.