The Zena Soul Syndicate is a project that was born in 2018 on the idea of the Genoese drummer Andrea "Dede" Dell'Amico who, with the help of the singer Fabio Canobbio, intends to bring back on stage a formation made up of numerous musicians, a sort of small Big Band, re-proposing the concept of training soul of the 60s, now lost.

In addition to the basic quintet and the percussions, there is a 5-piece brass section, 4 backing vocalists and several solo singers, for a total of 16 items.

The project was born as a tribute to “the Commitments”, cult film of the 90s directed by Alan Parker. The soundtrack to the film was a huge commercial success, bringing these classic Soul songs back to the attention of a huge audience.

With a repertoire almost entirely borrowed from the Commitments, the band has performed on prestigious stages, such as the Porretta Soul Festival, the best-known European exhibition, in the summer of 2022.

With the entry into the band of the arranger and Director Federico Basso, the band wanted to change direction, embracing an extremely ambitious project.

No longer a simple re-proposition of classic pieces, but a transposition of the same in a more key contemporary.

Basically we wanted to go back to the roots of the genre but mainly by inserting elements of the matrix in the arrangements Funk, which have gradually developed starting from the concept of Soul over the following decades.

Without distorting the original character of this extraordinary music, we wanted to enrich it with harmonic and formal rhythmic elements, drawing inspiration from the big bands Soul Funky, primarily Tower of Power, applying their aesthetic principles to the original songs.

We worked on the rhythms and arrangements of the wind section and the rhythmic texture in general, with a careful study of the developments of the black music over the last 50 years and on sound, to make it contemporary but always characterized by classical instruments such as the organ Hammond and electric guitar, the Rhodes and Clavinet, eschewing digital sounds, synthesizers and samplers.

The classics of Soul are reinterpreted through contemporary expressive tools and language, in a mingling with the Funk and Jazz: an operation never attempted by anyone.