{"id":5156,"date":"2012-06-27T23:56:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T03:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mondomark.com\/wordpress\/?p=3288"},"modified":"2012-06-27T23:56:41","modified_gmt":"2012-06-28T03:56:41","slug":"soundtrack-reviews-an-italian-octet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5156","title":{"rendered":"Soundtrack Reviews: an Italian Octet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019m doing a set of soundtrack reviews in two parts, largely because I wanted to get the complicated one taken care of first, since it took a while to gather the specific components of this salute to Italian soundtracks.<\/p>\n

Fans of giallo, zombie, cannibal, crime films, comedies, and certainly spaghetti westerns are well familiar with the whopping talent that produced an enormous amount of music when Italy was heavily riffing on whatever was hot during the sixties and seventies \u2013 my favourite period \u2013 and the eighties.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s unique about Italian cinema during that period is that while native writers, directors, and producers were making variants & knock-offs of whatever was a hit (home-grown, international, or imported from Hollywood), they never hired a Hollywood composer. (At least, I can’t think of one who was specifically involved in one of the aforementioned genres.)<\/p>\n

Now, you could argue it was due to a sense of cost-effectiveness, or perhaps better for complex financing agreements, or maybe a Hollywood composer would\u2019ve felt it was a step down to score a zombie flick, but the sheer volume of music released in Italy at the time of a film\u2019s release is simply massive.<\/p>\n

It may have been part of a film\u2019s natural exploitation to issue a 45 single, an LP, or pack it together in some compilation release, but there was less \/ no stigma attached to not only hiring native composers, but releasing their music to the masses.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also not a stretch to say that the work of Franco Micalizzi, Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, Armando Trovajoli, Stelvio Cipriani, Piero Umiliani, and Piero Piccioni were put on the same pedestal as Ennio Morricone \u2013 a giant whose C.V. included art films, epics, international co-productions,\u00a0 exploitive crap, and Tinto Brass erotica.<\/p>\n

Vintage scores are still being reissued and remastered and expanded, although perhaps the runs of 500 copies simply allow indie labels to sell out of titles sooner, so there\u2019s funds for the next venture.<\/p>\n

The albums I\u2019ve covered below are representative of the talent that moved back & forth between genres, sometimes with session musicians scoring films solo and becoming composers in their own right, and composers who decided to tackle some experimentalism as an antidote to the incessant sameness of \u00a0another giallo, spaghetti western, or spy spoof.<\/p>\n

Ennio Morricone is Italy\u2019s modern Mozart, and perhaps more \u00a0because he\u2019s proven himself adept in any genre by being inventive, weird, and sometimes re-appropriating a theme or two now and then when a year\u2019s quote runs as high as 20 film projects.<\/p>\n

For a period, he was a member of the Nuova Consonanza [NC], an experimental group from which he explored and found a way to take strange sounds and give them some thematic form, like sputtering into a trumpet mouthpiece or having the musicians groan erotically into the microphones \u2013 sounds he later used in many giallo scores.<\/p>\n

Some of the NC material is still available on CD, and Cometa Records have also released some material on LP, but their latest issue is Eroina <\/a><\/strong>[M<\/a>] (1971), an album featuring previously unreleased weirdness that giallo fans will find oh-so-soothing. I\u2019ve also added a review of the group\u2019s second LP from 1967, Private Sea of Dreams<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>], one of three platters reelased by RCA Victor; for those wanting more unreleased goodies, there\u2019s also the multi-disc set Azioni<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>], which die Schactel released in 2006.<\/p>\n

Cometa\u2019s also released Solisti di Armando Trojajoli<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>], a 1968 album featuring music by the quartet I MARC 4. The group featured expert jazzmen known for performing other people\u2019s music (like Trovajoli\u2019s) and playing on numerous soundtracks, and among the personnel is Carlo Pes, a guitarist who had his own sporadic fling as a solo film composer.<\/p>\n

In that regard, I\u2019ve also reviewed Peppino De Luca\u2019s L\u2019uomo dagli occhi di ghiacchio<\/strong> (1971) and Pes\u2019 Un uomo dalla pella dura<\/strong> (1972), both part of a double-bill CD<\/a> [M<\/a>] from GDM Records, with the former score performed by I MARC 4.\u00a0Also reviewed is De Luca\u2019s music from the 1970 production Dorian Gray<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] starring pouty Helmut Berger, which DigitMovies released a few years ago.<\/p>\n

You could brand the selections in this week’s score roster as a kind of 3 degrees of separation (or something like that) where one soundtrack leads to another related composer, hence the related coverage.\u00a0It\u2019s also <\/em>fair to say that Edda Dell\u2019Orso was not one person but 18 clones created in a lab by Ennio Morricone\u2019s producer to meet the demand of the composer without robbing Morricone of his favourite human voice.<\/p>\n

Moving on, we have two of my favourites: Girogio Gaslini, and Piero Umiliani.<\/p>\n

Gaslini\u2019s work as a jazz pianist is beyond reproach, and Quartet Records released his debut film score for Michelangelo Antonioni\u2019s La Notte<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1961) earlier last year, and they\u2019ve just announced two new Gaslini scores on CD:\u00a0 La Sorelle<\/strong> (1969) and La Pacifista <\/strong>(1970). You may have heard Gaslini\u2019s name as co-composer of Dario Argento\u2019s Deep Red<\/strong>, but if you\u2019ve never heard his jazz, you\u2019re in for a treat.<\/p>\n

Umiliani is best-known as the guy who wrote the \u201cMahna Mahna\u201d song which Jim Henson brilliantly appropriated for several Muppets skits<\/a>, but as a jazz composer, propagator of Italian lounge, and lover of the Hammond organ, Umiliani’s work is superb, and I\u2019ve reviewed Una Bella Grinta \/ The Reckless<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1965) which Cinedelic released a few years ago.<\/p>\n

Also reviewed is the snappy Africa To-Day<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] from Kronos Records, featuring African & Polynesian-flavoured library music Umiliani composed between 1971-1975. It\u2019s an unusual sound that\u2019s best described as exotica filtered through funked-up lounge sensibilities, and it works in its own trippy little way.<\/p>\n

That CD, like many of the full stereo recordings of the period, are indicative of the amazing musicians and sound engineers who captured performances with such robustness. It may trace back to the jazz artists who wanted their performances to sound as intimate and rich as the Blue Note and Capitol LPs of their peers & idols, but what emerged during the late sixties & early seventies are recordings that to my ears are benchmarks of miking and engineering.<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com <\/strong>( Main Site<\/a> \/ Mobile Site<\/a> )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Soundtrack reviews of 8 Italian releases, including albums by IMARC 5, Nuova Consonanza with Ennio Morricone, Piero Umiliani, Giorgio Gaslini, Peppino De Luca, and Carlo Pes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[1388,1386,131,1379,1384,1378,1385,1381,4213],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1la","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5157,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions\/5157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}