Ennio Morricone

In a room with little light....

My real purpose was to write classical music. Since the conservatoire (music school), that was my ambition. Then, of course, you have to live -- and you can make money from film music. That's just how my life went.

- Ennio Morricone

In the basement of the house where I grew up - a room with little light - I watched a lot of old movies on our tiny-screened black & white TV. Movie soundtracks were a major source of my journey on that Big River called Jazz. Next to Fred Astaire and the musicals, I was a big Western fan and Spaghetti Westerns were my early favorites. The drama, sweeping landscapes, and quirky music - I loved them. But 1969 was a big year for me. I was seven years old, and that was the year my dad took me to see True Grit - my first movie on the big screen. The next year, we saw Patton and Tora Tora Tora.

In 1972, he took me to see Jeremiah Johnson. That was when he told me, “I love Westerns.” As it turned out, so did I. He didn’t take me to the movies much, so it was a while before I saw another one.

Finally, in 1974, he took me to see what I think was the last movie we saw together; after that, I was pretty much on my own. I remember liking the soundtrack. The movie was another Western called My Name Is Nobody. Here’s the title track:

After the movie, my dad told me the town filmed in the beginning was Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico.

Acoma Pueblo is said to have been founded during the 1200s and is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the U.S. He reminded me that we had been there during a summer trip to Albuquerque visiting my aunt and uncle. The movie was filmed in early 1973, about the same time we were down there. I remembered Acoma as a magical place.

Interestingly, French actor Jean Martin played Sullivan in My Name Is Nobody. He also played Colonel Philippe Mathieu in the Battle of Algiers, which we covered two weeks ago on our journey.

The first time I actually realized who composed the music for My Name Is Nobody and all those Spaghetti Westerns I liked so much was when I saw Once Upon A Time In The West.

That soundtrack is a masterpiece - as is the movie. I can’t recall the first time I saw it, but it left an immediate impression. So I looked up who composed the score, and that’s when I discovered Ennio Morricone. Here’s a beautiful song from the movie, Nascita di una città:

Here’s another iconic song with whistling by Italian musician and composer Alessandro Alessandroni:

After Once Upon A Time In The West, I was on the lookout for Morricone’s music.

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Ennio Morricone was born in Rome in 1928. At just 10 years old he enrolled in a trumpet school at Rome’s prestigious Saint-Cecilia Conservatory. He completed his studies in 1954. In the late 1950s, he worked as an arranger for the Italian Broadcasting service RAI and later with RCA Italiana.

Morricone’s first feature film score was for Luciano Salce’s 1961 Il Federale, which began his long collaboration with Salce. In 1962, Morricone composed the jazz-influenced score for Salce's comedy La Voglia Matta. That year Morricone also recorded Chet Is Back. You can read more about that here:

Chet Baker in Italy

However, Morricone’s first big hit was Ogni Volta in 1964, sung by Paul Anka. As Piero Umiliani had done years earlier, Morricone featured the song at the Festival di Sanremo. It went on to sell more than one million copies in Italy alone and was awarded a gold disc.

Flexibility and eclecticism were always integral parts of Morricone’s musical character. By the time he was writing his first scores for his former schoolmate Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Morricone was also playing trumpet in the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, an avant-garde improvisation collective whose members at one point included the maverick experimentalist Frederic Rzewski.

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza in 1978. Morricone is 3rd from right.

The group was dedicated to developing new music techniques influenced by jazz, serialism, and musique concrète. In particular, they were influenced by contemporary composer Luigi Nono, who from the early 1950s to the early 1960s with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen became leaders of music associated with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (Darmstädter Ferienkurse) in Darmstadt, Germany. Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza is an interesting group that requires further recognition and research.

In regards to this group, Morricone stated:

Nuova Consonanza really reunited me with the love of my life — composing absolute music, music that is not related to a film, or to a pop song. One of our rules was to avoid anything that was melodic, anything that was usual. We had to produce very strange sounds, very complicated sounds, because we wanted to get as far away as possible from the so-called traditions of classical music. The experience with them really helped me to bear the burden of working in the commercial sector.

Here is a very interesting 1967 documentary about the group filmed in the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome by German filmmaker Theo Gallehr:

The group was driven by Italian composer Franco Evangelisti, who came through the 12-tone serialism background popular in academia at that time. However, like American composer Steve Reich, he found it a dead-end. So in 1964, he founded Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza with like-minded composers, including Morricone. They were interested in the idea of spontaneous or instant composing.

The group reminds me of the Dutch Instant Composers Pool (ICP), founded about the same time in Amsterdam by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and drummer Han Bennink. The ICP was simply one of the most important vehicles for experimentation and improvisation in the history of creative music. As European free jazz musicians, they ran into disinterested contemporary jazz labels, so they formed a cooperative to play and release their own music. You can read more about them here:

European Emancipation

On the ICP’s website, they explain the source of their name:

In 1958, guitarist Jim Hall, in liner notes to a Jimmy Giuffre album, used the term “instant composition” to describe improvising. A few years later, Misha Mengelberg, knowing nothing of this, re-coined the term, and it stuck. A quiet manifesto, those two English words countered notions that improvising was either a lesser order of music-making than composing, or an art without a memory, existing only in the moment, unmindful of form. Misha's formulation posited improvisation as formal composition's equal (if not its superior, being faster).

Their first album was Nuova Consonanza, released in 1966 on the RCA Italiana label. My favorite album is Eroina, recorded in 1971, but not released until 2011. To get a feel for their music, go to the the 16:56 minute mark and listen to the title track and then the following track Metedrina:

Interestingly, the group collaborated with Morricone on a couple of his soundtracks, the most popular was Enzo G. Castellari’s 1971 giallo-thriller Gli occhi freddi della paura. From the film - with a hint of Morricone sounding like Miles Davis on Bitches Brew - here is Evaporazioni:

Perhaps Morricone’s interest and association with this avant-garde music group explains some of the quirkiness that I liked so much in his early soundtracks. Over time, his film scores took on a more polished, melodic approach. In fact, his first movie score nominated for an Academy Award was Terrence Malick’s 1978 Days of Heaven. He was also nominated for an Academy Award for Roland Joffe's 1986 The Mission but lost to the jazz soundtrack from Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight. He did not hide his disappointment and in an interview said:

I definitely felt that I should have won for The Mission, especially when you consider that the Oscar-winner that year was Round Midnight, which was not an original score. It had a very good arrangement by Herbie Hancock, but it used existing pieces. So there could be no comparison with The Mission. There was a theft!

Although he did eventually win an Oscar for Quentin Tarantino's 2016 The Hateful Eight, the score for The Mission was better. However, neither is close to the score Morricone wrote for Once Upon A Time In The West. Only his score for Cinema Paradiso comes even close to the beauty and scope of Once Upon A Time In The West.

Here’s one more for the road. Alessandroni, the iconic whistler from Leone’s Spaghetti Western trilogy, was also a leading figure in the Italian Library Music genre. In the same vein as Morricone, I like his blend of jazz, funk, and experimental music that despite familiar elements sound intriguing and at times otherworldly. Here’s one of my favorites, White Sands from his Panoramic Feelings album released in 1971 on the Canopo label:

As a harmonica player, I’m always on the lookout for good harmonica playing outside the normal Blues, Country, and Bluegrass roots. So I’m adding a nice track from Alessandroni’s 1973 lush and hidden gem A Trip Around The World. Here’s Beach Party, with Gianfranco Di Lelio on harmonica:

Italian film director and screenwriter Giuseppe Tornatore, who worked with Morricone on his 1988 Cinema Paradiso, remarked, “He is not just a great film composer he is a great composer.” Ennio Morricone died on July 6, 2020, but his music will live forever.

Next week on the Big River called Jazz I’m thinking more soundtracks, as they were such an important part of my jazz journey; however, you might be a little surprised with the composer. But as my musical mentor told me, “It’s your journey. Just tell it your way.”

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