A few years ago, we took a trip to Italy and traveled from Rome to Sorrento. In Sorrento, we stayed at the magnificent Parco dei Principi hotel, designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti.
In 1959, Neapolitan engineer Roberto Fernandes bought land on the cliffs of Sorrento overlooking the Mediterranean and commissioned Ponti to transform it into a hotel. What amazed me about the hotel was the total dedication to the color blue, like these tiles on the patio:
Clearly inspired by the Mediterranean, I think Ponti was also inspired by the work of French artist Yves Klein.
During the late 1950s, Klein was experimenting with the color blue. In a 1959 speech at the Gelsenkirchen Theatre, where two of his sculptures were commissioned, he said: “Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions, while the other colours have some… All colours bring forth associations of concrete, material, and tangible ideas, while blue evokes all the more the sea and the sky, which are what is most abstract in tangible and visible nature.”
In 1960, Klein dedicated his Untitled Blue Monochrome to its first owner, the Italian artist Gianni Bertini.
Three years earlier, in October 1957, both artists appeared in the same group exhibition Arte Nucleare at the Galleria San Fedele in Ponti’s hometown of Milan. During the time Ponti was designing the Parco dei Principi hotel, Federico Fellini released his great film La Dolce Vita.
Fellini’s earlier 1954 film La Strada was a transitional movie, marking the end of Italian neorealism. Italy was experiencing a growing optimism and economic prosperity; however, the time leading up to La Dolce Vita reflected a Dante-esque frenzy of moral and spiritual decay. It was also a time when Italian movie soundtracks started introducing jazz music, culminating in Piero Umiliani’s seminal soundtrack for Mario Monicelli’s 1958 film I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street).
For the film, Monicelli contacted Umiliani to compose the soundtrack. Umiliani delivered a groundbreaking jazz music soundtrack - the first Italian soundtrack made entirely of Jazz pieces with top Italian jazz musicians. It also included American trumpet player Chet Baker. We’ll follow that stream next week…
In 1958, RCA Italiana released this legendary 4-track EP soundtrack from the film:
I Soliti Ignoti launched Umiliani’s career and ushered in a prolific era of jazz music in Italian movie soundtracks.
Another landmark Italian film that followed the jazz soundtrack path was Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 film, La Notte:
Antonioni selected Italian Jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini to write the score.
Giorgio Gaslini was born in Milan on October 22, 1929. He formed and recorded with a jazz trio at the age of 16, and at 19 he performed at the International Jazz Festival in Florence. He attended the Conservatory in his hometown of Milan, studying composition, conducting, and piano.
Here is the original 4-track EP from the film, released in 1961:
From the album, here is Notturno Blues:
A full 10-track soundtrack from the film was released by the Cinevox Record label in 1967:
The following year, Gaslini released Nuovi Sentimenti, a really good album with free jazz artists Steve Lacy, Don Cherry, and Gato Barbieri playing with two bassists and two drummers. However, I find his Free Actions recorded in 1977 for the Dischi Della Quercia label even more compelling and worth deep listening to.
Interestingly, in 2005, the Soul Note record label released Gaslini's Plays Sun Ra:
This album is worth a quick listen sometime - a nice tribute from one maestro to another. Along with Umiliani and Gaslini, another pioneer of the Italian Jazz soundtrack genre was Sandro Brugnolini.
In 1962, Sandro Brugnolini composed the soundtrack to Enzo Battaglia’s film Gli Arcangeli. Brugnolini was also a jazz musician. In 1959, he made his vinyl debut with the Modern Jazz Gang on a self-titled EP for the RCA Italiana label. The Modern Jazz Gang also worked on the Gli Arcangeli soundtrack, which included American singer Helen Merrill. Here she is singing Helen’s Blues:
In the mid-1960s, Brugnolini branched out from the jazz world. In fact, in 1974, he collaborated on one of the greatest library music classics, Feelings:
We’ll pick up and explore Italian library music a little further down the river….
Some of Brugnolini’s best work appears on L'Uomo Dagli Occhiali A Specchio, the 1975 two-part thriller directed by Mariano Foglietti for Rai Television. Recorded in Rome on December 7, 1973, the LP was released with the film in 1975.
From the film, here is the wonderful La notte muore (Orchestra):
Here’s one more for the road. In 1970, Gaslini composed the score for Brunello Rondi’s giallo film Le Tue Mani Sul Mio Corpo (Your Hands on My Body). It was released on the Cinevox label:
From the film here is La Rete:
By all means, Umiliani, Brugnolini, and Gaslini are just three of the many notable Italian composers who worked the Italian cinema circuit - Ennio Morricone is perhaps the most known. They were the ones that embraced jazz early on, and it had a West Coast Jazz feel - the west coast of Italy. I think back to sitting on that patio at Ponti’s Parco dei Principi hotel, surrounded by blue, with the wind off the Mediterranean blowing in my face, and listening to Italian soundtrack music. It gave me a free and easy feeling - a feeling of “the good life”.
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles into the waters of Piero Umiliani’s musical relationship with Chet Baker.
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Until then, keep on walking….
Aargh, I’m a total sucker for these Italian soundtracks. I’ll be digging into this essay when I have time.