Piero Piccioni
A Modern Gentleman

Musica Per Film: The Refined And Bittersweet Sound Of An Italian Maestro.

Armando Trovajoli, Stelvio Cipriani, Franco Micalizzi, Riz Ortolani, Fabio Frizzi, Alessandro Alessandroni, Stefano Mainetti, Detto Mariano, Ennio Morricone, Goblin, Guido and Maurizio De Angelis aka Oliver Onions, Pivio and Aldo De Scalzi, respectively Scortilla and Picchio Dal Pozzo, Nino Rota, Piero Umiliani, et cetera, et cetera, and Piero Piccioni. The life and profession of those soundtrack composers must have had an exclusive and unique charm. Being almost entirely removed from the concept of popular and commercial music, yet with the potential to become national-popular all the same. The few public performances of their repertoire, if ever any, the real existence, the recording studios, the orchestras, the screening rooms. Writing music while watching the directors' footage, the seduction of film, the wristwatches of another era. Italy in jacket and tie, black, gray, or pinstriped suits, most always freshly shaved with the smell of mint aftershave, elegantly receding hairlines, aristocratic yet urbanized photographic poses, already full of stress, electricians, many coffees in the studio or on the Autostrada del Sole. Imported cigarettes like Nazionali and Camel, Italian tailoring inside delicatessens, celluloid, J&B, Red Label, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.
Newspapers in bars, dressing gowns, moka and television, glasses resting on books next to nightlights, inner gardens and interior verandas, Lettera 62 typewriters, the same model Gianni Brera used to write his articles while smoking his cigars. City restaurants and provincial rains, newsstands, resale shops, salt and tobacco, post and telecommunications. Mineral water treatments, suits again.
Radio programs, pianos, suitcases, and briefcases. Trains, planes. Radio Times, Brionvega.

Piero Piccioni, also known as Giampiero Glauri first and Piero Morgan later, primarily a pianist and organist, soundtrack composer, and conductor, needs no introduction.
Son of a Christian Democrat, he was one of the most internationally renowned Italian musicians for films.
Lawyer and philosophy student, he debuted at EIAR, then pursued a temporary career in North America, in formations with Charlie Parker and Max Roach for CBS broadcasts, musical director of the Orchestra 013 with Lydia MacDonald resident at Radio RAI. A man of significant culture between poetry, literature, physics, politics, and with a temperament oscillating between Apollonian and Dionysian. Long-time collaborator of Francesco Rosi and Alberto Sordi, distinguished among smog and Fumo di Londra, car radios, orchestral music, and Disco Music, Swinging London, Space Age, and Forum Studios. TV dramas, retro-futuristic attitudes, hundreds of hours of music for films like Camille 2000 (relaxing in a Smoke City with Open Act: AIR), Un Tentativo Sentimentale, between jazz and symphonic music, Il Caso Mattei, already techno-Fordist music.
This Compilazione 1959-1982 reveals much of his exquisite taste. Jazz, Funk. Instrumentation.
Through the stereo drifts some female voice, specifically that of Nora Orlandi, clear or sensual, Mediterranean or nouvelle vague, open-eyed dreaming rhodes, winds in arabesque flights, some dramatic string instrument, several lounge and fusion accents, some visits to exotica. The rest, which is most: pianos and xylophones on the streets of San Francisco, New York, Motor Town, muted trumpets, strings evaporating in ascension, intermittent guitars, spaced, interrupted. Organist-style organs, cool cat walking in blue double basses, slap basses, deep drums that will never leave the recording studios.
Musica Sentimentale, published on December 3, 2021, for the musician's centenary in a collaboration between CAM/Sugar and Decca Records, Musica Descrittiva. Aesthetic. Ecstatic. Real Life.

A Modern Gentleman. Italy, the nation in the evening at the cinema in the square with the streetlight photography. Music that is a marvel for masterpieces in the hall, but also for often flimsy and mediocre films in which it was placed and mixed in indecent ways. Music good both for attentive listening and for the preparation of daily meals. The bourgeoisie, that of a death in November, when a first family member at 79 began to see the first lights of the afterlife in a fantasy on the Autosole.
You shouldn’t notice the soundtrack if it’s been done well, Morricone dixit, it must be a mechanism of introjection, yet the soundtracks remain interesting as they live on their own light on a record. FIAT - Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino. Tacet in score. Vanguard. Dandyism.

Noir, Chill Out, Bossa Nova, Tropicália, white Funk played in perfect clothing.
Lifestyle Of A Policeman, the polar nightmare of involvement in the Wilma Montesi case.
And from a private studio, the echo of a typewriter, or maybe a teleprinter:
Tv? Quiz, BR, FLM, DC... Oh, turn it off! End of Broadcast Record. Night Club Drums.