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Rating: A Portrait of the Artisan as a Young (Jazz)Man.
Just walking down Via dei Serragli or climbing from San Niccolò, taking a sidestep through some empty alley early in the morning or under the rain, you'll realize how much the Oltrarno area of Florence resembles Piero Umiliani. The other side of the Arno is an area of shopkeepers, piazza markets, old bicycle repairmen, artisans with worn aprons and sincere eyes. And it is precisely in Gavinana, which perfectly embodies these characteristics of a Florence between doorsteps and workshops, that the sound artisan Piero was born and raised. An artisan indeed, but with the flair of an old-school jazzman.
After the war, Piero was twenty and shuttled between the Conservatory at the corner of Via degli Alfani, a stone's throw from the Academy, and the RAI Orchestra of Pippo Barzizza.
After a few years, the cool fever erupted, and Piero wrote pieces for the then-famous quintet of Gianni Basso & Oscar Valdambrini, but above all, he met the guardian angel of the Piedmontese horn players: Chet Baker.
With the help of Chet's robust and smoky trumpet, he could record some indelible pieces of Italian jazz between the late Fifties and early Sixties. In the cheeky and syncopated “Gassman blues”, written by Piero for "I soliti ignoti," you can almost taste the fresh and naive air of the Fifties.
But it is in the soundtrack of the subsequent “Smog,” that the years of the galloping boom alternate with black and white melancholies. “Thinkin’ Blues” is like a distillation of everything good, of irreproducible, in that period.
Only the sound artisan Piero Umiliani knew how to make music and cinema converse with lightness and almost with mockery, creating that skillful blend that would always be his trademark.
Of course, here Piero is still a young man with slicked-back hair; and the Seventies, where his style would explode by remixing and inventing sound worlds, are still beyond the horizon.
But this naive sincerity of his may never be repeated again.
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