Piero Umiliani

Sonor Music Editions proudly presents "A Tempo Di Jazz" by Maestro Piero Umiliani. This lost gem captures the formative years of modern jazz in late 1950s Italy – alongside the legendary Basso-Valdambrini recordings in the early 1960s, as well as the early years of Piero Umiliani's long and prolific career as a composer with over 190 soundtracks, 40 library albums, and 35 TV title themes recorded. A Tempo Di Jazz includes seven original compositions by Piero Umiliani recorded in 1959. Here, at the age of 33, he lays a perfect ground with himself as a pianist, accompanied by some of the best Italian soloists at the time: Marcello Boschi on alto saxophone and flute, Ivan Vandor on tenor saxophone, Peppe Carta on bass, and the American trombonist Bill Gilmore. With plenty of room for improvisation, the sextet fuses big band moods with West Coast experimentation of Latin American rhythms and modern jazz ballads that sit perfectly between his soundtracks for the films I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) from the same year that attained him international recognition, and his masterpiece Smog (featuring Chet Baker and Helen Merrill) from 1962.

The music has carefully been transferred and remastered from the original mono master tapes, and mono lacquer cut by Jukka Sarapää at Timmion Cutting.