2xLP Transparent Blue 180gr + CD | Limited Numbered Edition of 500 copies. Before he wrote a single bar of film music, Piero Piccioni was two other people. First, a teenage piano prodigy leading his 013 Big Band on Italian radio in 1938, smuggling American swing past Fascist censors. Then, after the war, a practicing lawyer in Rome, negotiating movie rights for Titanus and De Laurentiis while his jazz band became the first to broadcast in liberated Italy. It took Michelangelo Antonioni to see the obvious: forget the briefs, write the scores.

By 1970, Piccioni had composed over a hundred soundtracks. He'd worked with Francesco Rosi, Luchino Visconti, Bernardo Bertolucci. He'd invented what critic Tim Lucas would later call the "Continental Op" sound: romantic orchestration meeting ethereal vocals meeting something darker underneath. But Colpo Rovente catches him at a hinge point, tilting from elegant lounge into psychedelic fever, from cool jazz into primal funk.

The score is a kaleidoscope. The main theme opens slow and seductive, then builds into a swinging, strutting groove that hooks you in three minutes flat. Gianni Basso's tenor saxophone curls through the arrangements like smoke. Antonello Vannucchi's Hammond organ adds an edge of hallucinatory menace. Dino Piana's trombone punctuates with bursts of brass heat. Piccioni himself sits at the piano, conducting alongside Gianfranco Plenizio, shaping an ensemble that swings between sophistication and savagery.

The track titles read like a geography of altered states: Kintabù, LSD (Red Hot), China Town Drugs, Mexican Dream, Acapulco. This is exotica filtered through Roman noir, bossa nova rhythms colliding with go-go shake, big band dynamics bleeding into something stranger. Eros smolders. Fuoco burns. Easy Dreamer floats on spectral female vocals before the bass drops deep and mean.

Originally released on RCA in 1970, the LP became a holy grail for collectors, fetching absurd prices in the secondary market before the Easy Tempo reissue in the nineties brought it back into circulation. The music has since been sampled by hip-hop producers and lo-fi beatmakers, its grooves still finding new ears fifty years on.

Piero Zuffi's film, a fever dream of Off-Broadway theatrics, hippie communes and urban menace, was reassembled in the editing room by Franco Arcalli into something deliberately non-linear, fragmented. But Piccioni's score holds steady: a navigational beacon through the chaos, music that works as pure listening pleasure whether or not you've ever seen a frame of the picture.

This is the Piccioni of the transitional moment: still rooted in the jazz sophistication that made him, already reaching toward the psychedelic edges that would define the decade ahead. Soft-spoken cool meeting hallucinogenic heat. European elegance meeting American groove. One of the rarest Italian soundtracks, finally getting the presentation it deserves.