Enzo Pietropaoli, Battista Lena, Fulvio Sigurta - La Notte (2012) SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

La Notte, a jazz trio session of trumpet (and fluegelhorn), guitar and acoustic bass recorded in 2012, shares its title with one of the most influential films of 20th-century Italian cinema, Antonioni's "La Notte" (1961) and with that film's landmark soundtrack album of jazz music.

The evolution of European jazz styles over the course of a half-century separates the two albums stylistically. What ties them is the presence of jazz music—and jazz musicians—in Italian films, a cross-cultural encounter which engendered a 'cinematic mode' of Italian jazz.

The sedate Italian music scene of the late 1950s was enlivened by the presence of a notorious American jazz star. Trumpeter Chet Baker first toured Italy in 1958, then returned in 1959 for what became a much longer residency than he could have imagined. Baker's insatiable heroin addiction was no secret to Italian jazz fans; it was part of his allure. His arrest, trial and incarceration for drug possession vividly inscribed him in the consciousness of his fans as a countercultural martyr. That Chet Baker had appeared both as an actor and on the soundtracks of several popular films only reinforced his impact on the developing Italian jazz and popular music culture.

At that same time, Giorgio Gaslini, a conservatory-educated composer and pianist, was invited to perform his modernist-styled hard bop on the set of Michelangelo Antonioni's "La Notte." As the film won an international audience, art-house moviegoers saw and heard Italian jazz in a new context. The jazz soundtrack, which was released on LP to critical acclaim, spoke to a generation of educated young people who were disenchanted with the shallowness of materialistic culture. The LP prepared a listenership for Gaslini's innovative fusion of 12-tone classical music and jazz instrumentation. Over a long career, Gaslini composed for orchestras and chamber ensembles, and recorded solo piano transcriptions of the works of American jazz innovators Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler.

In subsequent decades, musicians Enrico Rava, Enrico Pieranunzi, Stefano Bollani, Gianluigi Trovesi and Paolo Fresu developed audiences outside of Italy in part through collaboration with American, British and Scandinavian players. Pieranunzi and Trovesi draw on Italian historical sources and play a distinctly regional style of music, but ECM recording artists Bollani and Rava hold to a more mainstream jazz conception. The rewards of playing in an internationally-recognized musical idiom can be measured in CD revenues and concert ticket sales; for many lesser-known Italian players, the outlets for their artistic production are small record labels and regional music festivals—and film soundtracks.