SAIFAM Italy Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Pianist. Conductor. Composer. Impressario. Extraordinaire. We could probably leave it at that with Piero Piccioni, but for the sake of clarity let's get clear. One of Italy's most prolific film composers of the mid-late-20th Century, this monolith of big band and jazz wrote more than 300 movie scores in his career, and also lays claim to membership of 013, the first jazz outfit broadcast in his home country following the fall of Fascism in 1944. Born in Turin, one of the epicentres of Italian music, Cadaveri Eccellenti was a 1977 crime thriller about Lino Ventura, Italy's top homicide detective, who is investigating the assassination of a judge. Full of intrigue, mystery, and tension, not to mention that underlying sense of sexiness which seems to pervade European flicks of this era, by now you can probably imagine how cool the score is.