Piero Umiliani

Best known for his extraordinary body of soundtrack work and for his forward-thinking, lounge-jazz-inflected sensibility, Piero Umiliani was one of the most important composers, multi-instrumentalists and conductors in Italian music.

Born in Florence on 17 July 1926, he discovered his grandfather's piano at the age of 5, and soon afterwards his aunt gave him his first lessons. At 16 he began his career as a journalist for Il Nuovo Giornale di Firenze, which brought him satisfaction but also some trouble, after his enthusiastic articles on American jazz music, hardly the favourite genre of late-1930s Italy. During the Second World War, he fell in love with the music of Duke Ellington, which he heard on Swiss national radio.

In 1944, following the arrival of the Allies in Italy and trying to make ends meet while studying law, he found himself improvising as a pianist in a club often frequented by Americans. In 1948 he graduated in law from the University of Florence and enrolled at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory, where he graduated in Counterpoint and Fugue four years later.

His exposure to Americans and their music gave a decisive push to Umiliani's career as a jazz pianist. As early as 1951 he moved to Milan, where he released two records for Durium, the first bebop recordings ever made in Italy (the tracks were titled "Formula", "Mam Bop", "Papirologia" and "Intrabop"). In 1954, together with some jazz-musician friends, he embarked on a tour of Norway lasting over six months with the jazz band Masseglias (named after Aldo Masseglia, violinist and founder of the group).

After this tour, he made a brief return to his native Florence before moving to Rome, where he was immediately hired by brothers Paolo and Emilio Taviani to score their documentary "Pittori in città", which marked Umiliani's first true film soundtrack. Shortly afterwards, director Mario Monicelli got in touch with him for what would become the first entirely jazz soundtrack in Italian cinema, for "I soliti ignoti", which was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, though the statuette went to Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle".

The Florentine composer continued his work for cinema with titles such as "L'audace colpo dei soliti ignoti" (1958), where Chet Baker's trumpet bursts in, "Smog" (1962), again with Baker alongside the great vocalist Helen Merrill, "Una bella grinta" featuring Gato Barbieri's sax, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Accattone".

His eclecticism led him to tackle every musical style, working with major directors on films of all kinds. This brought scores for Luigi Zampa's "Il Vigile" (1958) with Alberto Sordi, Luigi Comencini's "A cavallo della tigre" (1962) with Nino Manfredi, and Carlo Lizzani's "La Celestina P.R." in 1964. That same year, having just won the critics' award for best Italian jazz record with "Piccola Suite Americana", Umiliani founded the record label Omicron, with which he produced the first three albums in a long series of "sonorizzazioni" — library-music records intended for use as background music in radio and television productions. The second of these, titled "Musica per due", contains "Chanel", a track that pianist Oscar Peterson included on his album "Soft Sands", also from 1964.

Between the late Sixties and throughout the Seventies, Umiliani worked on films that are now genre cult classics, such as Mario Bava's "Cinque bambole per la Luna d'agosto" with Edwige Fenech, Luigi Scattini's "La ragazza dalla pelle di Luna" with Zeudi Araya, and, again by Scattini, "Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso", a stunning soundtrack and forerunner of lounge music that also features the famous "Mah Nà Mah Nà", right up to "La pupa del gangster" with Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, directed by Giorgio Capitani.

From the time of his earliest recording successes, the Florentine maestro also began working in radio and television. Among his first experiences was the 1957 Sanremo Festival, where he took part in the "free authors" section, before going on to become musical director of Il Mattatore with Vittorio Gassman in 1960. In the following years he hosted the programmes Moderato Swing (1961) and Fuori l'Orchestra (1963), which brought jazz into every Italian home, not to mention the countless theme tunes he wrote for programmes of every kind. And it was television that would send Umiliani to the top of charts worldwide, when in 1969 "Mah Nà Mah Nà" became the theme tune of the famous "Muppet Show", the programme featuring the puppets created by Jim Henson.

In 1982 Umiliani decided to take his career in a new direction, wanting to return to performing live with a Big Band touring Italy. But sadly, one February afternoon in 1984, the Tuscan composer suffered a stroke while on his way back from the Rai studios on Via Asiago.

After a long period of rehabilitation, he found his way back to music, helped also by the rediscovery of lounge music: the revival of 1970s Italian film soundtracks, given fresh legitimacy by American director Quentin Tarantino, a self-declared fan of Umiliani's music, coincided with his return to the scene. In 1991, he also released a new studio album, Umiliani Jazz Family, which marked the debut of his daughter Alessandra as a vocalist and featured, alongside the maestro, Paolo Fresu on trumpet, Giovanni Tommaso on bass and Gianpaolo Ascolese on drums. Before long, much of his back catalogue would return to prominence through reissues on the Right Tempo, Cinevox, GDM, Cam and Cinedelic labels.

In total, Umiliani composed over 150 film soundtracks in the course of his career. He helped establish the style of the soundtrack influenced by European jazz of the Sixties and Seventies, which twenty years later enjoyed a successful revival thanks to Tarantino and others of his ilk.

Piero Umiliani died in Rome on 14 February 2001 at the age of 74, but his memory and musical legacy live on with us to this day.

In 2005 Steven Soderbergh featured the track "Crepuscolo sul Mare" (originally included on "La legge dei gangsters", 1969) in the soundtrack of the film "Ocean's Twelve" with George Clooney and Brad Pitt; the following year the BBC dedicated a two-part radio special to him, and at the Casa del Jazz in Rome, pianist Enrico Pieranunzi's band celebrated him with the evening "Omaggio a Piero Umiliani" as part of the 2006 Festa del Cinema. A year later, in 2007, Cake recorded a successful pop-rock version of "Mah Nà Mah Nà".

They are all testimonies to a profound legacy left in popular music by the Florentine maestro, the indelible imprint of his prescient genius as a composer, arranger and fearless musician.

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