Gianfranco Reverberi

Gianfranco Reverberi (Genova, 1934 – Rome, 2024) has left an indelible mark on both Italian music history and the world of film soundtracks. A versatile musician, composer, orchestra conductor, arranger, and record producer, he collaborated with numerous prominent artists, including Giorgio Gaber and Adriano Celentano, who both recorded his composition “Ciao ti dirò,” written with his friend and lyricist Giorgio Calabrese. 

Alongside his younger brother Gian Piero, also a gifted composer and arranger, Gianfranco was a driving force behind the so-called ‘Genoese School,’ a group of singer-songwriters from Genoa that included Luigi Tenco, Gino Paoli, Bruno Lauzi, Fabrizio De André, and others. Through the connections facilitated by the Reverberi brothers, these musicians met and formed relationships, eventually becoming some of the most influential figures in Italian pop music. In particular, Gianfranco Reverberi contributed to their success during his time as a producer at Ricordi and later at CGD, where he also launched the career of Piero Ciampi. 

In the late 1960s, Reverberi quit CGD and moved to RCA Italy, where as a producer he introduced talents like Lucio Dalla and Nicola Di Bari to the Italian audience. Simultaneously, he ventured into composing scores for spaghetti westerns, musicarelli, and other genre films. 

At the end of the decade, he founded his music publishing company, Edizioni Musicali Reverberi, and went on to write and produce more soundtracks independently, including for “L’uomo dal pennello d’oro” (1969), a vibrant Italo-German sexy-comedy directed by Franz Marischka.  For this film, Reverberi wrote beat/psychedelia-infused compositions that foreshadow the prog rock of the 1970s, and entrusted their performance to The Underground Set, a band comprising members of the group Nuova Idea, and produced by Reverberi himself. 

He then collaborated with director Renato Polselli, creating memorable scores for erotic horror flicks like “Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel ‘300” (1973) and “Mania” (1974), as well as intentionally transgressive films like “Delirio Caldo” (1972) and “Rivelazioni di uno psichiatra sul mondo perverso del sesso” (1973) – all B-movies that have been rediscovered by new generations of cinephiles, becoming cult classics, especially thanks to Reverberi’s memorable and innovative soundtracks, characterized by the creative interplay of jazz, psychedelia, electronic music, and experimentation. 

Reverberi’s biggest success in this field is undoubtedly the soundtrack he composed with his brother Gian Piero for Ferdinando Baldi’s “Preparati la bara!” (1967), a violent, bloody Western starring a young Terence Hill. In 2006, the soundtrack’s main theme was sampled by American neo-soul duo Gnarls Barkley for their hit single “Crazy,” catapulting Reverberi’s name, as co-writer of the music, to the top of the charts (the song won a Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance in 2007).