Jazz al cinema

Between the mid-50s and early 70s jazz took over Italian screens. While the postwar economic boom was radically transforming society, phenomenal Italian composers and musicians embraced the genre and contributed to its penetration into the country’s film and library music.

The example of the French Nouvelle Vague, notably Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and its brilliant use of Miles Davis’ soundtrack to support and emphasize the dramatic action, made Italian filmmakers aware of the cinematic power of jazz.

Directors and composers alike realized that jazz, with its rich palette of rhythms and inflections, could capture and evoke the spirit of the age, from the glamorous and carefree Dolce Vita lifestyle, to the adventures of the detectives, criminals and pretty ladies that drove the plots of so many genre films of the time.

The sonorities and textures of jazz thus penetrated into the scores of all sorts of movies, from noirs to spy thrillers to horrors, and soon became the main sound not only of Italian cinema, but also of national TV and radio shows.

Italian jazz pioneers (Armando Trovajoli, Piero Umiliani), consummate cats (Sandro Brugnolini, Oscar Rocchi, Giancarlo Barigozzi) and even more traditional maestros (Armando Sciascia, Fabio Fabor Borgazzi and Carlo Savina) reinterpreted swing, bebop, modal, cool, Latin and other idioms of jazz through an Italian lens, providing the national audience with a perfect soundtrack for a decade of abundance, ambition and optimism.