The first time Silvano D’Auria watched the film La Mano Lunga del Padrino (The Long Arm of the Godfather) was at the Teatro dei Filarmonici in his hometown of Ascoli Piceno, Italy, in 1972, the year of its release. The multi-instrumentalist had composed all the music for the low-budget crime flick, its title an obvious attempt to forge artificial links to Hollywood hit The Godfather, and the theatre was packed with an audience there to support a son of the city.
D’Auria had been recruited by the movie’s director, Nardo Bonomi. “He was always smoking this big cigar, he was very chill,” D’Auria recalls today. Bonomi showed him some scenes and the script, and D’Auria got to work. The result is a gorgeous set of peppy bossa nova, baroque jazz, mild psych, and the soaring, wordless vocals of singer Edda Dell’Orso.
But what about the film itself? “It was not a masterpiece,” admits D’Auria. “If it was a masterpiece, they would have called Ennio Morricone and not Silvano D’Auria.”
The Long Arm of the Godfather came and went, and D’Auria’s score was never issued as a standalone release. That is, until last year, thanks to Four Flies Records. A label founded in Rome by Pierpaolo De Sanctis, it’s one of several companies specialising in mining old Italian movie soundtracks and library music, rescuing gorgeous music from Italian films considered lowbrow and low budget: spaghetti westerns, spy capers and splatter flicks.
De Sanctis’s love affair with Italian B-movies and genre pictures began when he was 11, watching them at home on the family television. It was always apparent to him that the music was one of the best things about them. As an adult, he parlayed his interest in music into a career as a critic and DJ, but decided to roll the dice on running a label after realising that many of the scores that had stayed with him from his childhood were not available independently from the films – and that US labels were putting Italy to shame when it came to reclaiming the likes of Nico Fidenco or Fabio Frizzi’s work for Lucio Fulci’s films. “So I thought, ‘Why don’t we put out these gems ourselves?’”
From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Italian movie industry thrived. With hundreds of films made each year, a lot of music was required. Composers got a pretty good deal: they could work nine-to-five hours and were mostly free to pursue their individual proclivities with minimal interference from directors. “That’s why the music is so experimental and sounds so contemporary,” says Elena Miraglia, project manager at Four Flies. “These musicians just went in there and almost always did whatever they liked.”
Because the films skid across different tones, textures and genres, the music was required to do the same. You can’t pigeonhole these soundtracks into a single genre, but Italian cinema music did have a certain feel: cool lounge music, orchestral soul, jazz-pop and easy listening, occasionally moving into acid rock, dusty folk and electronica. There were guitars, strings, flutes, vibraphones, harpsichords, gongs, and plenty of sweet do-do-do-do and la-la-la-la vocal refrains.
“What stands out with Italian cinema is that the composers were so versatile,” says Jason Lee Lazell, who runs the boutique jazz, blues, global and classical label Moochin’ About. He became interested in Italian cinema music in the mid-1990s, when he was a buyer at the huge Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, London, overseeing the world music, soundtracks and easy listening sections. One day, a customer asked if it was possible to order some Italian film scores for a friend living in France. It was only as Lazell was writing the delivery address that he noticed the recipient’s name: Marcello Mastroianni, Italian screen legend, the first actor to receive an Academy award nomination for a non-English language performance, and at one time married to Faye Dunaway.
“About a month later, I received a postcard from him thanking me,” says Lazell. “Sadly, later that year he died, but it introduced me to his amazing films.” Before long, he says, “the Italian soundtrack section at Tower was bulging”. Years later, in 2020, Lazell released ‘Snaporaz’ The Films of Marcello Mastroianni, an epic suite featuring scores from 12 of his films.
If there is one truth about Italian cinema composers, it’s that one name soars above the rest: Ennio Morricone. The punchy, atmospheric scores he produced for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns helped elevate the genre. Morricone’s most famous works are probably wired into your subconscious; they are part of cinema history and will never fall into obscurity. And still, some of his lesser-known music has required rescuing from obscurity.
Released in 1964 – the same year as A Fistful of Dollars, which was Morricone’s first movie with Leone – I Due Evasi Di Sing Sing (Two Escape from Sing Sing) is not a western. It’s a comedy about two sloppy thieves directed by Lucio Fulci, who would go on to make several cult horror and fantasy movies. The score is a set of dapper big band and jazz compositions, displaying a different side to Morricone. It was originally available as an extremely rare, promo-only library release under various different titles. But in 2022, a new reissue arrived on Rome-based archival label Sonor Music Editions. “The Ennio Morricone release was one of the high points of my career,” says label owner Lorenzo Fabrizi. “It was such a great discovery that this record was practically unreleased.”
To release I Due Evasi Di Sing Sing, the Sonor team worked from the master tapes, making it possible to piece together the original soundtrack sequence while adding two previously unreleased tracks from the sessions. It was made possible by Sonor securing the rights as part of a larger catalogue, though this can also present a challenge when dealing with decades-old music. Take the recent Sonor release POX Sound by Paolo Ormi and La Sua Orchestra. The music was discovered on an eight-track cartridge at a flea market, beginning a two-year process of trying to locate its rights holders. “The business plan is completely dependent on the facility and availability of licensors to give us the authorisation to release the music,” says Fabrizi.
“It can be a long process,” Miraglia agrees. “It’s hard to find the master tapes, first thing, and to find the rights holders. There are so many steps. It’s really like a detective job.”
It’s one also determined by the condition of the master recordings. In the case of The Long Arm of the Godfather, D’Auria had forgotten what he had done with the tapes until his partner reminded him they were in a box in the top of the wardrobe. To save the deteriorating tapes, they had to cook them in a special oven.
Their excavations are bearing fruit among contemporary artists inspired by the era. Morricone disciple Adrian Younge creates splatter-flick funk and soul that conjures images of Italian films that never existed. In 2022, rapper and sample-splicing producer Oh No – the brother of Madlib and half of their duo the Professionals – released Off Air: Dr No’s Lost Beach, an album that leans almost entirely on samples from Sonor Music Editions’ library of Italian music from the 70s and 80s.
Then there is Charif Megarbane, who has recorded dozens of albums across many monikers, the most potent of which is Cosmic Analog Ensemble. Though he shuffles through many genres, Megarbane’s signature sound leans heavily on vintage movie scores that embody the most romantic notions of Italy. “Every time I started watching one of these movies it was so blatantly obvious that the quality of the music was so much better than the movies themselves,” he says. “It feels that a lot of that Italian stuff, even though it’s not really church music, it’s made for gods. It feels like there is always religious imagery reflected in it. You can’t help but feel many of those composers spent many hours in church and that imagery is somewhat reflected in what they were doing, with the epic sense of drama.”
Now this music has gone full circle, making a return to the screen – these days there’s a demand for an authentic Italian sound in TV and cinema. Four Flies has licensed music to shows such as Good Girls and the small-screen remake of High Fidelity, as well as ads for Estée Lauder. When film-maker and spaghetti western enthusiast Quentin Tarantino needed music for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he astonished Four Flies by reaching out to them.
“Imagine it’s an ordinary day at the office, and you get this email,” says Miraglia. “I don’t know how they learned about us. And so Pierpaolo started selecting some music from our repertoire.” Soon, another email landed indicating that “Mr T” was wondering if they had a few specific songs.
Four Flies’ latest funky undertaking is a compilation of music by Alessandro Alessandroni. You could call him cinema’s chief whistler, having lent his melodic tooting to some of Morricone’s most iconic works. But he was also a prolific composer, epitomising the musical brilliance that often accompanied unfashionable cinema – and it doesn’t get more unfashionable than softcore porn. Alessandroni Proibito (Music from Red Light Films 1977-1980) collects 14 tracks recorded for the soundtracks of four erotic films, previously only heard by patrons of Italy’s underground adult movie theatres.
Released in the form of an exclusive boxset of five 7in records, the Alessandroni project epitomises the ethos of these labels: treating music that has not always been taken seriously with the seriousness it deserves.
“We feel proud that this beautiful music comes from our country,” says Miraglia. “It’s been a while since we produced something very valuable in music. Discovering that there was something this big back then that deserves recognition makes us very proud. So we feel that we’re doing something for our country as well. And it’s so good, you know?”
