Richard Galliano Plays Nino Rota

There are some musical associations that make sense even before a note has been heard. If the names of Richard Galliano and Nino Rota seem made for one another, this is not simply because their surnames have a certain phonetic similarity that is due to their common Italian ancestry. It is above all because in terms of the history of music it is possible to identify certain correspondences between them. Although they hail from different generations, have different experiences and come from different countries, we still tend to think of them as sharing certain common features. Is it, perhaps, their ability to discover universal elements in popular forms?.. Or is it, rather, an acute sense of melody that makes them both such unforgettable composers? They share something that invests them both with a certain similarity even though they never met, except at a distance through the medium of music - an art that brings human beings together by playing with time. Rota wrote for the big screen, creating soundtracks that have featured some of the most famous themes in the whole history of the cinema by drawing on folk music from different regions of Italy and combining the symphony orchestra with the sounds of street music and rural dances. Galliano, conversely, has written song tunes, especially for Claude Nougaro, tunes that remain lodged in the memory and that are played on an instrument - the accordion - that more than any other symbolizes popular music. Both composers explored their local traditions and discovered elements that they sublimated by confronting them with other types of music with other histories and lit from different angles. Richard Galliano was inspired by the example of his friend Astor Piazzolla to invent a new kind of accordion music, breathing new life into a typically French kind of music in a way that combines the music of Argentina with an improvisatory freedom borrowed from the world of jazz. For his part, Nino Rota was able to capture the soul of Italy in his works but discovered his gifts as a film composer only after he had perfected his technique in the United States of America. It was as if he had to confront another country's culture the better to define himself. Richard Galliano is by no means the first jazz musician to take an interest in Rota's music, but in his case his desire to revisit some of the Italian composer's most famous tunes has a long history to it - some of his arrangements had been waiting in boxes for several years for a chance to see the light of day. In turn this desire is bound up with personal memories, for Galliano has never forgotten the "emotional shock" that he felt as a child when he attended a showing of Fellini's La Strada at his local cinema in Nice. Now that he is grown up and spends half the year on the road with his accordion slung over his shoulder, he has not forgotten the original theme tune: "It has accompanied me all my life." Galliano was born in 1950 and belongs to a generation that lived through the heyday of the Italian realist cinema, before seeing Fellini's quirkily imaginative films and, finally, the start of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy. These were all milestones in the history of the cinema, and all bore the seal of the same composer, Nino Rota, who succeeded in inventing for each of them a soundtrack that did more than merely lend distinction to the film for which it was composed. Rather, his soundtracks invested these films with a musical soul of their own. For some people these themes are extremely familiar for they are as firmly lodged in our collective memory as the iconic images that accompanied them. Richard Galliano has now taken them up again with the aim of doing justice to them without betraying the spirit of the original. In the case of the majority of them, Galliano picked them up by ear while watching the films. For him, these tunes remain all the more clearly associated with the images in the films – by the same token, when the trumpeter Dave Douglas asked him how best to prepare for the recording, Galliano simply advised him to watch footage from Fellini's films. There is no question, therefore, of distorting these themes or of using them as mere pretexts for something else. "It is a "delicate" project that one can easily get wrong," Galliano explains. "For me, playing these themes must involve a form of respect. Not everything can be forgiven in the name of improvisation. It seemed to me to be important to find simple sounds, something very real and not sophisticated, something that would do justice to the originals." As a result the present album reveals a rare concision, stripped of all unnecessary details in terms of Galliano's interpretations, with a clear statement of the melodies and a restrained approach to improvisation - it is as if the evocation of Rota's music and the singing imposed a kind of restraint. In the process, these tracks adopt the same logic as Rota?s most famous song tunes, which are often made up of only a handful of notes. Apart from The Godfather and La Strada, we also find music from Rota's film scores to many of Fellini's other films: I Vitelloni, Eight and a Half, Notti di Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord. The titles are linked together with a sequential montage technique not unlike that found in the cinema. Among the album's surprises is that of Richard Galliano playing the theme tune from The Godfather on the trombone, the instrument he studied at the Nice Conservatory, where the accordion was not yet taught. He decided to unpack his trombone only a short time ago. To help him in paying tribute to Nino Rota, Richard Galliano has turned to musicians from a very broad cultural background - jazz musicians open to other traditions who have not simply mastered the basics of their profession but proved capable of going beyond them and of seeking out other sources of inspiration. The multiple projects tackled by the American jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas are proof of his broad-mindedness and of his interest in engaging with other forms of artistic expression - he also fronts a band, Keystone, that explores the relationship between music and the image. The English saxophonist and clarinettist John Surman, who has divided his time between two continents for several decades, is a freethinker whose lyrical style is influenced by the musical traditions of Cornwall and the Anglican liturgy. The double bass player Boris Kozlov hails from Russia, where he studied music before moving to New York twenty years ago and establishing an enviable reputation as a key figure on the city?s musical scene, in particular as a pillar of the Mingus Big Band. And the drummer Clarence Penn has appeared regularly with Richard Galliano since being invited to perform with him in his New York Trio. With musicians like these the listener can be assured of a subtly nuanced interpretation in which each of the performers is alive to his colleagues? every move. As such, this release is a worthy tribute to the memory of a great composer, who was born exactly a century ago in 1911. It is also a celebration of the qualities that characterized Rota's art, with its mixture of festive tunes and band music, its somewhat serious lyricism and lively, imaginative melodies from which a veil of melancholy is never entirely absent. This music has a joyful simplicity to it that makes it instantly accessible while retaining its essential nobility. This was one of Nino Rota's great gifts. And it is one of Richard Galliano's strengths: "I've never been afraid of the popular and have always loved traditional or "cleverly" popular music. Whether it be the tango, band music with an accordion, blues or Eastern European music, such music is always the most difficult to play and can never be learnt in college. But such music makes people want to dance, which for me is the best thing that music can offer" The recording ends with one of Richard Galliano's own compositions dedicated to Nino Rota and called simply Nino. "I wanted to end the disc with a kind of charleston that strikes a relatively cheerful note because this music is otherwise rather serious. With its rhythm and colours, Nino mediates between New Orleans and Italy. It is my way of saying that Nino Rota’s music is universal." A beautiful homage, indeed.

Vincent Bessières Translation: Stewart Spencer