Many tend to drop Ennio Morricone’s name as a reference or an influence but few actually get to the depths of understanding how vast and extremely rich his massive catalog is. With over 400 film & TV scores to sift through (containing roughly 6000 tracks), dozens of pioneering 1960s Italian pop song arrangements to his credit, additional library and chamber music composed and recorded, and his albums with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, the task of processing the maestro’s collective universe is almost impossible. Among many things, he is a master at creating the most beautifully powerful, yet simple thematic music for film — songs that are extremely memorable and timeless. And for every memorable track you can name created by any other composer who has ever scored for film, Morricone has created 10 or more that are as memorable or better — a point that is indisputable and all of his contemporaries knew it, whether they were willing to admit it or not. I’m not trying to create a competitive argument among the fraternity of classic film composers worldwide, or their fans. Many other composers obviously have massively brilliant legacies of work. What I am saying is that there is NO argument — absolutely NONE whatsoever. And it is this point that needs to be hammered home much more than it has been. And to further pound this spike into a collective American perspective — a bullshit academy awards lifetime achievement award, where a fragile and bumbling Clint Eastwood cannot even pronounce his words correctly while glossing over his career before introducing him (the entire Eastwood speech was deleted from you-tube probably due to Eastwood’s extreme embarrassment) while Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg stand to applaud for the cameras, is NOT even remotely close to being enough to articulate this. Morricone has always had a certain disdain for Hollywood and the only redeeming factor of him actually showing up to claim the award is that he gave his acceptance speech in his native Italian as the confused audience stared and smiled, pretending to be relevant in his presence.

Dagored Records and Quentin Tarantino’s Italian Soundtrack Coup D’etat

Italian record label Dagored has been reissuing classic full-length soundtrack LPs and CDs since 1998. There was a new awareness of retro Italian soundtracks propagated in the late 90s by European and Japanese record labels, club DJs, collectors, and various cine-freaks resulting in a greater level of appreciation for this impossibly diverse genre as new release Italian film soundtrack reissues began appearing regularly on the shelves of independent record stores for the first time. From 1960s & 1970s westerns and spy films to action, drama, horror, and exploitation soundtracks, the floodgates were opening and a larger audience was being introduced to this bottomless pit of mostly unknown and completely underappreciated music. CDs began to rule the music industry then and the new release LP all but disappeared from the record store shelves. Yet Dagored was one of only a handful of labels with the foresight to release vinyl LPs at that time. The momentum began to wane by 2004 and it has taken almost a decade for a steady stream of Italian soundtrack LPs to return — and it has returned with a vengeance. In fact, you may have noticed Italian retro soundtrack LPs appearing much more frequently over the past two years wherever you may shop for music. And of course it is not only Morricone getting reissued — many other legendary Italian composers including Stelvio Cipriani, Bruno Nicolai, Nico Fidenco, Armando Trovajoli, Luis Bacalov, Alessandro Alessandroni, and Piero Umiliani are receiving the same treatment. There are a multitude of reasons one could propose as to why this is happening but the one I am choosing to mention is the fact that Quentin Tarantino has loaded his last five films (Kill Bill 1, Kill Bill 2, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained) with 1960s & 1970s Italian soundtrack cuts. A few of these are internationally familiar songs like Luis Bacalov’s Django, but most of them are extremely obscure tracks such as Morricone’s Un Amico and La Resa. Of course I’m not holding my breath in hopes for more of the same from other visionary film directors, but I really wouldn’t give a shit if Tarantino or David Lynch or Martin FUCKING Scorsese casted themselves as Ennio Morricone or Piero Piccioni or Riz Ortolani in an epic soundtrack composer biopic, as long as the original classic music was hyped and propagated far and wide across the globe. As has been the case since the mid 1990s, CD only reissues are still being pumped out monthly by original Italian labels like Beat, Cam, Cinevox, GDM, and Cometa, yet the LP has re-claimed its original crown as the format of choice for the discriminating listener. Thankfully, Dagored has heated up their engines and answered the challenge for demand by re-pressing some of their older titles plus select new reissues many have been waiting on for decades.

I’ve been collecting retro Italian Soundtracks for the past 35 years, starting primarily with Morricone albums. It was a difficult task in 1980s America to find much more than the usual Morricone-scored Sergio Leone Westerns or the domestically pressed LPs released by the Cerberus label based in Los Angeles. Undoubtedly if I’d been living in Europe, Italian soundtrack LPs would have been easier to acquire but in the early 90s, I stumbled across a subscriber-only newsletter/fanzine that was being published from The Netherlands called MSV, created by Martin Van Wouw of the Ennio Morricone Society. Directly after subscribing to MSV, I found out that Wouw had just published the Ennio Morricone Discography; a large spiral bound hardcover book highly detailing every single Morricone soundtrack in chronology from 1961 to 1990. These two publications were a major breakthrough for me in being able to decipher the maestro’s work. There were 116 printed newsletters of MSV from 1980 until 2012. It has switched to a subscriber only online edition ever since.

Revolver
(1973/Music by Ennio Morricone/Orchestra conducted by Bruno Nicolai)