Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  “When we first came over I don’t think we went to the West Coast for a couple of tours, actually,” says Haslam, who, as of this writing, lives in Pennsylvania. “We were concentrated on the East Coast of America, because that was where they were going crazy over us. I think our music was accepted on the East Coast and maybe not anywhere else.”

  Featuring arrangements by Louis Clark (who’d worked with ELO), 1978’s A Song for All Seasons, bolstered by the British Top 10 hit “Northern Lights” (an ode to Haslam’s homesickness on her many trips to America), was the first Renaissance record to make the U.K. charts since the band’s debut. But, like so many other progressive rock bands, faced with a change in attitude, musical industry directions, and cultural upheavals, Renaissance hit a rough patch in the late 1970s.

  Whether it was a sign of the times or the band no longer having the courage of their musical convictions, fans were spooked by Renaissance’s newer material on such uncharacteristic records as 1979’s Azure D’Or and 1983’s Camera Camera.

  “We had a hit with ‘Northern Lights,’ and that’s when we were encouraged to write more commercial music,” says Haslam. “We did a turnaround musically instead of trying to take our music into the 1980s ... It was too radical. I think we should have stayed our course.”

  By the early 1980s, only three longtime Renaissance members were left (Haslam, Dunford, and Camp) and before anyone knew it, the band had silently disappeared. Haslam, Dunford, and Tout would return in 2000 with Tuscany (produced by Roy Wood), and in the fall of 2009, Haslam and Dunford celebrated the band’s fortieth anniversary with a nine-city U.S. tour (unsurprisingly, favoring the East Coast), performing many of their classics.

  “Everybody was integral in all of this,” says Haslam. “It really was magic. It was a great combination of people that made that band special. It was a great time, an interesting band, and I don’t think it’ll ever be like that again.”

  (Courtesy of Afraká and Blu and Blu Music)

  PROGRESSIVO ITALIANO

  Musica Rock Romantica

  FORGIVE THE CRUDE GENERALIZATIONS: AMERICANS WERE and are known for their rhythm, the Brits for their studied, mathematical approach to music, and the Italians for their romance.

  Bands such as Osanna, Il Balletto di Bronzo, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), Le Orme, New Trolls, Locanda delle Fate, Museo Rosenbach, Arti + Mestieri, and many others had set the standard, first drawing on American and British influences, then looking inward and pulling from their country’s rich cultural history.

  “Rock, blues, jazz—they weren’t born here in Italy,” says Il Balletto di Bronzo’s Gianni Leone, a onetime member of Città Frontale. “That doesn’t mean I stopped myself from playing it. We here in Europe have another musical tradition. That’s not to say that we all must sing ‘O Sole Mio,’ which I hate. But our tradition is an important one, and it’s contributed to why progressivo Itallano has been recognized around the world.”

  “You have to remember that in the 1950s we had American rock ’n’ roll,” says Vittorio De Scalzi, guitarist /flautist for New Trolls, who grew up in Genoa, a major port city in Italy that imported many records from America and Britain. “In Italy it was very popular. Then something was changed with Jimi Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge.... Rock ’n’ roll became progressive rock, and we played our own style of it.”

  In Italy there were countless bands, with names as lyrical as their music, some only managing to release one record in their career. But they flooded the field with their spin on a passionate, sometimes academic, approach to experimental and classical rock.

  One of the first major Italian progressive rock releases to fuse classical and hot-rodded blues-rock guitar riffs (à la Cream) was 1971’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 per i New Trolls, rife with Ian Anderson–esque jazzy flute playing and sweeping symphonic arrangements by Argentinean composer Luis Bacalov—the final section (“Shadows”) of which is dedicated to Jimi Hendrix.

  Prior to Concerto Grosso, New Trolls were largely a straight-ahead, if unfocused, light psychedelic rock band influenced by Vanilla Fudge (with strings attached), experiencing success in Italy with the hit “Una Miniera.” “It was really the idea of producer Sergio Bardotti to have the interaction between our rock band and musica baroque,” says New Trolls’ De Scalzi.

  In the wake of Concerto Grosso, bands created classics of the genre by the dozen: Premiata Forneria Marconi’s Storia di Un Minuto and Per Un Amico; Il Rovescio della Medaglia’s Contaminazione; II Balletto di Bronzo’s Ys (a concept album inspired by but not based on the ancient mythological city of the same name consumed by the sea); Semiramis’s Dedicato a Frazz (with a pastiche of symphonic passages and beautiful/sci-fi-esque vibraphone-enhanced melodic runs); Museo Rosenbach’s Zarathustra (based on Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century treatise on religion and morality, Also Sprach Zarathustra); Reale Accademia di Musica’s self-titled debut; Campo di Marte’s self-titled concept record debut concerning European colonialism and the mistreatment of Native Americans; Latte e Miele (aka Latte Miele)’s Passio Secundum Mattheum; Biglietto per L’Inferno’s self-titled release; Area’s disorienting concoction of rock and jazz (and other genres) titled Arbeit Macht Frei; and Banco del Mutuo Soccorso’s politically charged Io Sono Nato Libero.

  “A lot of new groups formed in a few years,” says Aldo Tagliapietra of Le Orme. “What we wanted to do was change the world, change the music, and change society.”

  Much as in the United States (or as in any country for that matter), each region and each city in Italy possesses its own artistic personality, a fact that was exacerbated by the country’s political tensions throughout the 1970s. Progressive rock in Italy was shaped as much by the musicians as by their times and location.

  Italy’s motor city, Turin, for instance, produced Arti + Mestieri—a jazz-rock/art rock band that thrived on unrest and improvisation. Like the title of one of their songs, “Positivo/Negativo” (from the band’s 1974 debut album, Tilt), Arti + Mestieri mix light and dark, seemingly representing the cultural tension of their surroundings.

  “Turin is the city of the car Fiat,” says keyboardist Beppe Crovella. “Having Fiat in Turin was both positive and negative. It created a lot of jobs, but by the same token, the more people who flooded in, the more restless the population became. It meant more people didn’t get along and there was less harmony.”

  Even the band’s signature image, the iconic funnel (featured on the cover of Tilt), speaks to this, as if Arti + Mestieri are sending a message regarding their ability to channel cultural diversity. “That cover was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York because it has become so famous,” says Crovella.

  In Venice, Le Orme formed after the dissolution of the Corals (a garage band Aldo Tagliapietra fronted) and released what some regard as one of the best Italian progressive rock records, 1973’s Felona e Sorona (a concept record based on a cosmic romance), which makes overtures to European art music. Yet the music flows very freely, as it does on releases such Verità Nascoste, Contrappunti, and Uomo di Pezza: You’ll find moments of piano sonata and fugue, counterpoint melodies, as if lush, classical romanticism were in the band’s DNA.

  “Venice is a strange town, but during the age of Serenissima [the historic republic of Venice], it was one of the most important towns in music,” says Tagliapietra, who handles vocal, bass, and guitar duties for Le Orme. “In Saint Mark’s Church they used to perform concerts in stereo: a choir on one side of the church and a second on the other, with listeners and churchgoers in the middle.”

  Milan, of course, is a progressive arts center of Italy that thrives on new blood and ideas (there’s always something to learn in the city), and it just so happened to have spawned one of the more enduring Italian progressive rock bands, Premiata Forneria Marconi.

  This vitality can be detected in PFM’s rich blend of rock, European orchestral music, chamber music, baroque stylings, church hymns, and opera on records such as Storia di U
n Minuto and Per Un Amico before the band began diving into jazz-rock fusion for 1975’s Chocolate Kings and 1977’s Jet Lag.

  “We have always made a promise to ourselves that no one album will be the same as the one before it,” says PFM drummer Franz Di Cioccio. “It has always been about growing with each record.”

  It’s no surprise that Rome’s Banco del Mutuo Soccorso should be singing of politics given the topsy-turvy climate of violence in the capital city in the 1970s. Just as neorealismo, an artistic movement in Italian cinema, was exploding in Italy, the progressives, on some level, reflect this openness to reality. The mere appearance of this record and the nearly sixteen-minute opening track “Canto Nomade per un Prigioniero Politico”—a song for a political prisoner—dispel myths about prog rock being purely an escapist genre.

  Similarly, Naples-based band Osanna (formed by the unification of two separate bands, I Volti di Pietra and Città Frontale) released what they themselves dubbed the “first Italian rock opera,” 1973’s Palepoli.

  Viewed through the lens of Italy’s civic unrest throughout the 1970s, Palepoli could be interpreted as a statement on empire, the lack of human harmony, and the modern world’s greed. Even the artwork seems to confirm this: We catch a glimpse of Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s sixteenth-century painting The Tower of Babel, and the LP’s gatefold presents a panoramic view of humanity (give or take a dash of Hieronymus Bosch). In the background is another Bruegel painting, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, bringing into sharp focus the idea that man’s existence is inherently schizophrenic and irreparably caught between the sacred and the profane.

  Naples also spawned Il Balletto di Bronzo, which recorded the apocalyptic Ys, mentioned earlier. “The story tells about a man who remains alone in the world after a catastrophe,” explains Bronzo keyboardist Gianni Leone. “He meets three other men: The first one, represented by the second section, ‘Primo Incontro,’ is deaf, and immediately also the survivor becomes deaf; the second man, in ‘Secondo Incontro,’ is blind, and he becomes blind too; the third man—‘Terzo Incontro’—is dumb, and our protagonist becomes dumb. Then, e buio fu— darkness, the end of everything.”

  Other bands would continue to push rock Italiano’s musical boundaries. Classically trained violinist Don V. Lax came to Italy when he was seventeen, to attend one of the oldest music conservatories in the world, Rome’s National Academy of St. Cecilia. Lax, who claims to be half Romanian and brought up on classical and gypsy music, hadn’t been exposed to popular music until he immersed himself in it in the late 1960s and early 1970s music of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and the Beatles.

  After attending a Quella Vecchia Locanda (QVL) concert in Rome, Lax was impressed with the band and asked if they were looking for a violinist. As it happened, they were, and they set a date to rehearse in a little farmhouse (from which the band derived its name) outside of Rome, where the members of QVL (French drummer Patrick Traina, lead singer/flute player Giorgio Giorgi, bass player Romualdo Coletta, lead guitarist Raimondo Maria Cocco, and keyboardist Massimo Roselli were living.)

  QVL’s debut is arguably the band’s most adventurous record, containing Eastern European–tinged music (their 1974 sophomore effort, Il Tempo della Gioia, does not feature Lax). The opener, “Prologo,” showcases multitracked vocals, a high level of musical interplay, and simultaneous runs of piano, flute, guitar, and violin, which shape the jagged, multisectional song structure.

  “I think the Italian feeling for storytelling really came into the music,” says Lax. “The music was so free that it expressed all the different aspects and archetypes of the story we were telling. For example, take the concept of the first record. You’re not sure if the main character is from another planet or got lost and has amnesia. He doesn’t know what he’s even doing on this planet. He goes through this journey of life on planet Earth and sees things that shock him and bring him to grief. He falls in love and then has experiences of pain and suffering and moments of complete emotional and spiritual awareness that bring him great joy. The record ties together very well. It’s really like a continuum. Even the drum solo on the first side of the vinyl ends and then begins on the next side.”

  Le Orme: Uomo di Pezza (1972)

  Le Orme: Felona e Sorona (1973)

  Le Orme: Verità Nascoste (1977)

  One of the most operatic and distinctive bands from Rome, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, which first appeared on a compilation tape, Sound ’70, would soon be introduced to the world through their 1972 debut record.

  While the Italian melodic and operatic elements are obvious (singer Francesco Di Giacomo’s obvious range and passion were a Banco sonic signature), the influence of British proggers was also present, a condition that Banco wouldn’t totally overcome until the 1980s, when the band nearly completely changed musical direction.

  Gianni Nocenzi’s use of acoustic piano, the band’s musical interplay (particularly the call-and-response between the organ work of Vittorio Nocenzi, who studied piano and organ at the university level, and the electric guitar riffage of Marcello Todaro in the hypnotic “Metamorfosi”), studio effects employed by veteran songwriter /producer Alessandro “Sandro” Colombini (e.g., the rapid panning from left to right in “R.I.P [Requiescant in Pace]”), and the operatic /impressionistic moments of the multidimensional eighteen-and-a-half-minute tune “Il Giardino del Mago,” demonstrate Eastern and Central European baroque influences.

  The follow-up, a concept album examining the evolutionary theory of life on the planet (i.e., a look at man’s ability to rise above his primal instincts), was called simply Darwin!, and builds upon the band’s multigenre pastiche compositional style. We hear elements of synthesizer-driven British progressive rock (“Cento Mani e Cento Occhi”), orchestral touches, passionate vocal pleas (“750,000 Anni Fa ... L’Amore”), and Mediterranean flavors (synths that mimic folk instrumentation widely used in the area, such as accordion as in “Danza dei Grandi Rettili”).

  Darwin! also possesses what the debut only hints at in places: a strong sense of sonic experimentation. We hear moments of compositional complexity, rich textural chord voicings, and traditional European instrumentation mixed with sound design, custom-made synth noises, and even musique concrete (“Ed Ora Io Domando Tempo al Tempo ed Egli Mi Risponde ... None Ne Ho!”).

  Banco, as do many of the Italian progressive rock bands, presents a lyrical approach: The music is less pulse-conscious than melodic. For example, Banco drummer Pier Luigi Calderoni or Arti + Mestieri skinsbeater Furio Chirico often dispense with groove in favor of following a guitar or keyboard line.

  Banco’s 1973 Io Sono Nato Libero is the band’s most fully formed recording, featuring the abovementioned “Canto Nomade per Un Prigioniero Politico” and the multitracked voice and acoustic guitar magic that is “Non Mi Rompete”—a celebration of personal freedom (the title translates roughly as “let me be”). Despite the music’s sonic layering (particularly apparent in “No Mi Rompete”), the intricate moments rarely become cumbersome.

  Io Sono Nato Libero was such a definitive artistic statement that it helped to convince Emerson Lake and Palmer that they should sign Banco to ELP’s new label, Manticore. By 1975, Manticore had released Banco, which contained English-language versions of songs from previous albums and unreleased material, which was followed by As in a Last Supper, an English version of Come In Un’Ultima Cena, a richly textured record evoking images of the country’s ancient past while moving smoothly through odd times.

  Banco’s biggest musical rivals, PFM, were also signed to Manticore. Di Cioccio remembers how it came to be: “Our manager, Franco Mamone, the father of progressive music in Italy, made all of this possible. [He] took a tape of our music and gave it to Greg Lake and said, ‘This is my band in Italy.’ You know, you give a tape to a rock star and they say, ‘Yeah, I’ll listen to it when I get home.’ They probably will never hear it. We were very lucky, because he heard the tape and said the band was great
.... So he said he wanted to see and hear the band for himself. He wanted us to come to the Manticore [Studios in Fulham, London].... Turns out they loved us, and Pete Sinfield said we had the same power as King Crimson but were Mediterranean. That is what started us on [our] international career.”

  The opportunity that ELP presented bands such as Banco and PFM was a double-edged sword: Recording music in English meant, inevitably, the ability to reach a wider audience—a new world—in Britain and the States, the very home of the musical vein in which the Italian bands were working.

  However, the problem with mucking about with the band’s music and image spoke to the public’s sense of nationalistic pride: Italians didn’t always look kindly upon musicians who catered to English speaking countries.

  “I loved working with PFM,” says Pete Sinfield, who wrote lyrics for PFM’s Photos of Ghosts and The World Became the World (which were English versions of material found on PFM’s 1972 record Storia di Un Minuto and 1973’s L’Isola di Niente—loosely translated as “Isle of Nothing”). “PFM represented a kind of bright Mediterranean free spirit side, and they were warm and funky. A bit fast, as was the drummer Franz [Di Cioccio], like Carl Palmer. But it was terribly frustrating, because some of my best lyrics are on the two albums I did with them, and I found it was difficult for them to pronounce all of the words in English in a way that some of us are accustomed to.”

  Premiata Forneria Marconi: Storia di un Minuto (1972)

  Premiata Forneria Marconi: Per Un Amico (1972)

  Premiata Forneria Marconi: Photos of Ghosts (1973)

  Premiata Forneria Marconi: The World Became the World (1974)