Quite a mouthful, that title, I do agree, but I wanted to get the entire point across at a glance in the headline, this being the Internet and all…

In the early 1960s—playing mostly trumpet and flute—the great Italian cinema maestro Ennio Morricone became a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a musicians collective with evolving membership started by Franco Evangelisti. The players were dedicated to “anti-musical” systems compositions, electronic sounds, serialism, musique concrète and noise. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians described Evangelisti as “one of the most radical minds of the Italian postwar avant garde” and he was known as a sort of heady, highbrow “scientific” composer, interested in the effects of sonics and their effects on human perception. He was the author of an influential book From Silence to a New Sonorous World, published in 1980, the year of his death.
 

 
The ensemble—also known as “The Group” or “The Feed-Back”—called their technique “Instant Composition” although nothing was ever composed per se, but improvised directly to tape. Utilizing “noise”—in the sense advocated by John Cage of considering everything, including the kitchen sink, as musical—the group worked their unique mix of free jazz improv meets harsh atonalities, electronic blorts, bleeps, drones and pounding percussion into a handful of albums and Morricone’s memorably intense soundtracks to Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country, Enzo Castellari’s 1971 giallo Cold Eyes of Fear (“Gli occhi freddi della paura”) and the utterly insane Eroina where each song was meant to simulate the effects of a specific drug! The three main people involved were Evangelisti, Morricone and the darkly Dionysian avant garde composer Egisto Macchi. Others came and went.
 

 
At times il Gruppo sounded positively funky, at others like a proto-Einstürzende Neubauten going psychedelic beatnik. Or a lot like Can, Faust or Amon Düül II. When Morricone’s trumpet is heard most prominently, they can sound surprisingly in sync with the druggy wigged-out “electric Miles” era output of Miles Davis in the 1970s. They were noisy, yes, but these guys were also extremely accomplished musicians—each a respected middle-aged composer—so there was nothing even remotely primitive about what they were doing. Improvising, sure, but not merely fucking around. Think early John Zorn meets Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luigi Nono and you’ll at least be in an adjacent ballpark to where Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza did their thing.

Zorn wrote the liner notes for their 2006 box set, Azioni, which is a good place to start, perhaps aside from the soundtrack to Cold Eyes of Fear, which I also highly recommend.
 

“Seguita” from the ‘Cold Eyes of Fear’ soundtrack (1971)
 
More after the jump…

 
John Lydon’s fans have probably heard that he co-starred opposite Harvey Keitel in a 1983 film—variously titled Copkiller, The Order of Death, Corrupt, or as it was later renamed Corrupt Lieutenant (to capitalize on Bad Lieutenant, of course), but they have probably never seen the film.

No surprise few have ever seen it as the movie hardly saw any release in any form other than a VHS that came out in the mid-80s and a newer crop of bootleg DVDs you can buy at the 99 Cents Only discount stores. The version you can find there—and yes for 99 cents—has a cover that looks like it wasn’t even made on a computer, but by hand, with scissors, tape and magic markers, that’s how schlocky it is. It’s sourced from the same VHS that came out in the 80s. It’s for sale on Amazon, too, often for as low as a penny with $3.99 postage and handling.
 

 
Under whatever title, this film is not, by any method of accounting, what you could call a “good” movie, but it does have one very good thing to recommend it and that is the then 24-year-old Lydon’s performance as Leo Smith, a wealthy headcase who falsely(?) confesses to the murders of several dirty narcotics cops to a cop he (and the audience) knows is crooked, played by Keitel. His performance is so strange and riveting (and utterly unhinged/psychotic) that you just can’t take your eyes off him. In many ways he was just doing his standard John Lydon shtick (and wearing his own clothes!), but it’s simply amazing to me that he wasn’t routinely hired for more psycho and “bad guy” roles after this. What a waste. What a Joker he’d have made!
 

 
The film was shot in Rome—standing in for New York City—and a few sleazy Gotham exterior shots aside, the producers didn’t really seem to care that much if this was obvious. It’s got a decent, nerve-wracking Ennio Morricone soundtrack, but other than Lydon’s charismatic performance, Copkiller, AKA The Order of Death, AKA Corrupt is pretty sub-par, and at times, a rather tedious affair. Still, I confess that I have watched it at least three times all the way through just for Lydon’s scenes. Sylvia Sidney (Beetlejuice) is also in the film.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Mario Bava‘s campy 1968 action flick Danger: Diabolik—which stars John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell as a couple of stylish, leather-clad jewel thieves—exists in the exact part of the Venn diagram where James Bond and Barbarella meet. The film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, who also produced Barbarella that same year and John Phillip Law, of course, famously played Pygar the blind angel in the sexy sci fi classic. Sicilian-born heavy Adolfo Celi—who played “Valmont” the crime boss and Diabolik’s arch enemy—was best known for his portrayal of eyepatch-wearing SPECTRE badguy “Emilio Largo” in Thunderball.
 

 
Law’s suave Diabolik—a “master sports car racer, master skin diver, master lover” created by sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani in 1962—can be seen as a sort of antihero version of James Bond and the insanely gorgeous Marisa Mell—who was the inspiration for the comic book Vampirella character—is the equal of any of the Bond girls in the pulchritude department. Roman Coppola’s 2001 film CQ deals with the making of a Danger: Diabolik meets Barbarella-style romp, entitled “Codename: Dragonfly,” a cinematic homage that would be obvious to any fan of the Mario Bava cult film.
 

 
Danger: Diabolik‘s Ennio Morricone-composed soundtrack contains one of the greatest “Spy Fi” songs of that decade, the title theme, “Deep Down.” Obviously this is the maestro’s first run at a James Bond theme, or at least a pastiche of one. With a languid, string-bending Duane Eddy-ish guitar line that sounds like an underwater whale call and the powerful lungs of Christy—a pretty decent stand-in for the likes of, say, Shirley Bassey—it’s memorable, even awe-inspiring...

More after the jump…

 
I suppose this could be a well-known fact in certain circles, but until this afternoon, I, myself, was unaware that the late Steve Jobs dated folksinger/activist Joan Baez in the late 70s/early 80s and according to several sources, wanted to marry her. On Joan Baez’s Wikipedia page it says the pair split up when the matter of Baez’s age (she was in her early 40s at the time) meant children would have been unlikely. Think about it: Baez dated Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs, and she knows Thomas Pynchon! She’s still has a Bacon Number of 2 in the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. How can this be?

Click here to watch an extraordinary live performance of one of the songs from the Sacco and Vanzetti soundtrack, circa 1979 on YouTube (I can’t embed the clip).

Below, The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti, lyrics by Baez from the actual words and letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, music written and conducted by Ennio Morricone. This is an absolutely incredible piece of music.
 

 
This is a guest post by writer and musician Dave Madden. Take it, Dave:

What lingers in the closets of the Brass Ring of recent film composers? James Horner scored Robert Conrad’s kinda-crappy cult classic The Lady in Red. James Newton Howard did session work for Ringo and arranged songs for Olivia Newton-John.  And then you have Ennio Morricone whose wardrobe contains enough oddity to match the awards on his mantle.

During the mid ‘60s, while Morricone was securing his role as the Spaghetti Western king via Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, he became a member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a revolving collective of musicians dedicated to “anti-musical systems and noise techniques” (note: he was part of the band even throughout his days with Dario Argento and his first academy award nomination for the 1979 Days of Heaven). 

GDIDNC loosely labeled their technique “Instant Composition”, as everything went direct to tape, not staff paper. They merged a collage of the previous 50 years – Webern-like serialistic pointillism, free jazz, spectralism, Musique concrète – with extra-musical philosophies and disciplines; not to be confused with aleatoricism, they crafted their works not by emptying their preconceptions to get to zero, but incorporating myriad ideas and exercises to guide themselves to zero. While that reads as par for the course for improvising musicians today, there are a few things that separate them from your average non-musician – and placed the crew in the flagship ranks of AMM and Musica Elettronica Viva, and turned them into idols for a young John Zorn (he wrote the liner notes to their 2006 box set, Azioni) . 

First, each of the tenuous group was a fantastic musician, respected sound artist and/or scientist: a friend and collaborator of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono (who, together, established the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio in Warsaw), Gruppo founder and pianist Franco Evangelisti was involved with the Studio of Experimental Electroacoustics of UNESCO, focusing on the biophysics of brain impulses as sonic vibrations; Mario Bertoncini (percussion, piano) made his living as a music educator and, for decades, a concert pianist; Roland Kayn’s (Hammond organ, vibraphone, marimba) “monumental graphic scores” for orchestra were performed by Pierre Boulez, though he later devoted his life to “Cybernetic Music”, a sonic renewing process that became the focus of his ten-hour long Scanning. And so on with all eighteen-and-counting purported contributors.

More importantly, as former Down Beat editor Art Lange points out, they were all known for their compositional savvy:

The key words here, however, are “composers” and “organized.” Evangelisti insisted on a performing ensemble that consisted solely of composers in part because of the inherent (even if intuitive) sense of formal logic they would bring to the performance, but also to avoid any taint of instrumental virtuosity for its own sake.

Lastly, when they performed, the disparate personalities combined into a single, flailing behemoth that did not understand the concept of “lull” or “wandering” as it pursued its artistic objective. 

Observe part of “Strings Quartet”:

 
Wait for the percussive bombast near 7:20

 
Morricone after the jump…

(John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell in Danger: Diabolik)
 
There’s no question that one of the more beloved movies here at Dangerous Minds is that deliriously kitschy caper film, Danger: Diabolik, Mario Bava‘s ‘68 ode to love, leather, Marisa Mell and…Marisa Mell.  The same could be said for its somewhat hard-to-find Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

While uniformly great from start to finish, and full of quotable dialogue, it’s perhaps best remembered for its insanely catchy main title song, Deep Deep Down.  You can hear Christy‘s renditions of the song below (in both English and Italian), but below that is one from Mike Patton.

Say what you will about Patton’s various bands (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle), because I can say very little.  He does, though, do a fully committed Deep Deep Down!