Giorgio Gaslini

One of Italy’s foremost jazz figures, pianist and composer Giorgio Gaslini fused serialism and aleatory procedures drawn from twentieth-century concert music with the vocabularies of avant-garde jazz and popular song, a synthesis he labeled “total music.” He began studying piano in childhood and made his professional debut at thirteen. At sixteen he organized and documented a jazz trio, and three years later he appeared at Florence’s International Jazz Festival. He pursued formal training at Milan’s Conservatorio, concentrating on composition, conducting, and piano performance.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s his activities ranged widely: he directed a jazz quartet, supplied scores for motion pictures, and conducted several Italian symphony orchestras. He also produced works for theater and ballet that reached the stage at La Scala, the Rome Opera Theatre, and Verona’s Roman Theatre. Among more than forty film soundtracks, his music for Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte remains the most widely recognized.

On the jazz side, Gaslini collaborated in performance and on record with leading American experimentalists such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd, and Don Cherry. He taught at the Santa Cecilia Academy of Music in Rome from 1972 to 1973 and at Milan’s Giuseppe Verdi Academy of Music from 1979 to 1980, and he published two instructional texts on jazz. In 1991 he assembled the Grande Orchestra Nazionale; between that year and 1995 he wrote the suites “Pierrot Solaire” and “Skies of Europe” for the Italian Instabile Orchestra. His recordings appeared on Soul Note, Leo, and other labels. The Italian journal Musica Jazz devoted an entire issue to his output, reflecting the regard he commanded at home. Giorgio Gaslini died in Parma, Italy, in July 2014 at the age of eighty-four.