Tredici Bacci – Amore Per Tutti (album stream) (premiere)

Composed and arranged by Simon Hanes, and performed by him and his 15-piece orchestra, Tredici Bacci, Amore per Tutti is a soundtrack for an Italian movie that was never made. The 11-track album is Hanes’ homage to the film scores of the ‘60s and ‘70s, an era when composers like Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Bruno Nicolai, Luis Bacalov, Armando Trovajoli and many other lesser-known figures created vivid soundscapes for genre films — gialli (gory thriller and horror flicks), polizieschi (police procedurals), and the western all’italiana (better known as spaghetti westerns). Their work often was eclectic, mixing and matching, sometimes in a single soundtrack, jazz, free jazz, bossa nova, rock, electronic music, and mariachi.

Many of the composers whose film work Hanes loves were graduates of conservatories such as Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Rome, and they wrote for orchestras that included conservatory-trained, virtuoso (and versatile) musicians. They often worked fast, turning out several scores in one day, and under tight budgets. Hanes has a similar background: academically-trained — he’s a graduate of the New England Conservatory—but also involved with non-classical music — he played bass guitar in the Boston art-rock band Guerilla Toss. He’s also got the freewheeling spirit and experimental proclivities that characterize the movie music that inspires him.

Amore per Tutti (Love for Everyone) isn’t Hanes’ first foray into what we might call the colonna sonora finta (fake soundtrack). Its predecessors are two EPs, Vai! Vai! Vai! (Musica dal filmato originale) (2015), six tracks purporting to be music from a “lost” film by Elio Petri, one of Italy’s leading left-wing filmmakers, and The Thirteen Kisses Cassetta (2014). Amore per Tutti is his and his orchestra’s first full-length album, and it’s a smart, sophisticated, and altogether enjoyable outing that evokes its sources while putting a fresh spin on them. The album abounds in humor, energy, and conceptual savvy; it’s eclectic, but not scattershot. The musicians and singers, all first-rate, sound fully committed to what they’re doing. There’s irony and a touch of campiness, but the record never sounds glib or superficial — Hanes’ love for the work of the Italian composers is too genuine for that.

Amore per Tutti works much better than Rome, an imaginary Italian soundtrack album that the American producer Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Luppi released in 2011.

Hanes, a talented composer and band leader, is also a strong guitarist whose playing shines on Amore per Tutti, whether he’s serving up funk licks (“Give Him the Gun”) or spaghetti western twang (“Avante”). The first track, “Columbo”, opens with his riffing guitar; the horns double his lines and then play a peppy theme, joined by Farfisa-style organ and a la-la-la wordless vocal. Close your eyes and imagine being young, carefree, and stylish, strolling down Rome’s Via Veneto during the ‘60s economic “boom”, maybe spotting Anna Magnani holding court at a sidewalk café.

A word about the orchestra’s misspelled name — it should be Tredici Baci (Thirteen Kisses). Hanes explains that the name “was inspired by the number of people who I had initially roped in to start the project, 13 of my closest music school chums.” “It had a certain sexy ring to it. But at the time, my understanding of the Italian language was severely limited, and somehow my research led me to serendipitously (and inexplicably) add another ‘c’ to ‘baci’. When we realized our error, we discussed it and decided that it somehow was an accurate reflection of the band — a kind of metaphor for our path to this music as Americans (and Canadians) who weren’t alive to experience the heyday of Italian film soundtracks from the 1960s/70s, but love it deeply all the same.”