Italian jazz musician Giorgio Gaslini - known for his collaborations with famous Italian directors such as Antonioni, Lizzani and Argento - died today in Parma.
Born in Milan in 1929, Gaslini started playing the piano when he was seven years old. Growing up in the '40s in Milan, he became a jazz fan, a genre that wasn't appreciated at the time since it was also ostracised by the fascist regime.
Gaslini studied classical music as well as composition in Milan, playing in his life over 3,000 gigs all over the world and recording around one hundred albums.
As the decades passed, his name became known also to music fans who were not too familiar with the jazz genre thanks to his classical concerts, compositions for the opera and ballet and soundtracks.
He wrote the music for around forty films, including Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte (The night, 1961), Miklós Jancsó's La pacifista (The Pacifist, 1970), Dario Argento's Profondo rosso (Deep Red or The Hatchet Murders, 1975) in collaboration with Maria Grazia Fontana (Argento actually only retained three tracks - "Deep Shadows", "School at Night" and "Gianna" - from the ones Gaslini had originally written for him and turned to Goblin for the rest of the soundtrack), and Carlo Lizzani's Kleinhoff Hotel (1977). He also wrote the music for an Italian thriller TV series, La porta sul buio (Door Into Darkness, 1973; some of the episodes were directed by Argento).
There is actually an interesting connection between fashion and La Pacifista (with thanks to Kutmusic for providing the film from its archives for the screenshots in this post).
A minor movie in Monica Vitti's career, this otherwise dull film takes place in Milan where Barbara (Vitti), a journalist, is working on a feature about radical youth protests.
Barbara is a pacifist and therefore neutral, but things change when she falls in love with a young man who may be a terrorist and who lives in fear of being killed by his companions since he wasn't able to commit a political assassination.
Barbara's wardrobe in the film was borrowed from the Milanese boutique Gulp, founded in 1964 by fashion designer Gabriella Di Marco (who later on started also another boutique, Voom Voom).
Di Marco entered fashion history together with another fashion pioneer, Nuccia Fattori who in turn founded the stores/bazaars Cose and Altre Cose, where people could find hip brands such as Biba, Zandra Rhodes, Sonia Rykiel, Emmanuelle Khanh, Paco Rabanne, Walter Albini and, later on, also Cinzia Ruggeri.
Both Di Marco and Fattori's shops influenced fashion and style in Italy as they offered trendy brands and designs and were also open at night when they turned into nightclubs.
Di Marco's Gulp featured colourful interior designs, cardboard boxes as wardrobes, a juke box and a bar.
Among Di Marco's most popular items there were mini-skirts, sailor's pants, geometric shirts and jumpers and leather outerwear. These alternative stores became local stages where fashion and counter fashion prospered.
There is actually one bit in the film in which Barbara goes to cover a fashion event taking place in a church and she briefly speaks about models, furs and luxury contrasting with the surrounding environment, but the main link with fashion remains her '70s casual wardrobe suspended between the elegant and the hippish and somehow reflecting her crisis between neutrality and the possibility of supporting more radical causes.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments