What is stronger than artistic passion?
It is hard to say, but the arts, destined to be a vehicle of communication and therefore addressed to others, seem to hold a privileged place.
And when they rise above craftsmanship, then they deserve special mention and remembrance.
The discovery of the new music brought by the Americans, jazz, marked a life-changing turn for many musicians all over Italy, professionals and amateurs alike.
The rhythm of the post-war recovery meshed perfectly with the basic beat of that new genre, swing: a supranational and supra-ethnic trait d’union, being Black in origin.
After the later turns that led, in the late fifties and in the sixties, to the birth of the new youth music phenomena – from rock’n’roll, the Beatles and Bob Dylan onwards – which further changed the landscape of so-called pop music, some men in their forties and fifties found themselves united by an old dream: to form a Big Band, the great jazz orchestra, just like the ones discovered through the records brought to Italy by the Allies, led by names that until then (the thirties) had been banned, or Italianised: Luigi Fortebraccio for Louis Armstrong, for example.
The big bands of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey represented the mainstream of jazz, popular also thanks to the danceability of that music, sumptuous and complex because it was played by a large instrumental line-up.
Jazz, boogie and swing were danced to smaller groups as well; and the ordinary orchestras, depending on the size of the venue, settled into a four-piece rhythm section (piano, bass, guitar and drums), two or three saxes/clarinets, one or two trumpets, a trombone; in Italy a violin was sometimes added, and more often an accordion and a singer.
But the records that had arrived with the Liberation let people hear something else, something that raised simple performance to something special, different even from the classical orchestra with strings and winds.
So the spark finally struck in some Perugians who had played, before and after the war, in local line-ups of the kind described above.
In the Perugia area no larger orchestra had ever been formed, not only for lack of true master arrangers – though some of them were honourable and fine musicians – but also for obvious economic reasons: higher costs would have meant lower earnings for the players at a time when they were anxiously hunting for work, which fortunately was opening up in abundance amid the post-war euphoria for dancing and entertainment.
So, after hearing Angel Pocho Gatti’s Big Band with the best of the Italian jazz of the day at the Altro Mondo in Rimini, in the summer of 1973 Vinicio Pagliacci, formerly a tenor saxophonist in the local orchestras until the early sixties, set his mind on forming a real big band, encouraged by the climate that the newly born Umbria Jazz was creating: jazz was now concert music, by then regarded worldwide as the other musical art form typical of the twentieth century.
Pagliacci contacted Ledo Lazzerini, himself an accomplished saxophonist and jazzman, manager of Ceccherini, the celebrated Perugia music shop around which the local musicians revolved. The enthusiasm was immediately contagious, and their colleagues of fifteen or twenty years earlier, whose passion for that classic jazz they knew to be strong, took up again the instruments they had set aside after the generational change in music of the sixties.
Passion. Fervour. The selfless fulfilment of a dream. Musical values… The most beautiful thing that drove them to fly was the secret of the adventure.
The first Big Band, to which this writer is perhaps most attached, involved, besides the two already mentioned: Memmo Bianconi, Oliviero Ciacci, Orfeo Morettini (saxes), Tullio Scortecci, Gianfranco Ticchioni, Claudio Jacopi (trumpets), Augusto Marcelli, Aurelio Tacconi (trombones), G. Franco Caligiani (piano), Sauro Peducci (bass), Nando Roselletti, Silvano Pergalani (guitars), Sigismondo Giostrelli (drums).

I remember all the excitement of those preparatory moments, when my uncle Oliviero would tell me about them, and I even attended their first rehearsal, in the sitting room of one of their homes, with their first maestro, Miro Graziani of Assisi, a talented self-taught musician with a fine gift for composing and arranging. Some time later they recorded their first 45 rpm record of his music, a Rapsodia americana with fine echoes of the tradition of the musical and of Gershwin, and a fine Radio3 programme was devoted to him, with a live concert of his arrangements. Graziani wanted to turn it into a touring orchestra, perhaps his orchestra; but they already had jobs, of another kind, and they wanted to learn, to play the classics, to improve. So the difference in aims brought another illustrious Perugian to the helm, Alfio Galigani, the first jazzman from the city to achieve true professional status, with a clarinet diploma from the Conservatory (then a Liceo Pareggiato) and a post won by competition in the highly prestigious RAI light-music orchestra in Rome. I saw him many times in the Saturday shows, on Canzonissima and so on, and then delighted in following the Monday evening rehearsals in the premises the City Council had assigned them, now part of the Conservatory. Attending the first concerts in the Sala dei Notari, at the Morlacchi, in the villages, always packed with people who knew them or who came to hear that rare ensemble, better and surer in its repertoire each time, was a source of pleasure and admiration. What set them apart was, on the one hand, their seriousness: the desire to honour the music they revered made them apply themselves, individually and as a group, in a way that I myself, in my by now long professional career, do not think I have ever seen. And then the true added value: friendship, born of long years of playing together in the orchestras mentioned above, and of the happy surprise of finally being able to come together again around that shared, never extinguished desire. The rehearsals, utterly serious, were interspersed with irrepressible moments of gags and jokes, which made the atmosphere wonderful, even for a young lad like me, watching enraptured, eager one day to devote himself to that music. The same went for the concerts, always approached with a spirit that professionals often forget.
Galigani, drawing on his teaching expertise (shortly afterwards he also became the first holder of the newly established saxophone chair at the Perugia Conservatory) and on his national musical connections, refined their language, soon bringing them to perform in two editions of Umbria Jazz as well, before audiences and critics from all over the world, who praised their performances in the national reviews, also with regard to their choice of staying within the classic big band repertoire, appreciating precisely this aspect most of all. Thad Jones, world-famous bandleader and trumpeter, honoured them with a written note on the pleasure of having heard them before his own performance in Todi, for Umbria Jazz 1974. In the same setting they also played with the great Tony Scott, an Italian-American (Antonio Sciacca) who for several years had been voted the world’s best jazz clarinettist by the leading American jazz magazine.
Years of concerts followed, on average twenty and more per season, inside and outside the region, something no comparable ensemble in Italy managed to do, despite more celebrated names, and there were also tours in Romania, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Canale 5 and RAI 1 hosted their performances as well.
A further and definitive step up came with the arrival at the podium of the Roman Giancarlo Gazzani, recommended by Galigani himself when he could no longer reconcile his orchestral commitments in Rome with those in Perugia. A complete musician, trombonist, arranger for RAI, composer and teacher of Orchestral Practice at the Conservatory, Gazzani was a true conductor, and Galigani had found the best for the orchestra, ever eager to progress; he himself, despite his age, went on perfecting his arranging with him. The leap was final, and from my uncle’s first enthusiastic words I understood that it could be a stroke of luck for me too. Watching the rehearsals I realised at once how complete and competent he was in his work, and what gratification and progress he was giving the orchestra, which fell in love with him, easily drawing him into that familiar, conspiratorial atmosphere and making his work of refinement, arranging and conducting easy. Having first come along to help out in the trombones on a few occasions, in the role of conductor he was at once a prince, and I realised once and for all that I too wanted to do that job. So for him too, jovial in spirit but utterly serious at work, those were wonderful and rewarding years, crowned by an LP of arrangements by himself and by Marcello Rosa, the great Roman trombonist, who was a guest on several occasions. Both have recalled all the pleasure of their experience with the Perugia Big Band in the book edited by C. Pagliacci and G. Ticchioni, Jazz e non solo jazz a Perugia e dintorni. I gruppi di musica leggera dagli anni ’30 agli anni ’60 del XX° secolo e la Perugia Big Band. Other conductors worth mentioning, for shorter periods: Paul Jeffrey (of the prestigious Berklee College in Boston, which has run the summer masterclasses for Umbria Jazz for more than thirty years), Danny Richmond, a professional saxophonist who was studying Medicine in Perugia, Daniele Fusi (a pupil of Gazzani at the international jazz courses in Siena that Giancarlo taught for many years), and Nando Roselletti, a historic member from the very start, a fine arranger as well as an expert guitarist.
Other famous musicians who appeared as guests: Bruno Biriaco, Lucio Dalla, Tullio De Piscopo, Gabriele Mirabassi, Renato Sellani, Massimo Urbani, and others, for whom the reader is referred to the aforementioned volume by Pagliacci and Ticchioni.
A special mention goes to the vocalist Lalla Morini, from Arezzo, a truly complete musician, one of the rare voices comparable in refinement and swing to the ladies from across the ocean, and one that can be fully appreciated on the record. She joins the other fine voices who sang with the orchestra, listed in the appendix, together with the musicians who over a quarter of a century of activity helped keep the dream going, the real-life utopia of a group of skilled, humble and profound devotees of the art, here in the form of the “Big Band”; they showed everyone how true it is that dreams can be fulfilled in life: but they must be won, and believed in with the utmost commitment, without backing down. The result shows in the end, and beauty pours out of undertakings like the adventure of the Perugia Big Band.
Enlivened by this sincere spirit, a rare commodity today, they fly high in memory, and still stir emotions.

Appendix

Perugia Big Band 1973 – 1997

List of the musicians who played in the band over the years, in addition to those already mentioned in the text

Saxophones

Andrea Cavallucci; Carlo Orazi; Sergio Pieri (Pierucci); Alberto Sabatini; Francesco Santucci.

Trumpets

Alberto Antonini; Alessandro Bulletta; Augusto Giostrelli; Augusto Mencarelli; Sesto Temperelli.

Trombones

Aurelio Bruni; Galliano Cerrini; Raffaele Monni; Flavio Polegri; Emanuele Ragni; Mario Sambuchi; Antonino Ticchioni.

Bass

Stefano De Simone; Stefano Mora.

Drums

Daniele Fusi; Renato Peppoloni.

Vocalists

Maria Teresa Borsellini; Antonella Falteri; Silvia Pierucci; Adriana Regali.

Paolo Ciacci (Perugia, 1960) has taught Instrumentation and Composition for Wind Orchestra at the “D. Cimarosa” Conservatory in Avellino since 1999. He is also a composer of film music (he studied with E. Morricone at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena), and an arranger and conductor for orchestras and choral ensembles. He has published the autobiographical book Tutto ciò che è stato…È (ed. Futura, Perugia 2015).