Marcello rose

“…I was five years old (1940) when I was slapped in front of a piano, and in my healthy naiveté I did not consider it a punishment, quite the contrary. I studied it quite seriously for seven years, until, due to a sudden bout of rejection (my very good teacher was very demanding and strict and, perhaps, too old for me) I planted everything; I didn’t want to study anymore.

Everything about music, however, continued to fascinate me: from store windows with instruments on display, to sheet music, to records I found at home, the radio, music history books, going to the Opera House, biographical-musical films (one on Schumann even shocked me), etc. It was always about classical music, but something was subtly beginning to creep in.

Those now mythical movie-reviews began to arrive with orchestras by Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Xavier Cugat, Glenn Miller,….beh, I didn’t miss one.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me Kid Ory’s (trombone, 1886 – 1973) “Savoy Blues,” from the ’47 Dixieland Jubilee (the swingingest Savoy Blues ever recorded); at once I understood that “my” ultimate instrument would be the trombone and that “my” music was Jazz.

Everything I had hitherto studied, absorbed and stubbornly sought had served to make me intimately understand and feel that music. The sounds and “colors” of jazz, the blues, the swing, the possibility of self-expression, were now as familiar and indispensable to me as coffee and milk in the morning, and from then on jazz became my life.