Piero Umiliani — Piero Pleasure- The Touch of Piero Umiliani

Piero Umiliani was an Italian soundtrack composer who scored over 200 films in his career which spanned from 1958 to the early 1980’s. He scored mainly low budget Italian cinema  such as westerns, comedies, spy movies, soft-core porn movies & a few horror/ Giallo moives too. This collection offers up a selection of thirty tracks from his career between the mid 60’s & the mid 70’s.

Umiliani's style is often quite mellow, playful & male/female vocal harmony layered in it’s feel. And musically through–out this collection he utilizes a mixture of: quirky  & buoyant organ work, surf guitar, easy horn & jazz tone, dramatic Latin percussion, cheeky & easy listening 70’s pop brass ‘n’  jazz serenades, as well as a few touches of quirky & playful early electronics on some of the early tracks on the collection too. All the 30 tracks here are mostly all very mellow, melodic but with a playful glint in their collective eyes.  Sadly Piero Umiliani is most know for ‘Mah Na Mah Na’  the track which later became used for the popular US kids TV puppet show The Muppets and this appears first on the collection. But there’s much more variation, class & enjoyment offered over beyond this track on the rest of  compilation. We have a selection of tracks from spy movies in the mid to late 60’s, his soundtrack for Mario Bava’s ‘Five Dolls For An August Moon’, some of his soundtrack for an early Giallo movie Blonde Köder für den Mörder( The Blonde Connection) from 69,  a track from a western, etc- so there’s a good selection of his soundtrack craft on offer here.

All told a very enjoyable collection of tuneful, buoyant and at times nicely dramatic soundtrack work from this lesser know Italian film composer. Glancing at his listing on IMDB its clear there’s easily enough material out there to put together another compilation of Umiliani work- so lets hope this is forth coming soon as this collection is very worthwhile, creative & memorable through-out.