More or Less

Stefano Profeta began his musical studies at the age of nine with classical guitar; later he studied double bass at the State Conservatory of Music in Alessandria graduating with honors in double bass jazz and in Jazz Music, Polular and Improvised Music.
After a few stays in India he began to study sitar and rhythmic forms related to tabla, then deepening his knowledge of Indian music by following the courses of the Center for Oriental and Middle Eastern Studies in Turin.
Numerous are his collaborations in the jazz field, including those with John Riley, Alberto Mandarini, Kyle Gregory, Gianluigi Trovesi, Gianni Cazzola, Sandro Gibellini, Maria Pia De Vito, Joe Magnarelli and many others.
In addition to jazz, he has often worked in studio recordings and pop music tours.
He has, to his credit, a discography of 23 Cds, including jazz, pop, classical and ethnic music productions. He has played in tours and festivals in Italy, Spain, France, Croatia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay.

TOMMASO PROFETA

Born in Casale Monferrato in 2004, he began his musical studies at the age of six with the piano, to switch to saxophone the following year. Followed by his teacher Claudio Bianzino, he tackled the study of the instrument starting with the curved soprano saxophone, and then moving on to the alto in 2016. In July 2018 he attended the Summer Jazz Clinics of the Berklee College of Music in Boston in Perugia under the guidance of Jim Odgren and Fernando Huergo. In January 2019 he began playing as the first alto in the Erios Junior Jazz Orchestra, a formation that includes young musicians from seven to twenty years old, with whom he had the opportunity to share the stage with numerous guests (Michael Steinman, Rudy Migliardi, Wally Allifranchini, Emilio Soana, Nico Gori, Fabio Buonarota, Pasquale Innarella, and subsequently Anais Drago, Diego Borotti). In April 2019 he received the scholarship promoted by the Jazz Festival Città di Mortara and had the opportunity to perform during the Festival flanked by the rhythm of Emanuele Cisi. In June 2019 he passed the ABRSM grade 4 saxophone exam. In June 2019 he was invited to play at the Monfrà Jazz Festival, when he performed with Erios New Talent Quartet. During the concert he was noticed by Gianni Cazzola, who wanted to host him with his quartet during the evening concert. In July 2019 he participated in the 34th edition of the Berklee College of Music Summer Jazz Clinics in Perugia under the guidance of Jim Odgren, Jim Kelly and Jeff Stout. At the end of the courses he was awarded the “Five Week Performance Program” scholarship which includes a study stay at Boston College. He was also selected by Giovanni Tommaso to be part of the septet that opened the Umbria Jazz Winter festival in Orvieto in December 2019. In July 2019 he also participated in the Twins Music Academy & NYC Jazz Workshop courses in La Spezia with Antonio teachers Ciacca, Michael Rorby, Andy Farber, Luca Santaniello, Lucio Ferrara and Patrick Boman. During the courses he was selected for the audition of the five finalists for the Tiberio Nicola award. In September 2019 he participated together with the Erios Junior Jazz Orchestra in the sixth edition of the Jazzin Festival, organized in Barcelona by Joan Chamorro and the musicians of the Sant Andreu Jazz Band; within this context he has the opportunity to meet and play with jazz personalities as Dick Oatts and Scott Hamilton. In June 2021 he plays in the Turin Jazz Festival with the Erios JJO and guest Joan Chamorro.

Arthur Schwartz
(b Brooklyn, NY, 25 Nov 1900; d Kintnersville, PA, 3 Sept 1984). American composer. The son of a prosperous lawyer, Schwartz was groomed for the legal profession but he loved music and wrote songs during his law studies at New York University and Columbia University Law School. He began practising law in 1924 but, encouraged by lyricist Lorenz Hart, left the bar in 1928 when he teamed up with lyricist Howard Dietz. Their first success together, the revue The Little Show (1929), led the team to a series of Broadway revues that were among the finest of the 1930s. Three’s A Crowd (1930), The Band Wagon (1931) and At Home Abroad (1935) were highlights during this golden age of the sophisticated musical revue. The team had less success with book musicals, even though Revenge With Music (1934) and Between the Devil (1937) had superior scores. By the end of the decade, Schwartz settled in Hollywood where he scored some dozen film musicals with various lyricists and with uneven success.

Ennio Morricone: (b Rome, 10 Nov 1928; d Rome, 6 July 2020). Italian composer. A favourite pupil of Petrassi, he also deputized secretly for his trumpeter father in a light music orchestra. He thus developed two distinct sides to his musical personality: one of these led him to embrace serialism (e.g. in Distanze and Musica per 11 violini, 1958) and the experimental work of the improvisation group Nuova Consonanza (from 1965); the other gained him a leading role, principally as an arranger, in all types of mass-media popular music, including songs for radio, radio and television plays, and the first successful television variety shows. In the early days of the record industry his innovative contribution played a decisive part in the success of the first Italian singer-songwriters (‘cantautori’), including Gianni Morandi and Gino Paoli.

After many minor cinematic collaborations, Morricone achieved wider recognition with Sergio Leone’s series of four Westerns, beginning with Per un pugno di dollari (1964). There followed important collaborations with directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci (from 1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini (from 1966) and Elio Petri (from 1968), and particularly successful films with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Allonsanfàn, 1974; Il prato, 1979), Valerio Zurlini (Il deserto dei tartari, 1976), Roland Joffe (The Mission, 1986) and Brian De Palma (Casualties of War, 1989). Despite inevitable self-repetitions over a total of more than 400 film scores, his work provides many examples of a highly original fusion of classical and popular idioms: this is noticeable already, albeit in somewhat crude form, in Leone’s series of Westerns, where the music for the opening titles juxtaposes three distinct types of music: a synthetic folk idiom, using the jew’s harp, acoustic guitar and harmonica to accompany human whistling; a contemporary, urban rock sound, featuring the electric guitar; and an unabashedly sentimental choral-orchestral style. With Giù la testa (1971) Morricone entered an experimental phase in which he developed a technique based on melodic, rhythmic or harmonic ‘modules’ (usually of 4, 8 or 16 beats in length), each differently characterized and often featuring a particular instrument. These are juxtaposed and combined to create very different stylistic atmospheres. The most impressive application of the modular technique is found in The Mission, where the single modules, more extended and clearly defined than before, interact dialectically, assuming very clear symbolic functions.

Morricone’s non-film works form a large and increasingly widely performed part of his output. Many of them use his technique of ‘micro-cells’, a pseudo-serial approach often incorporating modal and tonal allusions, which, with its extreme reduction of compositional materials, has much in common with his film-music techniques. His most fruitful season of concert-music composition began with the Second Concerto for flute, cello and orchestra (1985, from which the Cadenza for flute and tape of 1988 is derived) and continued with Riflessi (1989–90), three pieces for cello which represent perhaps the highpoint of his chamber music output, attaining a high degree of lyrical tension.

Morricone was an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Commendatore dell’Ordine ‘Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana’. Among other honours, he received six competitive Academy Award nominations, Grammy recognition and a Leone d’oro. He received an honorary Academy Award in 2007 and won the Academy Award for Original Score for The Hateful Eight in 2016. In 2000 he was awarded the Laurea Honoris Causa by the University of Cagliari. Between 1991 and 1996 he taught film music (sharing a post with Sergio Miceli) at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena.

Ernesto de Curtis (1875–1937) was an Italian composer from Naples, best known for his contributions to the Neapolitan song tradition. His music for Torna a Surriento, with words by his brother Giambattista, became an enduring part of the international vocal repertoire. His other songs include Voce ’e notte, Sona chitarra, Non ti scordar di me and Ti voglio tanto bene.

Gerald Marks was an American songwriter and the co-writer, with Seymour Simons, of All of Me. First introduced in 1931, the song became an enduring standard recorded by jazz and popular singers across several generations.

John (Aaron) Lewis,
(b LaGrange, IL, 3 May 1920). American jazz pianist and composer. He grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he began to learn the piano at the age of seven. His musical studies continued at the University of New Mexico. In 1946, with fellow black musician Kenny Clarke, he joined Dizzy Gillespie’s bop-style big band in New York. Further studies at the Manhattan School of Music, which led to a master’s degree in 1953, were interrupted in 1948 when the band made a concert tour of Europe. After returning to the USA, Lewis worked for Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet and Ella Fitzgerald. He made some notable recordings with Parker, among them Parker’s Mood (1948, on the album The Genius of Charlie Parker, Savoy) and Blues for Alice (1951, on Charlie Parker, Clef).

Paul Heller is a German tenor saxophonist, composer and arranger. A member of the WDR Big Band since 2005, he has collaborated with leading jazz soloists and developed his own recording and concert projects. His composition Some Day a Green Dolphin Will Come is performed by Stefano and Tommaso Profeta on More or Less.

Ray Brown (1926-2002) was an American jazz bassist, bandleader and educator. His career included major collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson, as well as extensive small-group work. His rich sound and rhythmic authority made him one of the defining bassists of modern jazz.

Sammy [Samuel] Fain [Feinberg]
(b New York, 17 June 1902; d Los Angeles, 6 Dec 1989). American popular songwriter. He worked for music publishers Jack Mills as a staff pianist and in 1928 began to perform in vaudeville and on radio. Between 1927 and 1942 he wrote many popular songs with the lyricist Irving Kahal, such as Let a smile be your umbrella, adopting a popular jazz style. In 1931 he went to Hollywood and for the rest of his career contributed songs to films for performers including Maurice Chevalier, Dick Powell, Doris Day and Dean Martin. He achieved great success with the revue Hellzapoppin’ (1938).

He collaborated with the lyricist Paul Francis Webster on the songs for the Doris Day film vehicle Calamity Jane, which gained great popularity through a score that ranged from the energetic ‘The Deadwood Stage’ through the atmospheric ‘Black Hills of Dakota’ to the romantic ballad ‘Secret Love’, for which he received an Academy Award. The film was revised in a stage version in 1961, and has been in both professional and amateur repertories since. Despite this, most of Fain’s stage musicals proved to be failures. Many of his ballads, however, have become standards, notably ‘That Old Feeling’ (Vogues of 1938, 1937; lyrics by Lew Brown) and the evocative ‘I'll be seeing you’ (Right This Way, 1938; lyrics by Kahal). He contributed title songs to many films, winning an Academy Award for Love is a many splendored thing (1955) and nominations for April Love (1957), A Certain Smile (1958) and Tender is the Night (1961), all with lyrics by Webster.

Seymour Simons (1896-1949) was an American pianist, songwriter, orchestra leader and radio producer from Detroit. He wrote All of Me with Gerald Marks in 1931, a song that became an enduring jazz standard. His activities also encompassed music for stage performers and his own radio orchestra.

Thad Jones (1923-1986) was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, arranger and bandleader. After an important period with Count Basie, he helped establish the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. His writing combined harmonic sophistication, expressive melody and a distinctive command of the jazz ensemble.

Vincent (Millie) Youmans,
(b New York, 27 Sept 1898; d Denver, 5 April 1946). American composer. He worked as a piano salesman and music-roll maker at Aeolian, where he came under the tutelage of Felix Arndt, and later worked as a song plugger for Remick and Harms. He began composing while in the navy during World War I; Sousa admired one of his marches and orchestrated it for the Marine Corps band. In 1920, when his first song was published (The Country Cousin), he was working as a rehearsal pianist for Victor Herbert. He composed his first Broadway score, Two Little Girls in Blue, in collaboration with Paul Lannin in 1921. The success of this and his next work, The Wildflower (1923), established his fame. No, No, Nanette, also of 1923, and including ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘I want to be happy’, was the biggest musical-comedy success of the 1920s in both Europe and the USA. From 1927 Youmans also produced his own shows. He had another major success with Hit the Deck! (1927; including ‘Hallelujah’), but his subsequent productions were failures, though many of their songs remain popular. His last contributions to Broadway were some songs for Take a Chance (1932).

Youmans’s early songs are remarkable for their economy of melodic material: two-, three- or four-note phrases are constantly repeated and varied by subtle harmonic or rhythmic changes. In later years, however, apparently influenced by Kern, he turned to longer musical sentences and more free-flowing melodic lines. Youmans was forced to retire in 1934, owing to tuberculosis, after a professional career of only 13 years. More than any of his contemporaries he made constant re-use of a limited number of melodies; he published fewer than 100 songs, but 18 of these were considered standards by ASCAP.