When tenor saxophonist Leandro ‘Gato’ (the cat) Barbieri came to record these versions of mainly jazz standards in a Rome studio in 1968, he was already 35 years of age and more or less fully formed as a player, with a coruscating, sand-blasted sounding instrumental voice that was identifiably his own. Built on the examples of late period John Coltrane and his New York school disciples Sanders, Shepp and Ayler, it was a thrillingly out-there sound and approach to playing that leant heavily on multiphonic expressive squeaks and squawks through split reed harmonics and the blurring of individual notes into long sliding roars of raw emotional power.
This avant-garde method had already found kindred spirits in both the U.S. and Europe through projects with Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim, Carla Bley and the New York Jazz Composers Orchestra. So when Gato joined up with a very bop-focused group of Italian musicians to play a set of tunes mixing classic but up to date modern jazz repertoire – So What, All Blues, Nardis, Maiden Voyage, and Ornette’s When Will the Blues Leave and Jayne – with older standards like Round About Midnight, Lush Life (Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise – a regular feature for Coltrane – is the only show-tune) and canonical bop tunes Anthropology and Epistrophy, plus a few Barbieri or band originals, the results were bound to be interesting, if nothing else. Unfortunately, they were also destined to remain largely unheard for half a century.
Their reissue by Red Records as two beautifully appointed double LPs (also available as CDs) is a cause for some rejoicing because Gato sounds absolutely great and while his bandmates might appear at times to be struggling to keep up, they are more than capable of doing so. And such is the miracle of jazz that it all more or less works: the rhythm section is able to stretch out and accommodate Barbieri’s eccentricities while he bends to their will too, fitting his experimental flights of fancy into the required metre and, as it were, rolling with the bop punches.
There is also an almost comic effect as when – on Ornette’s tune Jayne – both band and soloist begin as one until, by the second chorus, Gato starts to get a little squeaky. Then, as the tune progresses, he becomes ever more screechy until, by the end, he’s quite unapologetically screaming as the rhythm section brightly comp along. One can’t help thinking of The Fast Show’s Jazz Club and the trumpeter who sucks instead of blows. Nice.
As the date ‘s pianist Franco D’Andrea recalls in a quote on the sleeve :”Gato was absolutely the first one who gave me a sense of the intensity of jazz, of the incredible intensity that this music can give off.” And D’Andrea, it is clear from the recording, was at that time already a very good player, as were the group as a whole, with Giovanni Tommaso on bass and Pepito Pignatelli – “the Prince of Jazz”, a hipster-aristocrat and amateur drummer who is credited with obtaining the commission to record at the studio in Rome’s via Asiago.
Barbieri the Argentinian was by then no stranger to Rome, where he’d lived for a time earlier in the Sixties, arriving in 1962 as a “returning Italian”. His parents came originally from Piedmont , he spoke Italian and he was then married to Michelle Sorrentino, whose father was a notable Italian journalist, and who acted as his manager.
This earlier Italian sojourn was also important as Barbieri made contact with the film director Bernardo Bertolucci, assisting him on his soundtrack for the 1964 film ‘Before the Revolution’, composed by Morricone but on which he played. From this connection came the commission for Barbieri to create the full soundtrack score for Bertolucci’s ‘Last Tango in Paris’ of 1973. And whatever you think of the film, Barbieri’s music (and the album which resulted from it), is a masterpiece. By then, of course, Gato had reconnected with his Latin roots and begun the great series of soulful albums he made for the Flying Dutchman imprint of producer Bob Thiele, synthesising all the elements of his mature style into a thrilling compendium of out-there saxophone adventures with heavily percussive grooves.
As a way station on that journey the two double helpings of Standards Lost and Found are well worth investigating. They also more than look the part, with thick cardboard gatefold sleeves in hand numbered limited editions of a thousand copies each, with wonderful, Blue Note-referencing design and b&w pics. The 180 gram platters were cut and pressed in Germany by Pallas and, remastered from the original analogue tapes, the music really sparkles. The sleeves also contain inserts of informative if sometimes rather eccentrically translated notes by Marco Giorgi and Andrea Polinelli. A class act all round that’s reflected in the hefty price.
