It's hard to tell from the packaging, but these are not straight performances of melodies from Nino Rota's film scores but jazz versions of them, with French accordionist Richard Galliano in the lead role. That's not a stretch: Rota's tunes are full of dance and circus elements that need only a bit of a rhythmic push to cross over into jazz, and Galliano's group handles the transitions subtly and cleverly. Moreover, his program is beautifully sequenced and contains some marvelously odd items such as the "Il matto sul filo" (The Fool on the Wire) from La Strada, track 9. He includes a couple of famous pieces from The Godfather, including the Love Theme, which work well in two ways: the better known the piece, the more liberty Galliano can take with it melodically, and he also draws the interesting connection between Rota's Godfather music and those of his films of the 1950s with Federico Fellini, with a few tracks from the serious 1960s films Otto e mezzo (8 1/2) and La Dolce Vita as interludes. All these pieces present visions of Italian popular culture, inflected in different ways. This was Rota's genius: his music seemed simple and sentimental, but it was actually a flexible language that could comment both the attractions and the grotesque dangers of mass culture. Rota's music, some of it now almost 75 years old, has stood the test of time, and one of the marks of its greatness is that it not only can stand up to but invites a variety of treatments, such as this fine jazz reading. by James Manheim
