Armando Trovajoli | Artist
Armando Trovajoli was an Italian film composer and pianist, born 1917 in Rome, Italy. He is credied with scoring and/or conducting over 300 films and musicals, many of them jazz scores for exploitation films of the Commedia all'italiana genre. He collaborated with Vittorio De Sica on a number of projects, for whom he composed music for La Ciociara "Two Women" (1960) and Matrimonio all'Italiana "Marriage Italian Style" (1964), both of which starred Sophia Loren, who became a friend. When Loren was going to Hollywood for the first time in the mid-1950s, Trovajoli composed and recorded with his orchestra a song in Neapolitan for her, Che M'è 'Mparato a Fà "What Did You Teach Me to Do?", which did much to launch her in the US. Trovajoli was born into an upper-middle-class family in Rome. He learned to play the violin as a boy and, in the 1930s, studied piano at the Santa Cecilia conservatory. By 1939 he was playing with a leading jazz band. After WWII, when Italians were finally able to listen to the latest American music, Trovajoli played with an Italian orchestra at a jazz festival in Paris, where Miles Davis and Charlie Parker were on the bill. After graduating from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome in 1948, Trovajoli was entrusted by RAI with the direction of a pop music orchestra. he collaborated with Piero Piccioni in Eclipse, a weekly musical broadcast in which the orchestra is directed alternately by the two composers. After several early works for film, Trovajoli's big breakthrough came in 1951 when he was invited by Dino De Laurentiis to write music for Anna, a film directed by Alberto Lattuada, particularly the song El Negro Zumbón, which became an international success. A prolific recording artist, Trovajoli is credited with 122 studio albums, including archival releases, plus many more Singles and EPs. Standout releases include Magic Moments at "La Capannina di Franceschi" (1958), The Beat Generation (1961), L'Arcidiavolo (1966), I lunghi giorni della vendetta (1966), La matriarca (1968), 7Volte7 [7Times7] (1968), Come, quando, perché? (1968), La famiglia Benvenuti (1969), C'eravamo tanto amati (1974), Blazing Magnum: Una Magnum special per Tony Saitta (1976), Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (1976), I pianeti contro di noi (2015), and L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio (1971) credited to "I Marc 4", Trovajoli's house band. Armando Trovajoli's musical style is a blend of Italian jazz, particularly his work as a pioneer of the genre in Italy, and his film scoring, which fused these jazz roots with Mediterranean moods and contemporary sounds like funk, disco, and bossa nova. Trovajoli was the husband of Italian actress Pier Angeli. He died in Rome at the age of 95 on 28 February 2013.
Artist Website: wikipedia.org/Armando_Trovajoli
Featured Albums: Armando Trovajoli
Related Artists: I Marc 4, Nino Rota
