Tredici Bacci bandleader Simon Hanes really loves the work of Italian film composer Ennio Morricone. Hanes’ love isn't subtle. Even if he didn't discuss Morricone so much in the press, the Morricone influence literally screams out at you from the music on Tredici Bacci’s debut full-length, Amore Per Tutti. Deriving its title from Fellini’s Nino Rota-scored classic Juliet of the Spirits, Amore Per Tutti is nothing if not defined by Hanes’ college-age immersion into 1950s and ’60s Italian cinema as his attraction to Morricone grew into an obsession.
It’s always a risky proposition when an artist references a specific influence with such laser focus. Listeners who lack the artist’s passion for the source material are likely to shrug, while fellow aficionados are bound to nitpick the music as not authentic enough on the one hand or too authentic on the other. Likeminded acts such as Antibalas, Debo Band, and Secret Chiefs 3 face a similar conundrum—and even inspire culture-vulture debates—with their respective modernizations of Afrobeat, Ethiopian, and Persian forms.
To his credit, even as Hanes pilots the 14-piece Tredici Bacci through narrow stylistic straits, his enthusiasm burns through in the band’s exuberance. He also injects the music with a persistent sense of levity that the band sustains even during the album’s most soaring moments. Additionally, Hanes wrote these tunes as an attempt to extract the poppiest aspects of Morricone’s scores, which gives Amore Per Tutti a concise feel in spite of its grand orchestral sweep.
On album opener “Columbo,” a grainy electric guitar figure blends seamlessly with horns that echo and harmonize against the same root notes while also heralding a grand arrival—the type of thing you might hear in an old Hollywood epic to invoke a sense of ancient Roman glory. Those horns do announce a grand arrival, but it comes in the form of a snakelike central hook with heavy traces of Greek/Turkish modality. The band maneuvers through such sequences with an impeccable agility that's easy to miss behind the music's melodramatic exterior.
Meanwhile, the album doesn’t attempt to recreate the musty ambience of old film. Instead of making you feel like an archivist poring over film footage and academic texts written by grad students, the music's crisp production feels very much anchored in the moment, which only accentuates the music’s springy good-time bounce, and very nearly passes Morricone off as party music. (It would have to be a certain type of party, of course, but one imagines Hanes wants us to crank the music up and have fun rather than sit there namedropping cinematic references for sport.)
On “Avante,” for instance, the band cranks-up the melodrama, as playful operatic vocals accompany a guitar line and galloping rhythm that are obviously fashioned in “spaghetti western” style. It’s funny, even goofy; in fact, it's hard to listen to a song like “Avante” without breaking into laughter, as you picture clip-clopping horses and the strangely distorted Italian conception of the American west. Hanes probably wouldn't have it any other way.
