TRACKLIST:
A1. L'Uomo e la Città
A2. Città Amica
A3. Città' Frenetica
A4. Quartieri Alti
A5. Viadotti
A6. Piazza Di Siena
B1. L'Uomo e la Città
B2. Rete Urbana
B3. Centrali Termiche
B4. Centrali Termiche
B5. Città Amica
B6. L'Uomo e la Città
B7 Suoni Della Città

In the intricate panorama of Italian library music, the themes of city, factories, metropolis, work,
urbanization and technology have always been among the most fascinating (and used), relying on dozens of
fundamental records by composers such as Alessandro Alessandroni, Farlocco, Gerardo Iacoucci, A.R.
Luciani, Narassa and many others. The attempt to provide a plausible soundtrack to a continuously and
rapidly ever-changing world, especially in the hectic seventies, has often produced masterpieces that
combined avant-garde techniques with sounds, risky experimentation with easy-listening songs, the traffic
chaos and assembly lines with the silence of the night, the end of the work shift with Sunday’s rest.
Piero Umiliani’s L’Uomo e la Città perfectly fits into this rich and varied field, an album where our Man is
accompanied by a jazz musicians sublime parade that includes celebrities like Bruno Tommaso, Oscar
Valdambrini, Dino Piana and Nino Rapicavoli, here delivering the most of a sound that is highly based on the
richness of the wind instruments and on the rhythm of the Umiliani-led ensemble.
L’Uomo e la Città is a less risky effort when compared to other releases by Piero Umiliani, but that’s in
favor of an extraordinary jazz tightness (Rete Urbana, Quartieri Alti, Città Frenetica), but the wish to amaze
appears when least expected in the two excellent renditions of Centrale Termica and Suoni della Città, among
the best tracks of the album. More

Released in 1975, "Continente Nero" is the perfect flip side of "Africa" (1972), an album that significantly expanded Piero Umiliani's music perspectives, incorporating partially explored rhythmic variations already used in "Percussioni ed Effetti Speciali" and "To-Day's Sound". It does so by taking inspiration from a tradition that starts from the divine Fela Kuti and reaches the amateur and field recordings by musicologists such as David Toop, but also from the Afro- American jazz history of Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Coltrane, Max Roach and hundreds of others More