Franco Piana Has Been in the RAI Orchestra Since 1982 - and Writes Jazz Suites That Critics Compare to Gil Evans

Franco Piana on jazzprofiles.com

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Franco Piana was born on January 14, 1957, in Refrancore, the Piedmont town near Asti that is also the hometown of his father, the valve trombonist Dino Piana. He has said he took up the trumpet at about six, after building one out of Lego and imitating its sound with his voice until his father bought him a real one, and that he had already learned the Count Basie band's solos from his father's records by the age of five. At sixteen he was playing in a quintet with his father; in 1973 he attended the jazz course Giorgio Gaslini taught at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, an experience that included an appearance on the television program "Jazz al Conservatorio." He also studied arranging and orchestration with Giancarlo Gazzani, and by his own account it was in the Rome big bands of the late 1970s, Tommaso Vittorini's Grande Elenco Musicisti and Alberto Corvini's Jazz Studio Big Band, that he began writing for jazz orchestra.

The family business was the family band. In 1978 he joined the Piana-Valdambrini Sextet, the group his father led with trumpeter Oscar Valdambrini, and he has described the years that followed as a school in section discipline and free improvisation, playing at around age twenty alongside Valdambrini, Gianni Basso and Franco Cerri. In 1982 he won the audition for the RAI Orchestra of Rome, where he worked as a trumpeter and arranger under maestros including Bruno Canfora, Gianni Ferrio and Armando Trovajoli, on television programs such as the Sanremo Festival and Fantastico and on film and musical scores with Trovajoli, Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani, Manuel De Sica and Renato Serio. He arranged for Mia Martini, Amy Stewart, Giorgia and Fausto Leali, and by his own account played with Bob Brookmeyer, Mel Lewis, Kai Winding, Eddie Daniels and Bob Mintzer, and, on a RAI radio broadcast produced by Adriano Mazzoletti, with Chet Baker. Lewis, he says, commissioned two arrangements from him for his orchestra. Those pairings are carried here as his own account rather than as documented recording sessions.

The 1980s and 1990s were his writing years. He won the Barga competition for arrangers in 1987 and placed second at the Le Havre international composition competition in 1994. Recorded credits from those years include the Alberto Corvini big band's Fireworks (1987), where he played trumpet and wrote four of the album's pieces, and Conversation (1991, Penta Flowers), a big-band record he composed, arranged and conducted, with the Piana-Valdambrini Sextet as featured soloists. Its centerpiece, "Lunga Vita Al Jazz," runs almost twenty minutes. The same year he wrote the score for the Lucio Fulci film Door To Silence. In December 1992 he debuted his own big band at Rome's Teatro Brancaccio, and in 1995 the band played the Umbria Jazz Festival. His compositions kept circulating: "Blues Band" was recorded by the Perugia Big Band (1982), Gianni Basso's big band and the Royal Big Band (2014), and "Melody For Children," first heard on Conversation, was recorded again by the Sound Art Orchestra in 2008.

In July 2000 he formed the Dino & Franco Piana Jazz Orchestra, a 20-piece band for which he wrote everything, and recorded Interplay For 20, reviewed by Jack Bowers for All About Jazz in April 2003 as the follow-up to Conversation; the personnel included Fabrizio Bosso as a guest, Claudio Corvini and Aldo Bassi in the trumpet section, and Dario Rosciglione on bass. In 2003 he added a Dino & Franco Piana Brass Ensemble, which debuted at the Villa Celimontana festival, and in October 2005 the Parco della Musica Jazz Orchestra under Maurizio Giammarco performed a program of his compositions in the Sala Sinopoli in Rome. A major arranging project came in 2008 with Omaggio A Armando Trovajoli, recorded at Casa del Jazz on March 20, 2008, with Trovajoli himself at the piano on two tracks and Enrico Pieranunzi on another; Piana conducted, arranged and soloed on the record.

His best-documented record as a leader came in 2012. Seven (Alfa Music), credited to the Dino Piana & Franco Piana Septet, put the father-and-son front line together with Fabrizio Bosso, tenor saxophonist Max Ionata, pianists Enrico Pieranunzi and Luca Mannutza, bassist Giuseppe Bassi and drummer Roberto Gatto, with Enrico Rava joining on the last track, "Step By Step." Its four-movement suite "Open Dialogues" drew comparisons to Gil Evans in both JazzTimes and Jazzit, and his own curriculum reports that Jazzit magazine named the album the best of 2012. He wrote "Eighty And One" for the session as a tribute to his father, who was 81. Three more ensemble albums followed on Alfa Music: Seasons (recorded July 2014, released 2015), Open Spaces (2020), which added the B.I.M. Orchestra string players, and Reflections (2021), with pianist Stefania Tallini and bassist Dario Deidda. In 2021 he also played cornet on his father's final album, Al Gir Dal Bughi, with Rava and Gatto.

Since then his most active partnership has been with Tallini. Their duo album E Se Domani (Alfa Music, released February 24, 2023, and presented at Casa del Jazz in Rome on February 18) pairs her piano with his flugelhorn, trumpet and, unusually for him, scat singing and percussive flugelhorn effects, over a program of originals, standards and Italian and Brazilian songs. From 2006 he taught at the Officine Musicali del Borgo school and from 2008 to 2010 at the Felt Music School, ran seminars on big-band history at Casa del Jazz with Massimo Nunzi in 2008, and, according to his curriculum, directed the Torino big band for the MITO festival in 2013 and led the Dino & Franco Piana Jazz Orchestra at Umbria Jazz in July 2014 in a Trovajoli tribute. Being Dino Piana's son was, he has said, at first a heavy responsibility; the lesson he took from the older players around him was that in jazz you do not chase anyone, you look for your own artistic identity. Father and son led the orchestra together until a few months before Dino died on November 6, 2023.

Piana is first a writer for jazz orchestra who also plays flugelhorn and trumpet, and the two roles feed each other. Reviewers describe his charts as lyrical and provocative frameworks for swinging soloists, and Jack Bowers, reviewing Interplay For 20, put his flugelhorn between Chet Baker and Conte Candoli. His own list of trumpet models is Chet Baker, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, with Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie as the players he names as fundamental to jazz history. JazzTimes heard the harmonically rich stamp of Gil Evans in Seven's suite, and the Italian press noted that his writing for four horns and a rhythm section in a small group recalls writing for a large orchestra, with the horns often playing in counterpoint and written passages opening onto solo space.

That approach comes straight from the Piana-Valdambrini Sextet's discipline, which he describes as rigor in the section and freedom in the solos. His Discogs credits sit under Jazz, with styles tagged Cool Jazz and Latin Jazz for E Se Domani and Contemporary Jazz for the Trovajoli tribute, and the rest of his catalog lands in the mainstream jazz and big-band tradition. Beside the jazz work there is a long second career in the RAI Orchestra, television arrangements and film-score sessions.