In 1975 and 1976 Stormy Six were the house band of the Italian left. They played festivals and demonstrations, occupied schools and occupied factories, dozens of Communist Party summer festivals; their song Stalingrado was in constant rotation on the first free radio stations in the country. So when the fifth album arrived, the audience opened it expecting more of that, and found fifteen instrumental pieces written for a theatre production. No words. Not one. The international jazz press loved it. The militant audience had no idea what to do with it.

The short version

Their fifth album, released in 1976 on L’Orchestra — the independent cooperative the band themselves helped found and run, and which put out every Stormy Six studio record until 1982. Fifteen tracks, entirely instrumental, written as music for the stage. It was recorded with two guests who shape the whole thing: the trumpeter Guido Mazzon and the drummer Toni Rusconi, who came in as Antonio Zanuso was on his way out of the band. Several pieces last under a minute. It sits between Un biglietto del tram and L’apprendista — between two of the most important Italian records of the decade — and it has spent fifty years being the one nobody talks about.

The album nobody asked for

To understand why this record landed the way it did you have to understand what came before it. Un biglietto del tram, in 1975, was a concept album about the Italian resistance and the last years of the war, and it was a genuine event: folk and progressive rock welded together, songs about real people, and it went straight into the culture at a moment when that culture was at its loudest. Stormy Six were not a band with political songs; they were part of a political movement that happened to include a band. And then they made Cliche — wordless, jazz-inflected, written to accompany actors. It is not a betrayal and it is not really a departure either: the musical language is plainly related to some of the previous album’s songs. But the thing their audience actually wanted from them was words, and there were none. Everybody agrees on the verdict, including the people who love it: this is the sound of a band in transition, and you can hear the effort and the disorder in it.

The sound

Chamber jazz with a rock band inside it. Mazzon’s trumpet is the lead voice for much of the record and it pulls everything towards the European free-jazz world rather than the folk-prog one; Rusconi plays like a jazz drummer because he is one. The writing is episodic by necessity — it was built to cue scenes, so pieces begin, make their point in ninety seconds and stop. What survives from the old band is the melodic sense and the arrangement instinct, which is why it never sounds like a side project. And what it points at is what came next: the electric, angular, awkward avant-rock of L’apprendista, which is where Stormy Six became one of the most respected bands in Europe. This is the bridge, and bridges are not usually where you stand and admire the view.

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The songs

Read the titles and the joke becomes clear. Dibattito. Riflusso. Comizio A, Comizio B, Comizio C — three rallies. Picnic. Leader, twenty-five seconds long. Tafferuglio, a scuffle, nearly six minutes of it. L’escluso. Banchetto e rissa. Salotto. Inchiesta TV. Tutta una serie di questioni, half a minute. Il nostro tempo e scaduto, which is what the broadcaster says when the programme ends. And then 1789. This is not a band that abandoned politics for abstraction; this is a band that removed the lyrics and kept the entire subject. Cliche is an instrumental album about public life in Italy in 1976 — the meetings, the speeches, the arguments, the television, the drawing rooms, the brawl — and it says all of it with a trumpet.

Reception and legacy

The jazz magazines abroad reviewed it seriously and well. At home the audience that had sung along to Stalingrado went quiet, and the record sank into the position it still occupies: the one between the two famous ones. A year later L’apprendista arrived, the band picked up electric instruments again, and Stormy Six went on to become the Italian name in European avant-rock, which is a status almost no other band on this site achieved. Looking back, Cliche is where that turn was made. The catalogue of L’Orchestra, meanwhile, would pass fifty titles — among them Picchio dal Pozzo — which makes this band the closest thing Italian progressive rock had to an institution it actually owned.

The verdict

For the curious, and for completists first. Do not start your Stormy Six here: start with Un biglietto del tram, then L’apprendista, and come back to Cliche once you want to know how one became the other. Play Tafferuglio and Banchetto e rissa. Then Area for the other Italian band who put jazz and politics in the same room, and Picchio dal Pozzo for the other side of L’Orchestra. A band that everybody wanted to hear singing, handing in fifteen wordless pieces for a play. It was the wrong record at the right time, which is usually how the interesting ones happen.

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