Columns

Just one more thing… One late autumn afternoon, the lopsided, absent-minded figure of Lieutenant Columbo entered my memory. Rete4, ever generous with surprises, was airing an episode in which Peter Falk – with his crumpled raincoat, perpetually lit cigar, and one-eyed, weary gait – moved through a Los Angeles villa filled with modern art, expensive carpets, and metaphysical corpses. I was just at the right age to realize that, when told well, a crime story was never just about blood and motive, but also about moral architecture and the choreography of the unconscious. In Columbo, everything was built with the precision of a Bach fugue, yet disguised with the nonchalance of a jazz musician stumbling upon the truth. Despite its unassuming appearance, Columbo remains one of the most sophisticated works ever produced for American television. Created in 1968 by Richard Levinson and William Link, and developed by a team of […]

The early 1990s marked the return of great singers. Many who had lived in near anonymity during the 1970s suddenly came back into view....

Let’s start with a song: “Laura.” David Raksin composed the music for the film of the same name (released in Italy as Vertigine), and...

Sixties Rome had a couple of easily recognizable symbols among many others: Cinecittà and the Piper. Two recently published books and a few albums...

Ayers died on March 4 in New York. The warm sound of his instrument has fallen silent, leaving an empty void. He was eighty-four...

Steven Wilson: In a Fragment of the Cosmos. One of the busiest musicians of our time reflects on the vastness of the universe

The 1. New Jazz Festival Hamburg '75 album remains a lost item today. It contains four long tracks from a festival whose lineup, half a century later, is still difficult to reconstruct: Terje Rypdal, Liebman & Beirach, Eberhard Weber, and Tomasz Stańko.

For years, it has been no secret that there is considerable crossover between the Sanremo Festival and the Tenco Prize. This year, the overlap...

Marianne Faithfull: a memory of an artist in dazzling chiaroscuro

2024 was a rewarding year for Caselli. In the spring, she was named a Knight of Labor, and in the fall, she received the...