Puccio Roelens - Rock Satellite (1977) [Vinyl]

Funk is the magic word on this record here. Puccio Roelens (1919 – 1985) was an Italian composer, orchestra leader and pianist active from the mid 1940s to the time of his passing in 1985. You can easily place him in the “library music” category with his heavily rhythmical instrumental funk with a jazz / fusion edge. Layers upon layers of different rhythm patterns get shifted here and your body moves at full throttle to the sensual, steaming hot grooves. Signore Roelens moves through a bunch of related but still different styles where melody and rhythm become one stream of energy that rushes through your physics to make you swing eternally. Quite many passages here have a slick and glittering disco feel while others take you from the hottest NYC clubs to the open air bars of Rio De Janeiro, somewhere close to the beach. Always present is his extraordinary piano playing. He caresses the keyboard of his Fender Rhodes electric piano like the silky skin of a woman while lush brass arrangements literally blow your senses before some spacey, dreamy synthesizer harmonies call for you to follow into an unknown but pleasantly colorful world of living visions. The interplay between all keyboards is marvelous and quite often turns into an enthralling dialogue of two or three instruments. You may rather drift from dream to dream and vision to vision on the soundwaves of this album than listen closely to get each played note but I assume that this was the composer's actual goal. Well, there are definitely enough moments of musical grandeur to be discovered here and if you attempt to capture them all, you will for certain end up grooving to these smooth and sexy numbers without control over yourself. No wonder original copies of this album already went for 500 US$ into the loving hands of soul collectors. Does anyone get it? Well, anyway, this reissue enables us average earthlings to get an idea of how good funky library music can get.