AllMovie

Italian composer and session musician Alessandro Alessandroni (often credited simply under his last name) may not be as well known as Ennio Morricone, but he played a major role in the making of some of Morricone's best-known scores in the '60s. Alessandroni is also a film composer in his own right, though he hasn't always received credit for his work in this area. Born in Rome, he was already well established as a session musician in the early '60s. He was known as multi-threat talent: a guitar virtuoso with an especially choice technique on the electric guitar, a virtuoso whistler, and a conductor of serious merit. Each of those abilities would loom large in the music of Morricone as he emerged in the mid-'60s with his classic Western films scores for A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. His group Canti Moderni (aka Modern Singers) can be heard on many Morricone soundtracks from the period, as conducted by their founder; Alessandroni also appeared on Morricone's original official recordings of much of that classic soundtrack music. From 1967, Alessandroni also contributed songs -- and sometimes full scores -- to more than three dozen feature films in every genre from Westerns to horror, and conducted the music for a handful of such movies, many of which had only just begun to appear on DVD as of 2003.