Hello, I hope all is groovy. It's good here, but there have been some sad moments this week.

As I'm sure many of you know, last Sunday Alessandro Alessandroni passed away. He was one of my musical heroes, a true maestros of Italian film and library music. I met him twice when he played at the launch of "Bistro" and at a live Gigoku show at the ICA. People like Lionel Woodman who sold Italian film music at the old film fayres in the 1990s used to sell us his records (yes, ACTUAL records from the Alessandroni archive) and tell us all how wonderful he was. I shall be playing two hours of his amazing magical music tomorrow on the OST Show.

I thought we could have some Italian music today too, and so we are. Piero Umiliani is globally known for "Mah Na Ma Nah" (a track originally from a Swedish based mondo documentary and then hijacked by The Muppets) which, rumour has it, was actualluy written by Alessandroni, but that's another story. Anyway, he made loads of early film music featuring Chet Baker trumpeting. So, the 50p Friday album is Chet Baker Italian Movies By Umiliani. It can be found here.   

If you were paying attention last week you would have read that it was my birthday. A fine member of this list promptly sent me this amazing little film, a Bollywood Happy Birthday party. Awesome. Just awesome.

I'm now off to Essex to look at an archive of old black and white pictures. And then some colour ones too.

Thanks for listening.

Jonny