Free music italiana nei primi Settanta del secolo scorso: “old fashioned”?

The second chorus of Giancarlo Schiaffini Quartet’s “Old Fashioned” (1973), in which Bruno Tommaso’s solo on double bass appears, is the subject of an early example of note-for-note analysis of a free jazz piece. This analytical perspicuity is enabled by the etmic music transcription protocol devised by the author, with full notational rendering of what is performed by musicians in a recorded performance. In turn, the extreme insight of detail into analytic practice is not self-referentially an end in itself, promoting the application of musicanalysis methodology, a hermeneutic approach in which the illumination of the fragment becomes part of a constellation that refers to a superordinate image of “sound-making”, in which meaning is revealed along the lines of Walter Benjamin’s critical magisterium.