Mario Molino

Big Tip! The story of The Diamonds Four has the kind of archival complexity that serious collectors live for. Mario Molino - classical guitarist, jazz musician, and one of the more versatile and elusive figures in Italian library music - first released this session on the obscure B.M.P. imprint in the early 1970s, in a pressing so limited it barely registered. It later surfaced again on the Music Scene label under a different title, with different track names, credited to the pseudonym Luigi Ferracioli - effectively a second disappearance. With only a handful of originals ever surfacing over the years, it had earned the status of a record that few had actually heard. Sonor Music Editions' reissue, limited to 500 copies and remastered with restored artwork, is the first time it has been properly accessible in half a century.

What makes The Diamonds Four worth the wait is the range it covers without ever losing coherence. Molino was a trained classical guitarist who also moved fluently through jazz, funk, and psychedelic rock - and this album reflects that duality across twelve tracks. Breezy bossa passages give way to fuzzed guitar and Hammond organ. Jazz-beat constructions tighten into something closer to proto-hip hop. Mood pieces open up into full-band arrangements. Titles like "Aeroporto", "Costa Brava", "Autostrada", and the closing "Drammabeat" map a particular imagination of Italian modernity - mobile, stylish, slightly cinematic - that the best library music of the era captured better than almost any other format. It sits naturally alongside his most celebrated releases: Antico e Moderno on Fonit's Usignolo series, Beat Gregoriano on Montecarlo, I Beats on Pentaphon.

Versatile, infectious, and long overdue.