Claudio Rocchi

[alucard]

Claudio Rocchi has played bass on the first record of Avant -Proggers Stormy Six and started then a solo career.His first record 'Viaggio' from 1970 : acoustic Folk recorded with Mauro Pagani from PFM on flute and bongos reminds me sometimes the acoustic side of Embryo...Rocchi was also like Embryo interested in Indian Music and Philosophy and his music has a quiet meditative charakter over which he lays his esoteric Italian lyrics..up from his second record Volo Magico N°1 he plays also a psydelic drony guitar and and up from the mid 70s also electronic instruments.

[Dunamis]

On Volo Magico N.1 there is this achingly beautiful ballad Tutto Quello Che Ho Da Dire with fantastic oboe sounding Mellotron. I have 7 of his albums from the 70s on LP and there is good stuff on all of them.

[helicase]

This library album is pretty good, too:

[Trane]

Volo Magico 1 is a tremendous album
Too bad that the next one (Norma del Cielo/VM2) isn't as interesting (originally supposed to be a double album)
Viaggio is also very interesting

[MIO Records]

Very good musician IMHO.
There is another album apart of the first three that I really love:

[Scrotum Scissor]

Claudio Rocchi has played bass on the first record of Avant -Proggers Stormy Six

Their one album with Rocchi, L'Idee di Oggi from '69, is still an interesting listen for its unusual merger of folky song sensibilities, strange aura/nerve and odd take on what they presumably perceived as psychedelic or rather "abstract" in Italian radical culture circles anno '69. Rocchi certainly played an essential part in its sound and approach, as significantly outlined by Franco Fabbri many years later in his writings on the popular music culture of his homeland.

I quite enjoy that unpretentious spirit of the first two SSixes, which are undoubtedly uneven affairs in terms of overall musical worth but contain notable exceptions - songs like "Porterandolfo" and "Sciopero" from L'Unitá sport terrific tunes and themes to thoughtful lyrical lessons, sarcasm and satire reeking with the bitter farce of faith in fate and its certain defeat. While at times somewhat pedantic in narrative, there's wit and irony firsthand and here the apparent dogmatism of future admissions settles not so much for ideological lecture as for revisioning and overcoming that very fate - Gramsci notwithstanding.

The only SSix record I truly can not take is the 1973 Pianura album of militantly radical and doctrinal Leninist tunes set to strictly acoustic commission. Two years on, Un Biglietto del Tram merges songs and lyrics into finer arrangements so becoming their first "progressive" release, and the ensuing rest is history. Tram and L'Apprendista, Maccheronica and Al Volo are to my ears simply indispensible items of southern European rock music not just from this but -any- period.

Rocchi's best album, to me, was Essenza in that it captures his singular and lite eccentric concoction of 'emotive' visions in frames of frail albeit tentatively coherent sonic. It tends to remind me a bit of Bruce Palmer's Cycle Is Complete, not so much in actual sound as in natural instincts of flow and "organic composition". Neither as supremely transcendent as early Battiato nor as (sometimes) superficially artistic or lyrical as some of Branduardi's, Rocchi nevertheless succeeds in placing himself somewhere half way in between the two.