The Barigozzi Group's 1974 jazz-funk holy grail is finally on Bandcamp

More than 50 years is a long time to keep a record off the market. The Barigozzi Group's Woman's Colours was pressed in 1974 on the Italian Fonovideo label, supervised by producer Fabio Fabor, and then essentially vanished — no reissue, no digital release, no commercial availability. 1 In that window, a few producers managed to sample tracks anyway, which tells you something about how hard crate diggers were hunting for this particular LP. Now Four Flies Records (catalog number FLIES 84) has put it back into the world, and Bandcamp Daily named it Album of the Day on June 2. 2

The name Giancarlo Barigozzi may not be in your mental file cabinet, but it should be. A flautist and saxophonist working Milan's early-1970s session circuit, Barigozzi and running mates — guitarist Sergio Farina and pianist Oscar Rocchi — were the kind of jazz-trained players who showed up for library sessions in the morning and club dates at night. 2 Bandcamp Daily writer Jim Allen compared them to L.A.'s Wrecking Crew — the legendary pool of session musicians who played on most of the major pop hits of the 1960s without ever getting credited — with one key difference: Barigozzi's group did get credited. The trio's range was wide — electroacoustic experimentalism, chamber-jazz impressionism, early Afro-funk — but Woman's Colours is where they apparently found the locked groove. 2 Allen called it "hipper and harder-grooving than the earlier Barigozzi Group albums by a wide margin." 2

The album has a structural conceit that could easily have been a gimmick: all 14 tracks are named after a color paired with a body part — Violet Lips, Dark Hands, Silver Legs, Black Heart, Ivory Breast. 1 Four Flies describes it as "a cohesive, organic exploration of a single theme: a refined tribute to the female form." 1 What keeps it from collapsing into repetition is the way Barigozzi, Farina, and Rocchi treat each track less as a standalone piece than as a different angle on the same modal center. Allen put it plainly: on the biggest tracks, "fancy chord changes and tricksy melodies take a distant backseat to modal burndowns, as Barigozzi, Farina, and Rocchi play their butts off." 2

Track by track, the album earns its reputation. "Dark Hands" runs on spidery guitar and overblown flute over a driving beat. "Silver Legs" has a riff Allen described as "insidiously earwormy" — the kind that, in his words, "would've probably wound up on Paul's Boutique if The Dust Brothers could've scored a copy." "Black Heart" builds on a sly mono synth, a clavinet that sounds genuinely hostile, and wah-wah guitar; it's the kind of track that makes you realize sample-culture exists for a reason. 2 The record also has a soft-pedaled end — "Blue Hairs" drifts in a direction Allen called "destined to have been retitled 'Love Theme from [fill in the blank].'" 2

Four Flies — an Italian label dedicated to resurfacing golden-age soundtracks — restored the artwork through designer Eric Adrian Lee and pressed the vinyl in a hard tip-on sleeve with a printed inner sleeve. 1 The digital is €10 for 24-bit/48kHz; vinyl LP runs €27. 1 Over 63 supporters had already backed it on Bandcamp as of this writing, and the fan overlap with Sandro Brugnolini, Sven Wunder, and Khruangbin listeners tells you exactly where this sits in the listening ecosystem. 1

Bandcamp: Woman's Colours | The Barigozzi Group