I 5 Del Sud

The story of the Italian Song, particularly from the 60s onward, has not been written accurately perhaps because it is very difficult to talk about artists that have really contributed to the development of Italian music after the 60s. Historian have the tendency to go to those that have had most success. This can be a costly mistake. Indeed to write about Italian music without mentioning Carlo Alberto Rossi, or Luciano Zotti, is to write about superficial history of Italian music.

This is because the song of Carlo Alberto Rossi were sung from artists that were famous all over the world such as Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole Julio Iglesias, Kathy Kirby and many others. My father, Luciano Giuseppe Zotti, was there with Carlo Alberto Rossi at a time when some of the best songs in the world have been written by Italian composers.

I begin the story from the time when my father, Luciano Giuseppe Zotti begun to play with his quintet by the name of “i 5 Del Sud” which means the 5 from the south”… of Italy of course. My father was one of the most respected pianist already well known in his city of BAri but waiting to do bigger things as he did. He studied with the famous composer Nino Rota who wrote the soundtracks for the movies The Grandfather and A Time For Us.

Let’s look at the 5 from the south that was a great quintet of Italian musicians that composed their own songs and became quite famous travelling around Europe to play in various nightclubs. They were signed up by the RCA recording company and made some hits at the time. What is important about this quintet is that they started at a time where music was going though a transformation, particularly in Italy where songs where now combined with Latin rhythms something important for music even today where Pop and Rock and even Jazz songs use Latin rhythms. This quintet was one of the first Italian bands to use Latin rhythms for their original songs.

Keep coming back to this page because I intend to write part of the story of the Italian Song, that part that is not known, or known by very few people but that has not yet been written. We cannot speak of Italian music without mentioning two essential names: Carlo Alberto Rossi and Luciano Zotti.