Sonata for the Mastiff. Calibro 35 discuss Ellroy, white lies and a fearful Los Angeles

James Ellroy has said on several occasions that if a restaurant plays rock music at high volume, he gets up and leaves. For him, music began in the classroom with Beethoven’s Fifth and has remained there ever since: in Francesco Zippel’s documentary ‘Ellroy vs L.A.’, which won an award at this year’s Nastri d’Argento, he is seen at home, standing in front of a bust of the German composer. He once summed up his influences as a “religious, Tory, formalist, Beethoven-worshipping” worldview. Calibro 35 have crafted a soundtrack for this man, blending funk, psychedelia and clavinet; it was released on 9 October and was performed live in Rome on 22 October. The tour continues in November, taking in London, Madrid and Milan, before wrapping up on 10 December in Genoa. They have never, however, met Ellroy in the flesh. “He would probably have influenced us in a different way,” they say. “We approached him from an aesthetic perspective.” Whether he liked the result, they don’t know. And that doesn’t seem to bother them. “He’s a larger-than-life character, so polarising, that I feel perfectly entitled to not give a damn. Just as I see him not giving a damn about anything or anyone,” says Tommaso Colliva, the project’s sound director. “The only way to deal with him is to surrender to the impressions he evokes through the things he says and, above all, the way he says them. We were immediately struck by the tone of his voice – hoarse and noir – as well as the raw nature of his stories, including the personal ones.”

Massimo Martellotta – guitarist and keyboardist, a mainstay of Calibro – recounts the initial idea, the one the director went with: “Ellroy’s spoken word is half the music”. The main theme consists of three notes that recur “here and there, like little satellites”, whilst the backing tracks almost always take a back seat, supporting the vocals. The rest is a matter of colour palette. To depict “a punk life that isn’t punk at all”, the choice shifted towards more acidic and psychedelic sounds. “We only fell into the jazz noir cliché in one track.” After all, even Ellroy – who detests rock – placed jazz at the heart of one of his most ferocious novels. White Jazz tells the story of a white, racist policeman in 1958 Los Angeles who finds himself addicted to bebop without knowing how or why. Calibro have done something similar to his city: they’ve taken the white, cop-filled Los Angeles of the novels and turned it black using the language of cinematic funk and blaxploitation, from Isaac Hayes right down to Kendrick Lamar. “As we hadn’t dealt directly with the character, we allowed ourselves to have fun and dare to make narrative combinations that were almost comic-book-like,” they explain. Then, when you least expect it, a sentimental theme emerges. It serves to accompany the story of his mother, murdered in 1958 when Ellroy was ten years old: the unsolved crime around which he has built a life of writing. “He recounts it dispassionately, stringing together a series of chilling anecdotes,” says Martellotta. “By contrast, we’ve created a very expansive, almost melodic theme.” And to conclude, a tribute to the only musician Ellroy acknowledges: a cover of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. “We tried to give him this little gift.” A sonata for the mastiff, the only music capable of taming him.

He gave himself the nickname: ‘Demon Dog’, the demonic mastiff of American literature. And he wears it like a studded collar. Ellroy says he has never been left-wing, ‘not even for a moment, not even in my sleep’. In the documentary, there is a passage in which he lists the accusations levelled against him: misogynist, fascist, racist. This year he published Red Sheet, set in Los Angeles in 1962, a novel that defends the Hollywood blacklist. Calibro do not pretend the problem does not exist (“Writing about Ellroy or dealing with him does not mean endorsing his views”), but nor do they view him as an ideologue. “He’s clearly incapable of being the leader of a cult. He’s a free agent, and above all he’s an actor: when he wants to rile you up, to be provocative, he knows exactly how to do it. If you read his work and play along, you’ll enjoy yourself. As a mere spectator.”

The aspect of Ellroy that fascinates them most is something else entirely. “He’s a character poised between reality and fiction. You never quite know where the real L.A. ends and the one he’s constructed in his mind begins,” emphasise Martellotta and Colliva. “On the one hand, he claims to be depicting a city that no longer exists; on the other, he admits that even that Los Angeles of ’62 was entirely of his own invention. Which, after all, is the basis of good lies: you need a credible setting, to be filled with fiction. That is Ellroy.”

That twilight zone between reality and imagination is a territory Calibro know well. They formed in 2007 by reworking the forgotten music of the ‘poliziottesco’ genre – in other words, the soundtrack to an Italy that existed mainly on the big screen. They then began writing soundtracks for films that were never made: ‘Traditori di tutti’, released in 2013, was built around an imaginary film based on Scerbanenco’s novels. One of the tracks from that period, sampled by Dr. Dre in ‘Compton’, is titled ‘Any reference to actual events is purely coincidental’. Musical masks and balaclavas. “Sometimes we play Calibro, sometimes we are Calibro,” they explain. This album contains both. Zippel had asked the band to improvise in front of the camera, to “capture that very moment”, and those tracks, they say, are “moments of truth, a genuine exploration by musicians who are searching for something. Others, such as ‘Vacation and Probation’, are Calibro playing themselves’. That is the risk of any strong identity. “Our sound can be imitated. The challenge is to remain a living entity and not a reproduction of ourselves.” Martellotta puts it in terms of age: “As a teenager, you’re very attached to the identity you want to have and that you build for yourself. Now that we’ve all got lovely white hair, we’ve realised you can’t just shed that identity. And the game becomes pretending to be something else.”

Ellroy has also written about his mother – who was strangled and abandoned beneath the oleanders along a road in El Monte, Los Angeles County – outside the realm of fiction. In the mid-1990s, he hired a former homicide detective, Bill Stoner, and for over a year they reopened the case: examining archives, interviewing surviving witnesses and reviewing old police reports. The result was My Dark Places, which is true crime in the most literal sense, with the writer investigating himself (the culprit was never found). Today, the genre in Italy fills TV schedules and podcasts. What sort of music does it deserve? Colliva has ‘a controversial answer: better music than what’s currently available’. Very few recent Italian productions, he says, have a carefully considered soundtrack. “With the current hyper-production of content, ninety per cent relies on modern library music – production music of the lowest quality.” The exception he cites is Il mostro, Stefano Sollima’s series about the Florence killer, with music by Alessandro Cortini. The comparison, on the other hand, is with library music from the 1960s and 1970s: “Excellent examples of how something beautiful can emerge from piecework craftsmanship. But today, the standard sound of the genre consists of drones and contrived tension. It’s not Carlo Lucarelli: it’s the Gialappa’s Band’s imitation of him. ‘Scary, eh?’”

The issue of library music, after all, is a matter of memory: what remains of all the music written on a pay-per-use basis for cinema and television? And who decides what remains? Calibro are interested in this question because they came into being precisely by delving into that archive. And today, to delve deeper, they also use artificial intelligence. “The other day I was doing a bit of research on Italian composers of film genre music,” says Colliva. “I drew up a list of twenty-five composers and asked ChatGPT for an Excel spreadsheet showing the three directors each had worked with and their monthly listener figures on Spotify. Forty-five seconds later, I had it. And I realised that Morricone, Umiliani, Piccioni and Nino Rota have ten times as many streams as all the others. It makes you realise how easy it is to fall into oblivion in this business.” Why those artists in particular? The case that intrigues me most is Piero Umiliani. "If you take 'Mah Nà Mah Nà' out of the equation, he’s produced very few major hits. The soundtrack to I Soliti Ignoti, of course, but it’s not A Fistful of Dollars... And yet, over the last twenty years, he’s been at the centre of a rediscovery that’s also reflected in streaming figures, whilst Carlo Rustichelli, who wrote much of the music for Italian comedy films, remains at around twenty thousand listeners. We live in a world where a few composers generate as many streams as everyone else put together.” Colliva is piecing together the story of Luciano Michelini for the band’s social media channels. His ‘Frolic’, written in 1974 for Sergio Martino’s La bellissima estate, first became the theme tune for Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s series set in Los Angeles, and from there the sound to which the whole world laughs at its own blunders on social media, with people dancing to it on TikTok. “These dynamics are completely unpredictable. And, after all, unpredictability is a source of hope.”

“Speaking of AI, we’re using it a lot as a ‘kitchen’ tool, in a non-generative way,” they explain. “Voice modelling, for example, allows us to test seven different voices and submit the songs we write to producers without having to call in a singer for every audition.” What worries Colliva, as a producer, is something else: artists turning up with demos already produced by the machine. “In the long run, I know those skills will atrophy. Making bad demos is what has taught us all to do our jobs well.”

The first single is titled “Riots”, and comes just over a year after Donald Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles against the wishes of the Californian authorities – the first time this had happened since 1965. The band were there whilst working on the album, playing at a festival and at the Whisky a Go Go. “We saw shanty towns of university students living in tents, because there’s no middle ground. We have friends who are musicians there, and you see them moving further and further away, into ever-smaller homes. It’s a very strange place, a very difficult city, even though three-quarters of our collective imagination comes from there. We found it had changed compared to ten years ago, and definitely not for the better. More turned in on itself, less curious. People are more frightened. It’s less easy to feel like a guest. Dark times.” Eighty years ago, in the very same city, there were those who knew a thing or two about dark times. In the 1940s, Bertolt Brecht lived in exile in Santa Monica. Not far away lived Hanns Eisler, the composer who had been setting his poems to music for almost twenty years and who had become a composer of film scores in Hollywood: he received an Oscar nomination for Fritz Lang’s Even Executioners Die, for which Brecht had co-written the screenplay with the director. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee summoned them both to testify. Brecht left the United States immediately after the hearing; Eisler was deported a few months later – the very same witch-hunt against communists in Hollywood that Ellroy defends in Red Sheet. A few years earlier, whilst in exile in Denmark, Brecht had written: “In dark times, will people still sing? Yes, they will sing of dark times.”

The documentary on Ellroy came about whilst Calibro were working on three series simultaneously: ‘Sandokan’ and ‘Blanca’ for Rai, and ‘Chiaroscuro’, due to be released on Netflix. Research carried out by ‘nightclub rats’ and more than two years of work, Martellotta explains, at an emergency-room pace: ‘Even at two in the morning, on Saturdays and Sundays. Just like doctors: always on call. In a series this big, you have to understand who you’re talking to and try to use that language, even if it’s not your own.” Ellroy, by comparison, was “a breath of fresh air”, they sigh.

They even ended up in front of the camera. Zippel featured them in the film far more than they expected: they appear on screen roughly half the time the music is playing. “We’re still the sort of people who find it strange to hear our own voices,” they admit. “Let alone seeing ourselves on screen.”

If Ellroy had included them in L.A. Confidential, who would they be: the thug, the top of the class, the set cop or the tabloid journalist? “None of us is a thug; I think that’s quite obvious.” They see themselves more in another Los Angeles noir, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs: “Low-level criminal foot soldiers,” they joke. “There’s a certain mercenary streak in us, in a good way. Each of us has our own character: some are meticulous, others aren’t; some are tidy, others messy; some come up with solutions out of the blue.” Who knows which of them, like Harvey Keitel moving from one Tarantino Los Angeles to another, might appear from behind a door saying: “I’m Mr Wolf, I solve problems.”

The images that open their concert, after all, are precisely these: a car full of thugs on their way to kill an unfortunate victim. For the show, they explain, “we took the documentary apart and put it back together, following a set list that made sense as a concert”. Half the tracks are new, half are from the archive. “If you want to come and see a Calibro concert, come and see a concert you’ve never seen before. If, on the other hand, you fancy losing yourself in the narrative too, you can do so, and that’s a wonderful bonus.” Ellroy, in any case, won’t be there. And it’s just as well: with the music at that volume, he’d have stormed off swearing.