New film 2025: “That Secret Room” is a successful synthesis of music and images: Videos, Photos

If you wonder who Edda Dall’Orso is, just mention a film, “Duck, You Sucker” from 1971, and two words: “Sean Sean“.

In reality, the career of the musician and singer, born in Genoa on February 16, 1935 and soon moved to Rome, requires much more than a line, and at least a mention of the collaborations, as well as with Ennio Morricone, with Armando Trovajoli, with Claudio Baglioni at the beginning, Sergio Endrigo, Nicola Piovani, Fabrizio De Andrè for the album “Non al denaro, non all’amore nè al cielo” and with Francesco De Gregori.

And the intense concert activity that continued until the new millennium would deserve a similar space. But, above all, what characterizes the singer’s career is her participation in numerous soundtracks that occupy a time span from 1964 with Paolo Cavara’s “I malamondo” to 2023 with Giuseppe Tornatore’s “La Migliore offerta”, passing through the very famous “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West”.

We started with a series of cinematic references and will continue like this, because the album we are talking about, “Quella stanza segreta”, (dodicilune) is an explicit homage to Edda Dall’Orso and at the same time an act of love for the seventh art conceived by the Roman bassist Massimiliano Cignitti, who had not hidden his passion for cinema in his previous works. Which we asked him to tell us about.

“Alongside the passion and study of music – explains Cignitti – since adolescence I have cultivated a deep love for cinema that has led me over time to explore it in all its declinations.

It goes without saying that iconic scenes in the history of cinema often become so also because of the extraordinary music that accompanies them, and sometimes even in the case of less successful films they become the real reason that makes us remember the film itself.

For this reason my interest in cinema music has become predominant and for years I have dreamed of creating projects that would revive and enhance this heritage.

A fundamental album for me is John Zorn’s historic tribute to Morricone “The big gundown”, a model of an original way of approaching the arrangement and revisiting of such melodies. “

After a first attempt to merge the two passions, with the CD “Buio in sala” (dodicilune 2022) dedicated, through original compositions, to some fundamental figures in the author’s personal history of cinema and made with a band composed of Mauro Scardini (piano and keyboards), Giancarlo Ciminelli (trumpet and flugelhorn), Marco Guidolotti (sax, flute) Marco Rovinelli (drums) guests the French Vietnamese guitarist Nguyên Lê and the Swiss harmonica player Grégoire Maret, and the collaboration on the project of 60s and 70s film songs Cinedelik (“La regole del gioco“), Cignitti now returns to the theme with a complex and very refined work, in which some lesser-known pages of genre soundtracks composed in the 70s by Ennio Morricone and in one case by Piero Piccioni are reinterpreted. And the meeting with Edda Dall’Orso was the driving force behind the whole project.

“For some years I had been cultivating the desire to dedicate a work to a true icon of Morricone cinema and beyond, the vocalist Edda Dell’Orso. My dream was to meet her, submit my project to her and have her “blessing” which would have given meaning to the tribute, finally a tribute to a great figure who is little remembered but alive!

Finding her was not easy, for more than a year I asked in the musical environment once close to her but no one was able to tell me where she lived or her contact details until by chance a friend told me that she would be a guest for an interview at the vinyl fair, an event that is held in Rome a couple of times a year. I went and finally we met. A very kind 90-year-old lady who was happy to invite me to her home to tell her about my project.

The selection of the songs to propose to her initially started from the idea of ​​wanting to avoid mostly the most famous production, digging especially in that world of 70s genre cinema in which Morricone was able to experiment more, less constrained by the big productions (as for Leone’s films).

And so here are thrillers, erotic horrors where Edda’s voice like a rare jewel drew bold and beautiful themes, music that certainly acquires a greater value than the film itself that accompanies it. Here my passion for local B movies (Tarantino docet) proved useful, making it easy for me to find material that I already remembered.”