Piero Umiliani, creator of cinematic jazz, spacey symphonic psychedelia and "Mah-Na-Mah-Na"

Very likely you've heard the song before, heard it several times. It played behind countless naughty, numskullish skits on The Benny Hill Show?no, not Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax"! ?and blared as Kermit and Miss Piggy tottered to and fro on The Muppet Show.

Accompanied by minimalist instrumentation?a rudimentary organ melody line augmented by guitar, bass and shakers?a deliberately nasal, percolating-coffeepot male voice exchanges "mah-na-mah-na" refrains with a small glee club of surreally cheery female voices chirping "dee-dee ba-dee-bee":

mah-na-mah-na dee-dee ba-dee-bee mah-na-mah-na dee-dee-dee-dee mah-na-mah-na dee-dee ba-dee-bee ba-dee-bee ba-dee-bee ba-dee-bee ba-dee-bee dee-dee-dee-dee

Back when the brazenly and brilliantly daft "Mah-Na-Mah-Na" first surfaced on the soundtrack of the 1968 Italian softcore documentary Svenzia, inferno e paradiso (Sweden, Heaven and Hell), the song's author, Piero Umiliani, couldn't possibly have entertained even the remotest notion that it ultimately would function as his musical legacy. After all, to date the Italian composer/arranger/bandleader/keyboardist had cut jazz albums backing vocalist Helen Merrill (1961's Parole e musica) and trumpeter Chet Baker (1962's Chet Baker Italian Movies?Music of Piero Umiliani)?not forgetting the fiftysome films he had scored up until that moment, everything from jazzy froth for 1958's lively caper parody I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) to high-plains sweep for 1967's horse opera Il figliodi di Django (Vengeance Is a Colt 45).

Born in Florence in 1926, Umiliani first studied piano with an aunt, who schooled him in the classics. But he soon cocked his ear toward jazz, discovering Duke Ellington while listening to Radio London at age 14. "It was a dream," he told the Italian magazine Il Giaguaro last March. "I was stunned."

While pursuing a law degree after World War II, Umiliani arranged jazz standards and published their scores, producing a nominal income for himself when the music was performed by various Italian orchestras. Lured away from law by music, he studied at the conservatory in Florence. "It was the end of me," he recalled for Il Giaguaro. "I realized that I was wasting my time and would never become a professional musician. Furthermore, I understood that my passion was not for the classical stuff they had us play at the conservatory; it was for jazz."

So in the early 50s he relocated to Rome, where took a job arranging music for movie soundtrack composer Armando Trovajoli. Not long afterward, RCA released Umiliani's debut album, Dixieland in Naples?"a strange record consisting of Dixieland arrangements of Neapolitan songs," he explained to the magazine?prompting airplay on state radio, which, in turn, hired him to play in a Benny Goodman-esque quintet. But his breakthrough occurred when he came to the attention of director Mario Monicello, who needed someone to score his Big Deal on Madonna Street.

"That was the first time jazz music was used in an Italian film," Monicello pointed out to the website Off Screen in 1999. "He [Umiliani] would write music for other musicians?a ghostwriter?whenever a little jazz piece was needed, but he never received credit. This was his first screen credit." (The two men teamed again for the "Renzo e Luciana" segment of 1962's Boccaccio '70.)

Umiliani went on to compose music for approximately 150 films, touching down in every conceivable cinematic genre: gangster picture, mondo, erotica, comedies and spaghetti westerns. Sitting behind the piano or celesta or Hammond organ or Moog synthesizer or Fender Rhodes electric piano, he led a trio, quartet, sextet or 20-piece band through bossa nova, scratchy orchestral funk, spacey symphonic psychedelia, cinematic jazz or whatever he felt best fit the onscreen imagery.

"In Italy, Umiliani is really the only one that can be so ubiquitous but still with a strong jazz attitude," Rocco Pandiani, founder and managing director of the Milan-based Right Tempo label, told SF Weekly last year. "He is the main man in that respect. He is a badass."

For the past eight years Right Tempo has been reissuing soundtracks by Italian composers such as Piero Piccioni, Gianni Ferrio and Umiliani, including the latter's Il Corpo (The Body), Angeli bianchi...angeli neri (Witchcraft '70), La legge dei gangsters (Gangsters' Law) and Svenzia, inferno e paradiso, plus his 1971 nonfilm album To-day's Sound. Umiliani tracks also turn up on several volumes of the label's multi-artist Easy Tempo compilations. Not surprisingly, the triphop cognoscenti?in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan?has devoured Umiliani's back catalog, with the High Llamas, Cinematic Orchestra and Kid Loco, among others, remixing, rematrixing and regurgitating his tracks, while wink-wink slice-and-dice artists such as Bentley Rhythm Ace have sampled Umiliani snippets into their own work. All of which ignited a demand for Umiliani in the flesh: last year votaries kissed the hem of his raiment when he appeared at music festivals throughout Italy. In truth, the composer had never experienced such widespread notoriety.

That is, with the exception of "Mah-Na-Mah-Na," whose cheese, though now more than 30 years old, has not even begun to harden. In addition to its aforementioned "verses," the dadaist ditty?a pop evocation of Kurt Schwitters' sound-poem sonata Ursonate?features impassioned, unaccompanied solo "scatting" by the male voice. Think Pee-wee Herman at the mic, minus the shrieking:

momp-nomp-mah-na-mah-na momp-nomp-na-na momp-nomp-na-na momp-nomp-na-na

And, picking up even more steam:

mah-na-mah-na-mah-na na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na

Released as a single, "Mah-Na-Mah-Na" achieved minor hit status in the U.S., entering the Billboard singles chart at #81 (with a bullet!) during the first week of September 1969, then peaking at #55 one month later, before toppling from the Top 100 in mid-October. It rose from the grave in the mid-70s when covered by Muppets creator Jim Henson and his collaborators (Henson provided the male vocal), with that version eventually anthologized on 1993's Muppet Hits and 1997's Sesame Street: Platinum Too. More recently the overhyped Cocktail Nation's fleeting flirtation with all things loungey guaranteed the original's presence on the compilations Cocktail Shaker (1998) and Hard to Find Pop Instrumentals (1999). And over the decades "Mah-Na-Mah-Na" has been recorded by German producer and electronic pop music avatar Giorgio Moroder, the cool-jazzing Dave Pell Singers and soundtrack artist LeRoy Holmes; DJ Smash remixed the song a few years ago.

It's easily Umiliani's most readily identifiable composition.

"Unfortunately!" he confided to Il Giaguaro. "Not that I'm ashamed of it, but evidently there were only three notes that worked at the time, and apparently still work today."

Its genesis, he elaborated, was virtually incidental, an afterthought plinked out while wrapping up Svenzia, inferno e paradiso: "I had finished everything for the soundtrack?short simple tunes?and there were still five minutes left till the end of the film. I told the orchestra that I wanted to do one last tune composed of these three notes. And so we did 'Mah-Na-Mah-Na.' As it turned out, I didn't insert the tune in the soundtrack, but published it in Italy on my label. The Americans rediscovered the tune when they were putting together the soundtrack; they used it three times and gave it the name 'Mah-Na-Mah-Na.' After that, several American television shows used it, surely the most famous being The Muppet Show."

Meanwhile, the rest of his work, thanks to reissues on the Right Tempo and Beat labels?plus its embrace by DJ culture?has found a hitherto unreached audience, especially in Japan, where Svenzia, inferno e paradiso has sold well. ("The Japanese are crazy," Umiliani told Il Giaguaro.) One of his tracks, the loping, funky "Lady Magnolia," from To-day's Sound, has even been adapted for use in an Italian ice cream ad.

"Is it possible that thirty years ago nobody was interested in this stuff?" he asked rhetorically in the magazine. "Was it too difficult? Well, I simply don't understand."

Umiliani probably remained perplexed on that account until he suffered a fatal heart attack in Rome on Feb. 14 at the age of 75. At least he took some satisfaction from his better-late-than-never popularity. "I should say that I never expected something like that to happen," he noted in Il Giaguaro, "and now that it's happening I like it. You see, when I did music for films, once I had finished I never listened to it again. It was like death. Now that these young people have rediscovered my music, it's like I'm listening to it for the first time with them."