The name I Marc 4 (or Marc 4) comes from the initials of their members: Maurizio Majorana (bass), Antonello Vannucci (Hammond/piano), Roberto Podio (drums/percussion) and Carlo Pes (guitar). Sometimes ‘A’ stood for Armando Travaioli, the Italian soundtrack composer. I Marc 4 played and recorded most of Armando Travaioli’s compositions. I Marc 4 were best known for their funky Italian soundtrack style. They also played and record with well known Italian composers like Ennio Morricone and Piero Umiliani. from discogs Around 1950, four musicians who were part of the orchestra of RAI, decided to form a band and in the moment of the constitution, they had a brilliant idea: to find their definition using the initial letters of their names, so the beat band “the MARC 4” was born from that idea. The first two musicians of the group, keyboardist Maurizio Majorana and drummer Roberto Podio, already knew each other for having played together earlier, in performing jazz songs with Lucio Dalla. The third player Antonello Vannucchi came directly from jazz, having played with Giovanni and Vito Tommasi, in “THE QUARTET OF LUCCA.” The fourth musician Carlo Pes, jazz aficionado, had started his career as a guitarist with Enrico Simonetti and Bruno Martino. Created as a Study Group, in a short time “I MARC 4” found themselves working with great soundtrack composers such as Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Armando Trovajoli, Gianni Ferrio, Piero Piccioni, Alessandro Alessandroni, Piero Umiliani, and many other great musicians of the time.Later, the group conceived and produced on its own a musical genre that started from the Beat, continued with the Bossa Nova to get to the Jazz, whose main feature was the Hammond organ played by Antonello Vannucchi. I MARC 4 are the sum of knowledge of various styles and musical instruments present at the time. Essential, compact and extremely clean, they used a wide range of musical instruments, even the ethnic ones, mixing them to classical electric instruments of the period, to the early synthesizers, even to baroque instruments with no trimming timbre, or daring sound experimentation, putting the instruments to compare in a continuous stylistic balance thus highlighting maximum of their expressive features. In the late sixties, this group of musicians was outside from other bands, for that set of movements, even very eccentric at that time particularly fruitful in Italy, that crafted musically. from http://www.cometaedizionimusicali.it
