Born to a family of musicians, Barbieri began playing music after hearing
Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time". He played the
clarinet and later the
alto saxophone while performing with Argentine pianist
Lalo Schifrin in the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, while playing in Rome, he also worked with the trumpeter
Don Cherry. By now influenced by
John Coltrane's late recordings, as well as those from other
free jazz saxophonists such as
Albert Ayler and
Pharoah Sanders, he began to develop the warm and gritty tone with which he is associated. In the late 1960s, he was fusing music from South America into his playing and contributed to multi-artist projects like
Charlie Haden's
Liberation Music Orchestra and
Carla Bley's
Escalator over the Hill. His score for
Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 film
Last Tango in Paris earned him a
Grammy Award and led to a record deal with
Impulse! Records. By the mid-1970s, he was recording for
A&M Records and moved his music towards soul-jazz and jazz-pop.
Caliente! (1976) included his best-known song, a rendition of
Carlos Santana's "
Europa".
Caliente! and his follow-up album,
Ruby Ruby (1977) were both produced by fellow musician and label co-founder
Herb Alpert. Although he continued to record and perform well into the 1980s, including composing the scores to films such as
Firepower (1979) and
Strangers Kiss (1983), the death of his wife Michelle led him to withdraw from the public arena. He returned to recording and performing in the late 1990s, composing original scores at the behest of friend
Bahman Maghsoudlou for
Amir Naderi's
Manhattan by Numbers (1991) and
Daryush Shokof's
Seven Servants (1996). The album
Qué Pasa (1997) moved more into the style of
smooth jazz. Barbieri was the inspiration for the character Zoot in the fictional Muppet band
Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. On April 2, 2016, Barbieri died of
pneumonia in New York City at the age of 83. == Personal life ==