Jazz Italian Style
From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra

This book examines the arrival of jazz in Italy, its reception and development, and how its distinct style influenced musicians in America.

Anna Harwell Celenza (Author)

9781316619476, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 November 2018

340 pages, 12 b/w illus.
24.5 x 16.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'Celenza's extensive research on Italian original sources, clear narration, and exhaustive bibliography will be extremely useful and should stimulate further work.' Francesco Martinelli, Italian American Review

Jazz Italian Style explores a complex era in music history, when politics and popular culture collided with national identity and technology. When jazz arrived in Italy at the conclusion of World War I, it quickly became part of the local music culture. In Italy, thanks to the gramophone and radio, many Italian listeners paid little attention to a performer's national and ethnic identity. Nick LaRocca (Italian-American), Gorni Kramer (Italian), the Trio Lescano (Jewish-Dutch), and Louis Armstrong (African-American), to name a few, all found equal footing in the Italian soundscape. The book reveals how Italians made jazz their own, and how, by the mid-1930s, a genre of jazz distinguishable from American varieties and supported by Mussolini began to flourish in northern Italy and in its turn influenced Italian-American musicians. Most importantly, the book recovers a lost repertoire and an array of musicians whose stories and performances are compelling and well worth remembering.

1. Italians and the origins of jazz
2. Jazz crosses the Atlantic
3. Jazz and fascism
4. Jazz Italian style
5. A nation divided.

Subject Areas: Fascism & Nazism [JPFQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Jazz [AVGJ]