Jazz Italian Style

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.