Jazz in Italy

Italy’s first homegrown jazz band is likely to have been the house band at the Mirador Club, set up in 1918 by drummer Arturo Agazzi, who had spent the First World War working in the best London Night Clubs, including the Embassy and Ciro’s. Perhaps the most impressive of the early Italian dance bands was the Blue Star Orchestra led by Pippo Barzizza (1902-1994). Barzizza had played violin and saxophone with Armando di Piramo, and had since then added banjo, accordion and piano to his arsenal. The Blue Star band was made up entirely of multi-instrumentalists – 7 musicians playing 36 instruments. The band performed in France, Switzerland and Turkey, made a few recordings in the early 1930s before folding in 1933.

Following Benito Mussolini’s Fascist coup d’état in 1922, the relationship between the state and jazz would be somewhat confused. Initial indifference to the spread of jazz became enthuiastic endorsement through daily primetime jazz programmes on state radio from 1926, and then increasing hostility and haphazard prohibition from the late 1930s, as the Italian government sought to promote a new Italian culture, sidelining foreign, and espcially American culture. In practice this seems to have had little effect when compared to the effective bans in Germany and occupied countries, or in Stalinist Russia after the war. Popular artists of the day, like singer Alberto Rabagliati (1906-1974) and the Trio Lescano released songs throughout the late 1930s and the Second World War, which incorporated American swing styles, and occasionally something akin to scat singing, into their music. Not coincidentally, both worked with the extremely successful Cetra Orchestra, run by Pippo Barzizza. Often all they needed to do to evade censorship was translate English language song titles into Italian. ‘Il Duce’ was purportedly a fan of the Trio Lescano’s Boswell Sister-influenced sound, and he appears to have been relaxed enough about the deleterious effects of jazz to end up with a youngest son, Romano Mussolini (1927-2006) who made a career as a jazz pianist.

More to come…