Adriano Mazzoletti
Il jazz in Italia. Dallo Swing agli anni
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ENGLISH
The year is 1943.
The U.S. troops take Sicily and head up north,
to free Italy from Nazi-Fascist regime.
Meanwhile, jazz establishes itself as the vogue
of the day, in all of its formats—from club
combos to radio big bands hosted by Italian
national broadcasting company, EIAR (then RAI).
Such creators as Piero Piccioni, Armando
Trovajoli, Oscar Valdambrini, Franco Cerri,
Nunzio Rotondo, Giampiero Boneschi, and Gianni
Basso bring jazz to every home through wireless
and records. In his second installment of Il
jazz in Italia, Adriano Mazzoletti traces and
evaluates the events that shaped Italian music
along three decades—from 1935, when Kramer’s
accordion launched Italian swing, to 1965, when
jazz began to change. Drawing from newspaper
clips, correspondence, public archives and
official directions, radio shows, movies, live
recordings and much more, including first-hand
accounts, Mazzoletti gives Italian jazzmen their
worth, stressing their achievements in a nation
mostly devoted to melodic pop song and opera.
The two tomes that make the book also give ample
room to Italy’s general history, from
dictatorship to war and democracy. Also, they
depict musical life in the main cities — Rome,
hosting movie industry; Milan, capital of music
publishing; Turin, home of the radio big bands —
as well in the lesser centers, which were much
more than just border territories. As a matter
of fact, it is in such medium-sized towns as
Perugia that major jazz festivals were to appear
in the following decades, while Trieste or Bari
hosted a massive presence of U.S. soldiers and
musicians.
The book also hosts a thick array of period
documents, essays by other authors, indexes and
catalogs—a veritable guide to period Italian
musicians, bands, and writings.
This book is a follow-up to Volume 1, dealing
with Italian jazz history from its origins to
1935 plus the radio big bands to 1945, with
special reference to its interaction with the
Fascist regime.
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