A Publication of the Abruzzo and Molise Heritage Society of the Washington DC Area

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By Nancy DeSanti, 1st Vice president, Programs

Georgetown University Music Professor Anna Harwell Celenza took her audience of about 100 people on a musical voyage across the Atlantic and back as she told us about her book “Jazz Italian Style: From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra.” She gave her presentation at our first luncheon program of the year at Casa Italiana on January 27, 2019, which featured a delicious lunch catered by Osteria da Nino.

Who better to explain this fascinating subject than Professor Celenza? She has a Ph.D. in music history from Duke University and is currently a professor of music at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in music history and radio journalism. Professor Celenza said she first started thinking about writing “Jazz Italian Style” when she was on a sabbatical in Rome. Her interest in jazz was inspired by her grandfather, who worked briefly as a jazz musician in the big band swing era.

In explaining the largely forgotten Italian connection to jazz, she said she hopes it will interest people who want to know more about music history, Italian-American culture, the Fascist era in Italy, music technology, and the evolution of popular music. Professor Celenza argues that Italian music had a considerable impact on American jazz, and she elablished orated on how jazz landed in Italy with the U.S. Army in World War I, flourished under Mussolini and then here in America during the 1930s, and influenced Frank Sinatra and the post-war generation including Dean Martin and Tony Bennett.

The author explained that jazz is an art form that originated in America at the hands of African-American musicians. But she noted that the first commercial jazz recording was made by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band whose leader was Nick LaRocca, an Italian-American.

New board members (left to right) Alfred Del Grosso, Andrea Balzano and Helina Zewdu Nega

She noted that when Italian immigrants came to America, New Orleans was an important point of entry in the late 19th century, even more so than New York, and that ragtime was already popular in the Crescent City. Professor Celenza pointed out that the “second line” in New Orleans, with the marching bands, owes a lot to the tradition of the funeral processions in Sicily.

The Northern Italian influence was more prevalent on the West Coast. In San Francisco, for example, Guido Pietro Deiro immigrated from Torino in the early 1900s and became a noted musician and vaudeville performer in California who introduced the accordion. He married movie star Mae West and together they popularized dances such as the shimmy along with the jazz tunes that accompanied it. The shimmy soon found its way into the nightclubs and dance halls of Northern Italy.

When jazz arrived in Italy at the end of World War I, it quickly became part of the local music culture. In Italy, thanks to the gramophone and radio, many Italian listeners didn’t notice a performer’s national and ethnic identity. So 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 music world.

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In 1920s Rome, jazz clubs began to flourish, and one of the popular ones was Cabaret del Diavolo (Devil’s Cabaret). The club was laid out on three floors in imitation of Dante’s Divina Comedia, with Paradiso on the top floor, Purgatorio on the level below, and the Inferno in the basement. The professor explained that when Benito Mussolini came to power, he saw jazz as a way to reach the young people, and so on fascist radio, 20 minutes of music would be interspersed with five minutes of speeches. Jazz was embraced as a sign of youth and modernity.

It is probably not well known that Benito Mussolini’s son Romano was an internationally recognized jazz pianist who played with Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie. Mussolini’s son Vittorio was a well-known jazz guitarist. And Mussolini himself played the trombone and then the violin and was a music reviewer for a socialist newspaper when he was in his 20’s. The most famous singers in Italy during Mussolini’s time were Natalino Otto and the Trio Lescano.

Natalino Otto has been called the Frank Sinatra of Italy but Professor Celenza said the opposite would be more accurate, since Otto began singing professionally several years before Sinatra. Both had a lyrical brilliance, a fluid rhythmic sense, a distinctive phrasing style — and good looks too. For a time Otto, who was born near Genoa, worked as a dance band musician for a transatlantic ship. He made 34 crossings between Genoa and New York.

Each time he was in New York he made it a point to visit jazz locales and he often performed on Italian-American radio station WOV which was popular in the New YorkNew Jersey area. He even cut his first record there. According to the professor, what made Sinatra’s sound so distinctive in the late 1930s was his adherence to the Northern Italian jazz style created by Otto, who also incorporated Northern Italian folk music into his singing. She thinks that hearing singers like Otto had a profound effect on Sinatra’s approach to singing.

Meanwhile, the racial laws enacted in Italy in 1938 did not, however, affect one of Mussolini’s favorite groups — the Trio Lescano made up of three Jewish sisters from the Netherlands (another Jewish group was not so fortunate, and they ended up in Auschwitz). Professor Celenza closed with a rendition of “Torna a Surriento” first by Frank Sinatra and then by Dean Martin. Suffice it to say that Sinatra’s Neapolitan accent left something to be desired compared to Dean Martin’s beautiful version recorded a few months later.

The professor noted that singers such as Tony Bennett, Louis Prima, Perry Como and Dean Martin all could sing in Italian (which they spoke in the home) although they generally performed in English. AMHS Vice President Lynn Sorbara commented afterwards that her father took art classes with Tony Bennett in New York and he used to listen to him singing in Italian (Lynn is also related to Nick La Rocca). We thank all those who helped serve the lunch, those who donated raffle prizes and those who bought raffle tickets, which brought in $229 for the Society. ❚

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