Jazz’s international history began at the same time that it emerged in 1917 as the new fad in popular music in the United States. In the waning days of the Romanov dynasty, for example, young Russian aristocrats tootled on saxophones along with the pioneering Victor recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) from New Orleans. The global dissemination of the ODJB’s disks fostered imitations; created a craze for jazz dances; led to foreign bookings for American bands; and inspired the widespread adoption of the word jazz as a designation for an irreverent and anti-rational way of behaving and perceiving the world. As in America, internationally jazz was considered a novelty music and as an antidote to civilization’s wartime agonies and woes. Serious appreciation of the music’s African American characteristics and artistic potential would flourish only after 1930.
Anna Harwell Celenza’s Jazz Italian Style, at its core, is a study...
University of California Press