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{en} Anna Harwell Celenza. Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Abstract

"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."--Publisher description.

It contains references to Jewish musician "Ezio Levi, the cofounder of Milan's Circolo del Jazz Hot and coauthor of Introduzione alla vera musica di jazz, immigrated to the United States due to racial persecution. Levi had recently been hired by Vittorio Mussolini to serve as the in-house composer for a new film company he had set up with American producer Hal Roach called RAM (Roach and Mussolini) ... But ... the arrival of Italy's race laws terminated his work with RAM ... Levi arrived in New York on April 6, 1939 ... His efforts to find work in the musical industry were blocked by Domenico Savino, the successful songwriter ... "I soon discovered how difficult it was to enter that little mafia of musica leggera" (Levi) ... Levi was given the cold shoulder [by Irvin Mills, as well] ... [As a Sephardic Jew] Levi was deemed "the wrong kind of Jew" in New York. And his previous connections with Vittorio Mussolini did him no favor ... By 1941, he had given up on the idea of establishing a livelihood in New York and had immigrated to Lima, Peru, where he pieced together an income writing music for the expat Italian community there.