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Italian jazz. James Reese Europe’s military concerts in France in World War I in 1919 are claimed to have introduced Europeans to a new, "syncopated" music from America. Yet, Italians had an even earlier taste of a new music from across the Atlantic when a group of "Creole" singers and dancers, billed as the "creators of the cakewalk" performed at the Eden Theater in Milan in 1904. The first real Italian jazz orchestras, however, were formed during 1920s by musicians such as Arturo Agazzi with his Syncopated Orchestra and enjoyed immediate success.^[1] In spite of the anti-American cultural policies of the Fascist regime during the 1930s, American jazz remained popular. (Even Romano Mussolini, Benito's son, was a great jazz fan and then prominent jazz pianist.) Also, in 1935, American jazz great Louis Armstrong toured Italy with great success. ^[2]

In the immediate post-war years jazz took off in Italy. All American post-war jazz styles, from be-bop to Free Jazz and Fusion have their equivalents in Italy, thanks to many gifted musicians like Gorni Kramer, Lelio Luttazzi and Franco Cerri, and great singers like Natalino Otto and Jula de Palma. The universality of Italian culture ensured that jazz clubs would spring up throughout the peninsula, that all radio and then television studios would have jazz-based "house-bands," that Italian musicians would then start nurturing a "home grown" kind of jazz, based on European song forms, classical composition techniques and folk music (for example, in Sicily, where Enzo Rao and his group Shamal have added native Sicilian and Arab influences to American jazz). Currently, all Italian music conservatories have jazz departments, there are dosens of jazz festivals each year in Italy, the best-known of which is the Umbria Jazz Festival, and there are prominent publications such as the journal, Musica Jazz. In Italy, today, it is virtually impossible to find a medium-sized city without a jazz club.

• (Italian) Mazzoletti, Adriano (1983). Jazz in Italia. Dalle Origini al dopoguerra. ISBN 88-7063-704-2. 

• (German) Cerchiari, Luca (1988). "Jazz in Italien". Exhibit catalogue: That's Jazz. Der Sound des 20. Jahrhunderts: 469-476. 

• Umbria Jazz Festival In Perugia, generally in July. The largest such event in Italy.
• Running updates on jazz events in Italy
• Jazz museum in Genoa

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