[Dixielandjazz] Italian

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

One could be rude about the excessive claims regarding the Italiannness of jazz 
-- though the importance of Italian music should not be underplayed. The bel 
canto line was important for Liszt, and for the development of piano playing 
contemporary with the technological advance into the modern piano.
Jelly Roll Morton does also play a little Verdi on the Library of Congress 
sessions. 


actually I once started a series of reviews of Italian jazz musicians, because 
there certainly is a strong Italian component --  not forgetting the Dixieland 
ensemble having quite reasonably been related to the sextet from Lucia di 
Lammermoor (and surely there is room for a band version based on Donald 
Lambert's amazing solo 

performance with all its harmonic suggestions? And not forgetting 
Lambert's lyrical intro and theme statement! Maybe musicians could refresh with 
an awareness that while the supposed Italian origins of jazz have been rather 
overplayed by the uninformed a little more of the Italian could have interesting 
results. Like Yank Lawson's supposedly Latinamerican Dixieland -- one should 
also remember the comments of Conchita Superviam stupendous mezzo-soprano with a 
vibrato on the Bechet scale -- that she was never quite happy singing and 
dancing the Habanera in Carmen, whose composer was Bizet and French, because she 
was Spanish and the Habanera wasn't.  


The local background nurture contributes to the phrasing of some Italian 
musicians including of course Rossano Sportiello as well as some contemporary 
saxophonists.  And of course one could go on about Louis Caruso Armstrong and 
Bechet playing an aria from Pagliacci (and the wandering Italian street 
musicians I heard almost on successive days playing Bechet numbers in 
respectively Germany and Catalunya). 

And there was Danny Polo, and the man who still called himself Tony Scott when 
he went back to the land of his fathers (Patria sua) 

 
As for Bick La Baiderbecca !!  Giacomo Guardenti! Beniamino Buonuomo!! ???

I would suggest to those who think jazz All-Italian a reference to Dizzi 
Ghillespi and Ciarli Parca (Dizzi later 

being lumbered with a Scottish pseudo surname and Ciarli with an English one) 
and the theory that the consonants in the name of the music they pioneered  were 
sabotaged by anti-Italian revisionists so that what had initially been two Ws 
became two Bs,
That probably wouldn't stop anything,  Mop!