The Birth of Jazz Diplomacy

A stranger in the villaggio: Italian Studies, American Studies, jazz, and the transnational turn

“…Where previous scholars have set the beginning of the US State Department's use of jazz as a foreign policy tool in the 1950s, with the Eisenhower administration's jazz tours in the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe, recently the musicologist Anna Harwell Celenza has shown that the first use of the approach came in Italy soon after the armistice, with the targeted circulation of jazz V-Discs, radio programming, and concert presentations that came outfitted with promotional rhetoric about jazz as an American art form embodying democracy and freedom. Armed with this ideological cudgel, US cultural cold warriors angled to disaffiliate jazz from both fascism and communism (Celenza, 2019). This was no simple matter, as is made clear in Celenza's (2017) book Jazz Italian Style: From Its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra, which shows that jazz was a central part of Mussolini's fascist cultural program; that virtually all successful Italian jazz musicians from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s depended on the support of the fascist state for their livelihoods; and that many of these musicians concealed and/or willfully misrepresented this fact for years afterwards (Celenza, 2017).…”