Jazz and Totalitarianism

Bruce Johnson, Bruce Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317499428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Jazz and Totalitarianism examines jazz in a range of regimes that in significant ways may be described as totalitarian, historically covering the period from the Franco regime in Spain beginning in the 1930s to present day Iran and China. The book presents an overview of the two central terms and their development since their contemporaneous appearance in cultural and historiographical discourses in the early twentieth century, comprising fifteen essays written by specialists on particular regimes situated in a wide variety of time periods and places. Interdisciplinary in nature, this compelling work will appeal to students from Music and Jazz Studies to Political Science, Sociology, and Cultural Theory.

PART I
Totalitarian Templates

1
JAZZ AND FASCISM

Contradictions and Ambivalences in the Diffusion of Jazz Music under the Italian Fascist Dictatorship (1925–1935)

Marilisa Merolla

The introduction of the Jazz Band (originally a Negro orchestra with Negro instruments and Negro musicians) in our ballrooms will certainly mark a significant date in the history of the culture of our century …, as dancing still remains infinitely more rapid and immediate and of a universal impact than reading, in order to spread some distinctive rhythmic or aesthetic principles.¹

(Sacchi 1922)

This chapter will focus on the Fascist radio broadcasting of EIAR (Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche) during the so-called jazz ‘diffusion’ period in which Mussolini gradually recognized the importance of radio for the construction of a totalitarian state. It will shed light on the use of jazz music in the ‘Volgarizziamo la Radio’ (Radio to the People) campaign conducted by Mussolini in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In fact, for its seductive and frenzied rhythms, jazz was chosen as the music that could fascinate Italians and attract listeners to the first Fascist radio shows, not realizing at first that the diffusion of jazz music, with its syncopated rhythms and its cultural associations, was received in different ways by different communities, and in many cases came to represent New World values including forms of freedom and individual expressiveness. This ambivalent relationship between jazz and Fascism gave birth to an ‘Italian way to jazz’, which even if it did not express an explicit rejection of Fascism and its values represented an anomaly in the building of Italian Fascist totalitarianism.

Introduction

It was around 1919 when jazz music arrived in Italy from the United States. The shattering impact of its rhythms seemed to express the anxieties of a country that had just emerged from the Great War (Merolla 2011, 7–8). Two years earlier, a thirteen-year-old Vittorio Spina had first come into contact with some American musicians based in Rome along with the US troops of General Pershing (Mazzoletti 2004, 12). In that year of 1917 Spina started his long career by playing banjo in a US military orchestra led by Sergeant Griffith of the Marine Corps (Mazzoletti 2004, 12–13). It was only with the end of the war, between late 1918 and 1919, that the spread of jazz music increased thanks to the appearance of several new ballrooms and night clubs in Rome, Milan and Turin (Mazzoletti 2004, 22). As the centre of the record industry, Milan quickly gained a pre-eminent position in the Italian jazz scene, with such noted clubs as the Mirador (Cerchiari 2003, 55). It was founded in 1918 by the dancer and drummer Arturo Agazzi, who had worked since 1914 in the London night clubs of Ciro’s and the Embassy, as well as the Murray, which he himself founded (Cerchiari 2003, 72). The Mirador’s music programming included the foxtrot, tango and jazz. In 1920, it hosted the first live show of Gaetano ‘Milietto’ Nervetti, one of the first Italian jazz pianists, who by then had created the Ambassador’s Jazz Band with Carlo Benzi. Foxtrot and jazz were enthusiastically appreciated by the bourgeois youth of the ‘Milano bene’ (Milanese upper class), as reported in Corriere della sera, which declared that the music ‘comes from niggers’. These were ‘two ingenious creations of modern choreography’, ‘two products of mankind’s stomach-ache while facing the end of the war’ (Frakka 1921). The following year, again according to Corriere, the popularity of African-American music among Italian bourgeois youth was one of the results of the accelerated transformation of Western societies at the end of the First World War (Sacchi 1922).

Recently, historians have begun to consider jazz music not only as a historical source in contemporary Italian history, but also as a peculiar ‘agent’ that is able to influence evolving socio-political processes. The relationship between jazz music and the Fascist radio broadcasting of EIAR (Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche) is emblematic of the contradictions and ambivalences of the political use of African-American music by the Fascist dictatorship. According to Adriano Mazzoletti (2004) and Luca Cerchiari (2003), there were three main phrases in the relationship between jazz and Fascism: ‘indifference’ (1919–1925), ‘diffusion’ (1925–1935) and ‘prohibition’ (1935–1943). This chapter will focus on the so-called ‘diffusion’ period, when Mussolini gradually recognized the importance of radio broadcasting for the construction of a totalitarian state.

The chapter will shed light on the use of jazz music in the ‘Volgarizziamo la Radio’ (Radio to the People) campaign, conducted by Mussolini in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Jazz was identified as music that could fascinate Italians because of its seductive and frenzied rhythms, and the authorities initially hoped that it would attract listeners to the first Fascist radio shows, not realizing that the diffusion of jazz music, with its syncopated rhythms and its cultural associations, would be received in different ways by different communities, and in many cases would come to represent many New World values, including forms of freedom and individual expressiveness (Johnson forthcoming). The scientific debate about the political repercussions of the spreading of jazz under the Fascist dictatorship highlights the ambivalent relationship between jazz and the Italian authorities during the Fascist regime (Martinelli 2013). Between 1925 and 1935, this ambivalence resulted in ‘a watered down, “jazzy” version of jazz reduced to ballroom music and canzonetta [which] goes exactly to the core of the fascist attitude towards this music: jazz could, and therefore ought to, be made national and Italian, adapted to the circumstances of a provincial reality dreaming of a far away, modern America’ (Dainotto 2008, 287). Nevertheless, this Italian approach to jazz – ‘becoming … the note between dreams and reality, between traditionalism and modernism, between Italy and the world’ (ibid.) – contrasted with the celebration of strength, autarchy and power of the Fascist marches and hymns, and can be considered a sort of double-edged sword for Mussolini’s dictatorship, as the sudden censorship of jazz in later years confirmed.

The ‘Industrial Model’ of Italian Radio Broadcasting during the Rise of the Fascist Regime

In Italy, the crisis following the First World War abruptly interrupted the transition toward democracy that Prime Minister Antonio Giolitti had launched during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. Among the many and complex factors that provoked the collapse of the liberal state and allowed the Fascist dictatorship to rise, historians point to the inability of the old Italian political class to understand the needs of the new mass society, which, after the radically transformative experience of the Great War, was claiming major representation. According to Giovanni Sabbatucci (1976, 28), the old liberal state had neither the cultural nor the organizational instruments that were needed to face the deep socio-political transformation arising from the war. In addition, Italy’s liberal political elite had not recognized the determining role that the new mass-based political parties were going to play in the modern representative democracies. The liberals were not able to transform themselves into an Italian mass-based party. In a related point, Emilio Gentile underlines the inability of liberal governments to promote a national ‘political liturgy’, composed of the signs, the cults and the symbols that are essential if the masses are to identify themselves in a modern nation-state. As a result, the old liberal state was, according to Giuseppe Mazzini, a ‘state without a soul’ (Gentile 1982, 6; 1993, 10–12). At the opposite end of the political spectrum, and tragically denying the liberalism and freedom that had enlivened Italian political unification in 1861, Fascism was the first political movement that was able to understand the crucial importance of creating ‘the myth of a new state’ (Gentile 1982, vii). With the realization of the ‘new state’, Mussolini made Italy one of the first Western European countries to experience ‘totalitarian modernity’ (Gentile 2008, v; see further Griffin 2007; Ben-Ghiat 2001), while offering a civic religion as the vital catalyst for contemporary mass politics (Gentile 1996).

During the ventennio (Italy’s Fascist era), Mussolini used signs, cults, myths, spectacles and public ceremonies as instruments of propaganda in order to spread a ‘national religion’ among the masses. This pedagogical cultural– political operation that aimed to integrate Italians into a Fascist consciousness accelerated between 1925 and 1926 with the promulgation of the leggi fascistissime (the exceptional decrees), through which the Fascist regime fully expressed itself like a real dictatorship. Moreover, beginning in 1924, Mussolini had at his disposal the new medium of radio broadcasting by which to shape the mentality and customs of a still-emerging nation. From this point of view, the medium of new mass communication would have represented an obvious propaganda instrument to spread a national myth and a common culture to its still largely illiterate populace, which was territorially split into a multitude of dialects and local cultures. Nevertheless, Mussolini’s attempt to convert Fascist radio broadcasting into a consensus machine had many limits and ambiguities, and failed for several reasons (Cannistraro 1975; Isola 1990; Monteleone 1992; Monticone 1978; Papa 1978). The primary reason for this was the strength of the ‘industrial model’ that underpinned the origins of Italian radio (Castronovo 1984, 75–77), a model that was characterized by the dominant influence of the industrial Italian elite on the new medium.

When, on 6 October 1924, the first Italian radio broadcasting society (URI – Unione Radiofonica Italiana) started to broadcast, it was not yet significantly influenced by political propaganda. In fact, initially, the Fascist regime was not fully aware of the great potential of radio broadcasting to construct a political consensus. URI was based in Rome and led by an engineer, Enrico Marchesi, who had been a partner of Giovanni Agnelli since the foundation of the automobile manufacturer Fiat in 1899. A few years later, two more radio stations were created in Milan and Naples.

After his initial ambivalence, Mussolini started to realize the potential of the new medium and began to formulate the idea of a new national broadcasting society controlled by the government. Hence, in 1928, URI was replaced by Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche (EIAR; Monteleone 1992, 47).² Unsurprisingly, the legislative decree that established EIAR also introduced the Superior Committee of Vigilance, which monitored radio programmes and their adherence to the cultural guidelines of the Fascist dictatorship (‘Comitato Superiore di Vigilanza per le Radio-audizioni’ 1928, 6). Soon the Ministry of Communication enacted another decree, which obligated the EIAR to submit all cultural content for approval prior to broadcasting (Cannistraro 1975, 230).

By the end of 1928, EIAR had at its disposal five radio stations – Rome, Naples, Milan, Bolzano and Genoa – and was broadcasting 6000 hours of entertainment and news per year, or roughly seventeen hours per day (ibid.). However, the number of Italians who had access to radio remained limited. Radio receivers were still luxury items, inaccessible to the masses. Moreover, further limitations were imposed, as EIAR demanded annual (paid) subscriptions from every radio owner. In 1926, there were around 27,000 subscribers; two years later, that figure had risen to more than 61,000. Despite the increasing number of subscriptions, though, very few Italians were able to listen to radio transmissions in 1928; and there was a distinct geographical imbalance in their distribution. The majority of subscribers were concentrated in northern and north-western Italy – Lombardy, Liguria and Piedmont – with the rest in the large cities (Rome and Naples). Southern and eastern Italy had no radio signals at all (ibid.).

This territorial concentration deepened in 1929 with the Società Idrolettrica Piemonte’s – SIP’s – acquisition of the national radio broadcasting society, resulting in the so-called ‘piedmontization’ of EIAR (Monteleone 1992, 48; Ortoleva 1993, 448). SIP, one of the most influential economic groups in the country, was based in Turin, the industrial capital of Italy. Hence, many industrialists joined EIAR’s board of governors. First among them was Gianni Agnelli, who was also the president of Radiomarelli, the country’s main producer of radio equipment (Ortoleva 1993, 449). To no one’s surprise, the headquarters of Italian radio broadcasting soon moved from Rome to Turin. As a result, the ‘industrial model’ of Italian radio broadcasting was born. On the one hand, this form of radio broadcasting adhered to the dictator’s cultural and political guidelines, as it remained under the regime’s control. On the other hand, it also meant that Italian radio was dominated by the industrialists’ attitudes and their desire to promote their own economic interests. Therefore, Mussolini’s goal of using broadcasting to help build a Fascist nation was relegated to secondary importance.

We Want ‘Gess’! The Role of Jazz in the ‘Radio to the People’ Campaign (1925–1933)

From the very beginning, radio was the medium that arguably made the most significant contribution to the spreading of jazz music among the Italian people (Cerchiari 2003, 63). According to the official Italian radio magazine Radiorario, after fascinating the major European cities, jazz finally made its appearance in Italian broadcasting in 1925 (‘Unione Radiofonica Italiana. Stazione di Roma. Lunghezza d’onda m. 425’ 1925, 7–10). The radio station in Rome was the first to introduce a show exclusively dedicated to the latest rhythms: ‘Jazz Band’ aired daily from 5.45 to 8.30 p.m. It was a live show, broadcast from the luxurious Ho...