Jazz music has a long history and many influences. With Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (available February from Cambridge University Press, $44.99), Anna Harwell Celenza examines the Italian influences on the development of American popular music.

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. Italians made Jazz their own and by the mid-1930s, a genre of jazz distinguishable from American varieties, supported by Mussolini began to flourish in Northern Italy, and led to an influence of Italian-American musicians.

Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra will fascinate music historians, students and enthusiasts alike.

About the Author. 

Anna Harwell Celenza is the Thomas E. Caestecker Professor of Music at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where she teaches courses in music history, radio journalism and the music industry. She is the author or editor of several scholarly books, and has published numerous articles on composers and musicians from Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler to Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.

For an author interview or more information please contact Diana Rissetto, Senior Media Associate at Cambridge University Press: [email protected]