Jimmy Smith - See See Rider

The story of jazz in Italy begins, interestingly enough, with a description of the American music industry penned by an Italian diplomat named Chevalier Bruno Zuculin. Italian readers wanted to know more about the origins of jazz, and in August 1919 Zuculin published a somewhat glib, yet telling, description of the New Orleans jazz scene in La Lettura, a monthly illustrated supplement to Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most widely read newspaper at the time.

There are two categories of jazz bands, those that are mostly black, which perform in the hotels, restaurants, dance halls and social clubs, and those, often Italian, that play in the cinemas, in variety shows and in those numerous theaters where the most genuine theatrical product of North America flourishes, namely the entertaining productions called Musical Comedies or Girls and Music Shows, wherein the plot, if it exists at all, is of little importance to anyone, and the success of the performance is based primarily on the quality of the music and the beauty of the girls.

Zuculin was reporting directly from New Orleans, where he had been serving as Italy’s consul general for just over a year. He was the first to state, quite emphatically, that Italian immigrants played a role in the genesis of jazz in the United States, and it was this belief, perhaps more than anything else, that later drove many Italians to embrace the music as a native art form.

Source: Our jazz is culturally black, but its global dissemination owes a lot to Italians

by Anna Celenza

Jimmy Smith - See See Rider

• Composer by: Ma Rainey
• Released on: Home Cookin' LP album
• Recorded in: 1958, 1959

"Jimmy Smith was honored as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004. His sound and style made him a top instrumentalist in the 1950s and '60s. Smith coaxed a rich, grooving tone from the Hammond B3."

See previous Song of the Day