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Oral history of Italian Jazz

This aim of this project, initiated by Siena Jazz in the 1990s, is to gather the memories of key figures in the history of Italian jazz, as recounted in a series of interviews to be kept in the archives of the Centro Studi Arrigo Polillo, available to researchers, journalists, scholars and the general public.
Musicians, journalists, organizers, jazz lovers, photographers, professionals and amateurs are interviewed using a common scheme that invites them to tell how they encountered jazz, the jazz scene at the time and how their relationship with jazz developed. Other prompts used to elicit memories include concerts and discs that changed their lives, professionalization of the impulse to play jazz, collaborations, activities and positive or negative experiences or events. The interviews, rendered lively by the personalities of the subjects, their different ways of recounting and disputes related to gut feeling for music, paint a fascinating picture, in which dance halls alternate with concert halls, passion with reason, analysis with bias.
Show-figures like Giorgio Gaber(scik) and Enzo Iannacci, musicians who went in other directions, professors of ethnomusicology, musicians from town bands, and leaders of orchestras enliven the tales, which are backed up by research to confirm names, dates and circumstances. The interviews give a broad view of the phases of the Italian jazz movement: swing and Liberty in the late 1940s, the Hot Club movement, the decline in popularity of jazz in favour of rock'n'roll and pop, intellectual cool, free jazz, 1968, the proliferation of festivals, Miles's "betrayal", jazz rock, the first independent labels and schools of jazz are some of the many threads emerging from the material collected.

Interview from 1979 to 2006