John Gennari, University of Vermont

Inherent musicality has been one of the stereotypical traits attributed to Italians since Thomas Jefferson wrote to Filippo Mazzei, fellow democratic revolutionary and dedicated horticulturalist, apprising his Tuscan friend of the status of his Virginia vineyard and inquiring about the possibility of hiring Italians skilled in grape cultivation who could also—naturally—play violin for special events at Monticello. Fast forward to the early twentieth century and Italian immigrant neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Pittsburgh, Cleveland, San Francisco, New Orleans, and smaller cities teemed with music cafes, theaters, concert, dance, and wedding halls. Barbershops hosted impromptu concerts. Street vendors hawked fish and produce in melodious song. Men and women sat on balconies and porches harmonizing folk tunes from the old country. Street corner teenage vocal quartets hustled tips. Troubadours serenaded. Brass bands paraded. Like African Americans, whose neighborhoods teemed with the same vernacular musical practices, Italian Americans have been primary contributors to the American sound.

In New Orleans, Sicilian open-air festa bands, funeral corteges, and Catholic Saint’s Day processions joined US military bands, wagon advertisements, Mardi Gras revelers, and African American “second line” parades to make that city’s street soundscape the most polyphonic and polyrhythmic in the western hemisphere. Bruce Raeburn has coined the term “bel canto meets the funk”—bel canto translates as “beautiful sound”—to characterize the New Orleans-based synthesis of an Italian vocal aesthetic of melodic beauty with a black vernacular emphasis on earthy, sensual vitality. This joining of lyricism and rhythmic groove—characteristic of the alto basso dynamics of Italian culture writ large—would become an essential feature of jazz, rhythm and blues, doo wop, and soul. In the 1960s, the pop group The Rascals—dubbed “the blackest white group” by Rolling Stone magazine—featured Eddie Brigati’s erotically imploring voice on “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” and Felix Cavaliere’s soulful pleading and sweet elation on “I’ve Been Lonely Too Long,” both hit tunes anchored by drummer Dino Dinelli’s superb rock/swing groove.

The roots of such captivating art run deep and wide, encompassing a trans-Atlantic cultural stream that moved in both directions. A key example is “Core ‘ngrato” (“Ungrateful Heart”). The song originated in New York in 1911 as a collaboration between two Italian emigrants, composer Salvatore Cardillo and lyricist Riccardo Cordiferro (ne Alessandro Sisca), then returned to Italy to enter the canzone napoletana canon and serve over the next century as a symbol of authentic italianità. It has been sung by everyone from Enrico Caruso in the Metropolitan Opera House to Dominic Chianese (playing Corrado “Junior” Soprano) in the Season 3 finale of The Sopranos. Caruso, who after emigrating to New York became the first international pop star of the twentieth century, brought widespread attention and esteem to a singing style that featured the soaring crescendo, the dramatization of intense feeling, the feeling of passionate love, and even more, of love’s betrayal and loss. In this, the famous tenor gave the world something fundamental to the tradition of canzone napoletana, something that became a cliché of Italian masculinity writ large: the Italian as acutely sensitive and hyperbolically emotional in matters of the heart. Operatic bravura continued to be a touchstone of Italian American musicality, as exemplified in Mario Lanza’s hugely popular 1950s recordings of “O Sole Mio” (a favorite of Elvis Presley, who transmuted it into his own hit with “It’s Now or Never”), “Arrivederci Roma,” and “Come Back to Sorrento”; in the passionate, soaring sound of saxophonist Joe Lovano, a stalwart of the jazz scene from the 1970s to the present; in Bruce Springsteen’s anthemic “Born to Run” and other of his New Jersey turnpike dramas, along with concert performances by Adele Zerilli’s son that serve as marathon rituals of emotional and physical catharsis.

With the advent of electronic recording, radio broadcasting, and the microphone, it became possible for singers to project a more intimate, seductive sound than had been possible for opera singers like Caruso. This brought a new vocal approach, “crooning” as it was called, in which the microphone served as a kind of electronic ear connected to every listener. Whereas the great male opera singers were usually tenors, crooning found its ideal in the baritone voice, whose lower register hews closer to the sound of everyday speech. One of the masters of the new style was Russ Columbo (Ruggiero Eugenio di Rodolfo Colombo), a singer, composer, violinist, and actor from Camden, New Jersey. A pioneer of the pop romantic ballad, Columbo scored big hits with “You Call it Madness, But I Call it Love,” “Too Beautiful for Words,” and “Prisoner of Love,” the last of which became a standard later recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Jo Stafford to James Brown and Tiny Tim. Columbo was poised for long-lasting Hollywood celebrity—a romance with famous actress Carole Lombard seemed to ensure this—when he died tragically following a freakish firearm accident in 1934. Bing Crosby would emerge as the unrivaled king of Depression-era pop and one of the singular figures in twentieth-century American culture.

Crosby—and everyone else—was soon eclipsed by Frank Sinatra, a unique, surpassing talent who achieved a restoration of the bel canto (“beautiful song”) principles of eighteenth-century Italian opera (well-rounded tone, eloquence of phrase and cadence, purity of intonation) combined with the air of casual ease introduced by the radio crooners. Sinatra was as much an actor as a musician in using his high baritone to dramatize shared emotion and make listeners feel he was singing directly to them. The Sinatra croon of the 1940s was the sound of a tender, precarious love perfectly attuned to the collective heartache of a nation of young women whose boyfriends and husbands were off fighting the war. In the early 1950s, following a devastating downturn marked by a hemorrhaging of his vocal cords, Sinatra rebounded with a remarkable series of albums with top-drawer arrangements by Billy May (Come Fly with Me), Nelson Riddle (Songs for Young Lovers, In the Wee Small Hours, Nice ‘n Easy), Gordon Jenkins (September of My Years), and Quincy Jones (Sinatra at the Sands), reinvigorating swing music and heralding a new style of sophisticated, adult-oriented popular entertainment.

The vital Italian presence in jazz had started in New Orleans in the late 1910s, marked by the curious fact that this deeply African American music first gained widespread international attention when, in 1917, Sicilian trumpeter Nick LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band

cut the first commercially-released jazz record, with “Dixie Jass Band One-Step” on the A-side and “Livery Stable Blues” on the B-side. The most famous jazz musician to hail from New Orleans’s “Little Palermo” neighborhood was Louis Prima, a fiery trumpeter, flamboyant singer, and singularly dynamic showman. Like his idol Louis Armstrong, Prima embraced his role as an entertainer with an infectious joy and an intuitive gift for humor; unlike Nick LaRocca, Prima showed no interest in claiming a white identity and was proud to often be mistaken for black. Discovered by the Italian Canadian bandleader Guy Lombardo and brought to New York in 1934, Prima became the headliner at the Famous Door, one of the clubs anchoring the 52^nd Street swing scene that included paesani such as fellow New Orleans trumpeter Joe “Wingy” Manone and the Philadelphia-reared string players Eddie Lang (Salvatore Massaro) and Joe Venuti, pioneers of jazz guitar and violin. Prima’s “hot” affect (fervent, animated, carnal) joined a 6/8 shuffle groove that captured both the joyous pulse of Italian wedding dancing. His hotness inhered in his ability to arouse excitement in others through his own high-affect frenzy. In this fashion, Prima, like Louis Armstrong, translated into American vernacular the kind of intense feeling that Caruso expressed in his naturalistic, verismo vocalizing.

World War II and its aftermath brought a change in jazz musicians’ attitude that coincided with the era’s demands for racial equality as well as a bracing cultural anxiety provoked by recognition of the war’s horrors and the advent of the atomic bomb. Called “cool” (even when the music itself burned hot, as with bebop’s blistering tempos and mercurial chord changes), it was defined by an ineffable charisma, an air of mystery, a relaxed intensity; at the practical level, an ability to create excitement without showing excitement. The Italian term for this quality is la sprezzatura: making hard work look easy, affecting a casual nonchalance even while conveying deep passion; answering the mandate, as the old Italian adage goes, to “never let them see you sweat.” Not surprisingly, jazz’s postwar shift from the sweating brow of the fervent entertainer to the furled brow of the contemplative artist included a number of Italian American musicians of distinction. These included Lennie Tristano, William Russo, Buddy (Boniface) De Franco, Tony Scott (Anthony Joseph Sciacca), Jimmy Giuffre, Pete and Conte Candoli, Frank Rosolino, Joe Morello, drummer with the classic Dave Brubeck quartet, a master technician best known for his “three plus two” 5/4 groove on the hit single “Take Five,” and Scott La Faro, bassist in a classic trio with pianist Bill Evans and drummer Paul Motion, where he moved beyond the traditional time-keeping role of his instrument to pioneer a new approach of playing lyrical counter-melodies.

What historians call America’s “long 1950s” (roughly 1945 to 1965) witnessed a remarkable Italianization of the worlds of music and entertainment. Consider this rich irony: in the new mass medium of television, Italians figured simultaneously as dangerous Mafiosi under investigation by Senator Estes Kafauver’s Special Committee on Organized Crime, and as pioneers of the prototypical family-friendly program, the evening musical variety show. Italian American singers Perry (Pierino) Como and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) emerged as masters of the form. Como held primetime slots on CBS and NBC from 1949 to 1967 with a show that featured his virtually edgeless, borderline tranquilizing baritone on such songs as “Dream with Me” and “Sing to Me, Mr. C,” and a soothing, middle-of-the-road persona that served as a clean-living Eisenhowerian antidote to Sinatra’s high-living, Kennedy-esque swagger. Suspended somewhere between these two poles, cocktail in hand, floated Martin, the dark and handsome prince of la sprezzatura, who helmed NBC’s The Dean Martin Show (1965-1974) and The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast (1974-1985). With Sinatra, Martin, and Como occupying so much space in the national media, one wonders how there was any bandwidth left over for other Italian American singers. Among the most notable in this deep talent pool: Vic Damone (Vito Rocco Farinola); Mario Lanza (Alfredo Arnold Cocozza); Jerry Vale (Genaro Louis Vitaliano), Frankie Laine (Francesco Paolo LoVecchio); Joni James (Giovanna Carmella Babbo), who topped the Billboard chart in 1952 with “Why Don’t You Believe Me?” and scored more than twenty Top 40 hits over the next decade; Connie Francis (Concetta Rosa Maria Franconera), the top charting female vocalist of the late 1950s and early 1960s, who bridged the diverging sophisticated pop and teenage rock and roll audiences with “Who’s Sorry Now?” and “Where the Boys Are”; Bobby Darin (Walden Robert Cassotto), another crossover stylist whose chutzpah and charisma made him the latest racy heartthrob.

It was that teenage market that impresario Dick Clark targeted with his TV show American Bandstand. Among his earliest guests, in 1958, were Dion DiMucci and his group The Belmonts, former street gang members in the Bronx, dark-haired teenage toughs with a love for the vocal group harmonizing of black rhythm and blues groups like the Orioles, the Ravens, the Flamingoes, the Wrens, the Cadillacs, and the Teenagers, The Belmonts were one of a slew of Italian-led New York groups (Nino and the Ebbtides, Vito and the Salutations, Johnny Maestro and the Crests, the Capris, the Elegants) performing in the style that was later dubbed “Italo-doo-wop,” or simply “doo wop.” Drawing on the traditions of barbershop a cappella, gospel falsetto, jazz scatting, and jump blues, doo wop groups sang simple love ballads and upbeat numbers energized by nonsense syllable vocal riffing in the tenor, baritone, and bass registers. In Newark, New Jersey, a quartet of Italian American teenagers calling themselves The Four Seasons rose to the top of the charts with “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” Later, the group’s lead singer Frankie Valli scored a major hit with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which became the sound of middle-of-the-road 1960s adult romance, serially reprised by Motown, hip-hop, British synth-pop, and South Korean girl groups.

The figure who most gloriously bestrides the postwar Italian American golden age and our own, and who furnishes the strongest link between the genres of jazz and popular song, is Tony Bennett (Anthony Dominick Benedetto). Jukebox fame visited Bennett in the early 1950s with a pair of Bing Crosby-styled ballads and his first major hit, “Rags to Riches,” a brassy big band number featuring the impassioned vibrato Bennett often favored in this part of his career. Bennett polished his nightclub and concert acts and found his signature song in the 1962 recording “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Like American jazz writ large, Bennett struggled against the rock juggernaut in the late 1960s and 1970s but made a celebrated comeback in the 1980s and 1990s. Shrewdly managed by his son Danny, Bennett found a new audience on MTV, becoming the preeminent custodian and proselytizer of the pre-rock Great American Songbook among fans raised on classic rock, soul, funk, disco, hip-hop, and alt-rock.

Italian Americans have shaped multiple music genres since the 1970s – sometimes explicitly marking their ethnicity, sometimes not. Key examples include Ur-rock freak Frank Zappa, whose bands combined rock instrumentation, Fluxus-influenced sonic collage, surrealism, social satire, and avant-garde jazz; groove maestro Steve Gadd, first-call drummer across jazz, rock, pop, disco, and soul; jazz luminaries like pianist/composer Chick Corea, guitarists Al DiMeola, John Pizzarelli and Pat Martino, organist Joey DeFrancesco, and saxophonists Joe Lovano, George Garzone, and Jerry Bergonzi; punk and alternative rock guitar virtuoso Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine; arena cock-rockers Steven Tyler (Steven Tallerica) of Aerosmith and Jon Bon Jovi (Jon Francis Bongiovi; blues and soul funkster Nikka Costa; rhythm and blues/pop megastar Alicia Keys; and, finally, a parade of pop divas led by Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone), Cyndi Lauper, Toni Basil (Antonia Christina Basilottta), Gwen Stefani, and the flagrantly theatrical Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta). In American music of all kinds, Italians continue to ensure that the bel canto meets the funk.

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