Jazz Band

Jazz Band, published in 1929 by Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960), is one of the most singular and controversial publications to appear in Italy at the end of the 1920s. This work fits into a richly varied historical and cultural context, characterized on the one hand by the avant-garde movement of Futurism and a fascination with the international scene, and on the other by the looming shadow of the Fascist regime.

An eclectic figure, Bragaglia is best known for being one of the most active experimenters of the Futurist period. A director, photographer, theorist, and writer, he was the inventor of so-called photodynamism, a photographic technique aimed at capturing movement and speed—core elements of Futurist poetics. However, beyond his most celebrated artistic explorations, Bragaglia also engaged in essay writing and pamphleteering, often marked by a polemical and provocative tone. Jazz Band is a striking testament to this more reactionary and contradictory side of his thought.

Despite the title suggesting a tribute to the exhilarating “Jazz Age”, the book is in fact a systematic and sarcastic attack on the very music that, during the 1920s and 1930s, had swept into the salons, theaters, and nightclubs of Europe—and inevitably, Italy as well. The book does not deal with the early jazz born in the African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans, but rather with its Europeanized, polished version—transformed into a spectacle for the elites of the continent's capitals.

The text is accompanied by illustrations from some of the most renowned artists of the time, among whom the name of Onorato stands out. Known for his minimalist style, Onorato created not only several internal illustrations but also the book’s cover, which alone reveals the caustic and critical tone of its contents. He perfectly captures Bragaglia’s irreverent tone at first glance: broken lines, deformed bodies, caricatured expressions reminiscent of blackface. Nothing in the graphic apparatus seeks to celebrate jazz’s vitality—rather, it aims to ridicule it.

In the chapter significantly titled Feats of Jazz, Bragaglia focuses his most scornful gaze. He describes the convulsive movements of jazz dances as a kind of animalistic regression—a feverish, instinctive expression that overwhelms the body, distorts the limbs, and erases all grace and rationality. << Mad music and crooked legs, whistling, rusty sounds…>> he writes in a bitter, contemptuous tone, thus summarizing his harsh verdict on the entire phenomenon.

Among the most controversial pages of Jazz Band is undoubtedly the chapter titled Negreries, where racist and colonialist prejudices—then widespread in significant parts of the Italian intelligentsia—emerge powerfully. Reusing a term that had appeared the previous year in the magazine Comoedia, Bragaglia attacks not only African-American music but the entire Black cultural imagination, portraying it as a symbol of barbarism and a threat to the supposed “civilization” of Europe. This section offers a raw and disturbing glimpse of an Italy that had no qualms about embracing myths of ethnic purity and nationalist rhetoric.

But Bragaglia’s critique goes far beyond mere musical or aesthetic dislike. Behind Jazz Band lies a precise political and cultural calculation. During those years, the artist felt the need to legitimize himself in the eyes of the Fascist regime, which presented itself as the restorer of order, tradition, and a purported European civilization threatened—so it claimed—by cultural degeneration from overseas. It is no coincidence that, thanks to positions like those expressed in the book, the author was gradually welcomed into the regime’s official institutions: he was given the directorship of the Teatro degli Indipendenti in Rome, a space intended to embody the aesthetics of the new Fascist order.

However, even his closeness to the regime would ultimately prove a source of disappointment for Bragaglia. Despite his temporary complicity with power, the artist always retained a certain intellectual restlessness and a barely concealed skepticism toward Mussolini’s dogmas. Yet, ironically, what Jazz Band aimed to ridicule—the explosive vitality of jazz and the cultures that birthed it—would ultimately prevail in the long arc of history. The music Bragaglia mocked as “mad” would go on to conquer stages, hearts, and salons, far beyond censorship and caricature, revealing itself—despite every attempt at cultural repression—to be one of the most powerful and enduring expressions of artistic modernity.

This work is a valuable and unsettling document that reflects the contradictions, fears, and fascinations of an Italy teetering between modernity and reaction, between openness and closure, between enthusiasm for the future and retreat into authoritarianism. Precisely in its ambivalence, it offers essential insight into the cultural, artistic, and political tensions of a complex era.