Gramsci e il jazz

In the ‘Roaring Twenties’, jazz music bursts into the compassed rhythm of old Europe, accustomed to the waltz step. That symphony of restlessness, of short skirts and legs in the air, which Joséphine Baker transformed into wild seduction, presented itself to observers and critics as an orgy of sound and movement, escapism and irrationality. Gramsci dedicated only occasional notes to jazz, which, hitherto unpublished, are analysed here: he feared a massified, consumerist, simplified, mechanised society, where jazz was intertwined with Taylorist factories and American cities populated by skyscrapers. A vision capable of going beyond the music and glimpsing, beyond the dragging rhythm, the real social dimension.