The golden age of jazz

A blue car, a gleaming Fiat 1800, was speeding along the long avenue from Milan to Linate airport. On board, an elegant man in his forties with his son. They were Arrigo and Roberto Polillo. It was an afternoon in the winter of 1962, and since that day this ritual would be repeated dozens of times. At Linate the two would in fact welcome the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, as well as the great female voices, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. The jazz greats would board the Fiat 1800 and head for the Hotel Duomo, followed by rehearsals and concerts. Roberto had recently received a gift from his father - a passionate photographer - of his very first professional camera. But most importantly - at the age of sixteen - he was given the responsibility of portraying the international guests, on stage and backstage. Something that he would do for about a hundred of the 200 concerts organized by Arrigo during his career. While Roberto may not yet have imagined it, he was laying the foundations for an outstanding historical archive that today is partly on public display in Siena, at the Accademia Nazionale del Jazz, alongside the collection of books, magazines and records that belonged to his father, preserved in the Centro Nazionale Studi sul Jazz of the same academy, which is dedicated to Arrigo Polillo. «My interest in photography», Roberto Polillo explains today, «comes from him. As a child I used to admire his travel shots with a small Rolleiflex camera. As well as promoting music, he played an important role as an impetus for jazz photography with his magazine. While still young, from the end of the fifties, Ugo Mulas, Mario and Nino Vanoli, Riccardo Schwamenthal and a few years later Giuseppe Pino collaborated with him». The relation between photography and jazz is deep and many of the shots that we now consider historical have contributed to the collective imagination of jazz fans.

Let’s take a step back in time. Arrigo Polillo, who was born in 1919, had already started a busy correspondence with various Hollywood stars in the thirties, together with his brother Sergio. Their request? A photograph with an autograph in exchange for a handmade portrait. Because, among other talents, he was a very good artist and would later create original album and magazine covers, but it was still fifteen years away and before that a world war would have occurred. The success of this unusual venture by the two young men - and the proof of their marked penchant of international relations - can be seen in the countless letters they received from the press offices of actors and actresses and other Hollywood celebrities. A rich collection, from Joan Crawford to Edward G. Robinson, from Bing Crosby to Tyrone Power, Orson Welles and Walt Disney. We need to think about how cinema and jazz fitted in that historical period. American music and cinema represented a point of reference for young Italians, a sort of highly effective therapeutic medicine for a country that was sinking day by day into the gloomiest kind of provincialism. Thus the «American myth» was beginning to be created through cinema and also through jazz, this unusual music with its melancholic tone or distinctly swinging rhythm, full of improvisations, full of subtexts, that flourished even more in reaction to when Afro-American music was banned from the radio and dance halls and when the sale of records was prohibited and the names of jazz musicians were mispronounced, even Louis Armstrong became Luigi Braccioforte and Benny Goodman, Benito Buonuomo. Instead of disappearing, jazz continues to be performed, heard and danced in the underground scene.

Immediately after the war, Polillo founded with Gian Carlo Testoni Musica Jazz, the first Italian magazine devoted to this genre. He was its editor-in-chief for twenty years, until the premature death of Testoni, whose legacy he inherited as director. A further twenty years to reach almost four decades of editorial activity. «At the beginning, there wasn’t even a real editorial office» Roberto recalls, «and Dad did everything at home, from his studio: he read the articles written by the collaborators and proofread the drafts sent by the printer, he would cut out the columns of text, lay them out the old-fashioned way with scissors and cans of white glue, pasting them onto the pre-printed forms. He would select the photos to be published, placing them against the window, with the image facing outward and writing in pencil on the back the cut-outs to be made to achieve the required format. All with extraordinary speed». The son of a magistrate, Arrigo had graduated in law, he worked as a lawyer for about ten years, but by the mid-1950s he had already entered the world of publishing. First as an assistant to Arnoldo Mondadori, then Head of staff at Mondadori, up until the period that led towards trade union conflicts and the «Hot Autumn». All too much for a true gentleman like him. He decided to resign from his post and, at last, his record player in Corso Italia, featuring his favourite pieces - traditional jazz and free-jazz - which until then had only been played in the evening at maximum volume, ran all day and became the soundtrack to his typewriter. He typed away at great speed, creating his masterpiece: Jazz. La vicenda e i protagonisti della musica afro-americana. The book - a landmark still in the Mondadori catalog - boasts over twenty editions and a German translation.

At the same time, he publishes hundreds of articles, reviews and essays - he writes more than seven thousand - for Musica Jazz, Il Giorno, Epoca, Panorama, and he organizes concerts that bring the Italian public to learn about an innovative music. Arrigo Polillo organised eleven editions - from 1955 to 1966 - of the International Jazz Festival of Sanremo, featuring, among others, Gerry Mulligan, Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk. Arrigo Polillo is credited with having played a fundamental role in promoting a niche genre, making it accepted and loved, and enabling its entrance into the academy and conservatories. The magazine was the «physical» place where this happened, but the real magic was in his head. An eclectic, serious, prepared man, Arrigo Polillo had great moral, intellectual and cultural stature. Just consider that the over two hundred concerts organized in his life - along with his partner and friend Pino Maffei - sometimes there was no need to sign an agreement: his word was enough. Particularly with Norman Granz - an American record producer and a fundamental figure in jazz music - the respect was total. They would call each other, set a date and the concert would take place as agreed. A tough but never aggressive controversialist, he kept a «Letters to the Editor» section in Musica Jazz. Due to the often fiery controversy, Arrigo decided to suspend for a couple of years. «Between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies there was plenty of turmoil», Roberto Polillo tells Hub, «jazz music had important transformations in a historical moment of upheaval. From the classic jazz of Louis Armstrong and bebop, came John Coltrane who overwhelmed everything, and then free-jazz and fusion. This succession created countless discussions among fans. Musica Jazz was the focal point of this ‘revolution’, even in a very clear way». Open, friendly, playful, Arrigo was witness to an extraordinary and unrepeatable jazz era: he had a deep knowledge of musicians’ personalities and in 1978 he collected in his book Stasera jazz anecdotes and memories of his human exchanges with them. As he wrote in his preface: «I have attempted to write a quick diary of forty years living in the midst of jazz, at the expense of surprising a few jazzmen in their pajamas».