At the beginning of the twentieth century the first signs of African American culture in the form of dances – ragtime, the cakewalk, jazz, the Charleston – appeared in Europe as a new, original form of entertainment, and music craze, notably in the Parisian salons. At the time when avant-garde tendencies and a passion for primitivism were fuelling new artistic movements from cubism and Futurism to surrealism, it was only one term, ‘jazz’, that emerged to describe this experimental art and important cultural phenomenon. It characterised a broad range of imported and home-grown styles associated with American dance and music. Often perceived as a synonym of African American culture, it became a generic signifier of modernism and was soon incorporated into pronouncements and activities of the avant-garde. Although the impact of jazz on French avant-garde circles, where jazz achieved its notoriety, has often been studied, much work remains to be done on the presence of African American culture throughout all new European manifestations of modern art in the twentieth century. As Jed Rasula observed in his article of 2004, jazz served as a pledge of allegiance to the emerging combination of primitivism and the ultramodern pioneered by Americans in the post-war years across Europe. Taking this statement as a point of departure, this essay aims to explore how African American culture was perceived by Italian Futurists, considering to what extent they were interested in the phenomenon of ‘negro dances and music’, and the varying purposes for which they incorporated notions of ‘blackness and modernism’ and ‘jazz’ into their own experiments.