Meanings of Jazz in State Socialism JAZZ Jazz under State Socialism Edited by Gertrud Pickhan and Rüdiger Ritter Vol. 4 Gertrud Pickhan / Rüdiger Ritter (eds.) Meanings of Jazz in State Socialism Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pickhan, Gertrud, editor. | Ritter, Rüdiger, editor. Title: Meanings of jazz in state socialism / Gertrud Pickhan, Rüdiger Ritter (eds.). Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, [2016] | Series: Jazz un- der state socialism ; vol. 4 Identifiers: LCCN 2015039731 | ISBN 9783631664094 Subjects: LCSH: Jazz—Europe, Eastern—Political aspects. | Jazz—Baltic States— Political aspects. | Jazz—Germany (East)—Political aspects. | Jazz—Russia (Federation)—Political aspects. | Socialism and music. | Communism and music Classification: LCC ML3916 .M385 2016 | DDC 781.650947/09045—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039731 For the language editing of the whole text, we thank Uta Protz. All translations of the texts not submitted by the authors in English were made by Uta Protz and Daniel Parsons. ISSN 1867-724X ISBN 978-3-631-66409-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-05517-7 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05517-7 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2016 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. 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This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com Contents Gertrud Pickhan / Rüdiger Ritter Introduction ............................................................................................7 Rüdiger Ritter Jazz in State Socialism – a Playground of Refusal? ................................17 Christian Schmidt-Rost 1956 – A turning point for the jazz scenes in the GDR and Poland .......39 Marta Domurat-Linde From ‘Jazz in Poland’ to ‘Polish Jazz’ ....................................................75 Igor Pietraszewski Jazz Musicians in Post-War Poland .......................................................97 Gergő Havadi Individualists, Traditionalists, Revolutionaries, or Opportunists? The Political and Social Constellations of Jazz in Hungary during the 1950s–1960s .......................................................109 Peter Motyčka The Jazz Section: Disintegration through Jazz .....................................157 Rüdiger Ritter Negotiated Spaces: Jazz in Moscow after the Thaw ............................171 Heli Reimann Swing Club and the Meaning of Jazz in Estonia in the late 1940s .......193 Authors’ CVs ......................................................................................225 Gertrud Pickhan / Rüdiger Ritter Introduction Jazz has never been just music: from the beginning, it has been imbued with various additional meaning. It is thus unsurprising that the ideas and positions manifested in jazz have always evoked passionate responses, from supporters and opponents alike, whether they were the musicians creating the music or the people who wrote about it. Under discussion were not only questions of musical aesthetics and subjective judgement – such as whether a certain title or style was agreeable or not – but also broader issues, as jazz was associated with a certain lifestyle and habitus. It posed a challenge to the contemporary music scene; moreover, it questioned the moral values inherent to contemporary society. Soon disgust and rejection emerged, but even more so fascination and support. Jazz polarized society from its very beginning by nothing other than its mere existence. From its earliest years, from the 1920s onwards, jazz occupied a promi- nent position in the newly emerged Soviet Union and prompted a broad spectrum of reactions, ranging from enthusiastic welcome to outright dis- gust and hateful rejection. Again, it was not only musical aesthetics that were scrutinized here, but rather how one wanted to define one’s ‘own’ music or articulate opposition to a music that was quintessentially regarded as a symbol of the USA. More to the point, jazz was seen to function as a flagship of the ‘other’, attempting to break into the consolidated cultural system of the Soviet Union. In other words, the topic discussed was really not so much the music itself, but the process of positioning the Soviet Union vis-à-vis its traditional ‘class enemy’ the United States, on the one hand, and ‘old’ Europe, on the other. Jazz was predestined to evoke controversial statements. It was a music rich in meanings, a vast array of which both admirers and opponents liked to draw on. For admirers, jazz represented freedom; for opponents, it pro- voked in four principle ways: First, from its inception, jazz was closely associated with sexuality and, as a consequence, rejected by the establishment. After the October Revolution, sexual liberties and experiments with alternative forms of living beyond the 8 Gertrud Pickhan / Rüdiger Ritter framework of the traditional family had briefly flourished. This, however, soon came to an end, coinciding with an increasingly rigid rejection of jazz. In later years, the prudishness prevalent in the Soviet Union led to a curious similarity between the criticism voiced by socialist critics and that expressed by the bourgeois establishment in Western Europe. In fact, it did not take long for the adherents of communism and those of national-conservative ideologies to meet, albeit totally unexpectedly, in a common rejection of jazz. Socialist critics even adopted the main arguments of their bourgeois coun- terparts, the best-known example being the invective enunciated by Maksim Gorkiĭ, who, in alignment with the bourgeois educated elite, described and rejected jazz as ‘pornography’: ‘Listening to this yelling for a few minutes, brings unavoidably to mind an orchestra full of sex-crazed madmen con- ducted by a stallion-like-man, waving a huge genital organ.’1 Second, musically ‘educated’ intellectuals and composers active in al- ready established fields of music reacted sharply in the negative to jazz and proclaimed it to be ‘primitive’.2 But there were also many who supported this new kind of music. This shows an important detail of the effect jazz had on Europe: that its ‘alien’ nature provoked both vehement opposition and intense fascination and support, even beyond the narrow confines of the various jazz scenes. To this end, many artists in the new Soviet Union firmly committed themselves to jazz, last but not least to revolutionize ar- tistic developments in Europe. Just to serve as the cultural heirs of the old Europe seemed to many to be a waste of the new socialist ideology. This was an idea that had already been considered by the elites of nineteenth- century Russia and Western Europe. Indeed, many Russian intellectuals felt obliged to adopt jazz as a new art form and to demonstrate Russian-Soviet predominance in this field. In this context it should not be forgotten that as jazz came to Europe, it was combined with existing forms of dance and entertainment music. The 1 Gorkiĭ, Maksim: O muzyke tolstykh [On the music of the Gross], in: Pravda, 28 April 1928. 2 Best known is Theodor Adorno’s verdict against jazz. See Steinert, Heinz: Die Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie oder: Warum Professor Adorno Jazz-Musik nicht ausstehen konnte [The discovery of the culture industry or why Professor Adorno could not stand jazz], Wien 1992.