The Global Politics of Jazz in the Twentieth Century

Cultural Diplomacy and "American Music"

Yoshiomi Saito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429594076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, jazz was harnessed as America's "sonic weapon" to promote an image to the world of a free and democratic America. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and other well-known jazz musicians were sent around the world – including to an array of Communist countries – as "jazz ambassadors" in order to mitigate the negative image associated with domestic racial problems. While many non-Americans embraced the Americanism behind this jazz diplomacy without question, others criticized American domestic and foreign policies while still appreciating jazz – thus jazz, despite its popularity, also became a medium for expressing anti-Americanism. This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies – shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context.

Saito examines jazz across a wide range of regions, including America, Europe, Japan and Communist countries. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources, primary as well as secondary, which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization. This comparative analysis on the range of unique jazz scenes and cultures offers a detailed understanding as to how jazz has been interpreted in various ways, according to the changing contexts of politics and society around it, often providing a basis for criticizing America itself. Furthering our appreciation of the organic relationship between jazz and global politics, Saito reconsiders the uniqueness of jazz as an exclusively "American music."

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, the history of popular music, and global politics.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 The genealogy of “American music”

Born in New Orleans, jazz emerged at the dawn of the twentieth century, musically influenced by ragtime and blues. Inexpensive musical instruments, procured by the southern states’ military bands after the Civil War, turned out to be more than suitable for this music. When Storyville, a red line zone in New Orleans, closed following American participation in the First World War, many musicians moved north in search of work, allowing jazz culture to bloom in big cities like Chicago and New York. In the heady period after the war, the increase in material prosperity, innovations in science and technology, and a new dynamism in American society, led to the so-called Roaring Twenties. Urbanization and industrialization saw America’s automobile industry grow rapidly through mass production, the movie and record industries expand exponentially, and a suite of new skyscrapers begin to reshape New York City’s skyline – F. Scott Fitzgerald described America during the spectacular 1920s as the Jazz Age. In this period, “hot” jazz became one of the more popular styles, and was predominately played by African American musicians. Emphasizing a dynamic rhythm and improvisation, it was seen as posing a challenge to the Protestant norm of self-discipline, which was still held in esteem by America’s middle class. In comparison, “symphonic” jazz, with its strong influence of classical music, was readily accepted by those who held these values. Paul Whiteman, a conductor who restricted improvisation and instead emphasized melodies, garnered broad support for this style and successfully grew his fame as the “King of Jazz.” A typical example of the symphonic style was “Rhapsody in Blue,” a piece composed by George Gershwin upon a request from Whiteman.

American society of the mid-1930s became familiar with swing as it recovered from the Great Depression. With the advent of this new style of jazz, orchestra composition grew in size, while improvisation became relatively restrained, resulting in arrangement coming to the fore instead. Swing’s uplifting rhythm aligned with society’s desire for bright and inspiring music in this era. The beginning of the swing era commenced when clarinetist Benny Goodman’s national tour ended with great success in 1935. By January 1938, with the Goodman Orchestra having had resounding success in bringing its swing rhythm to Carnegie Hall – the Classical Music Hall of Fame – swing had become a social phenomenon.

Meanwhile, and despite the music’s growing popularity, criticism of jazz remained. Jazz had once been called “jass” with distinctive sexual connotations, and was associated with images of deviation from social norms. Fans who danced with great energy to this music with a swinging rhythm were called jitterbugs. For them, swing overlapped with a desire for liberation from all kinds of private and social constraints that bound them as individuals. As detailed by jazz historians Lewis A. Erenberg and David W. Stowe, when fascism began emerging in Europe, jitterbugs and swing were accused of being “musical Hitlerism” symbolizing a decline of rationalism, while one Catholic archbishop even suggested that jitterbugs and their “cannibalistic rhythmic orgies” would lead the younger generations to “the primrose path to hell.” For those who believed jazz and fascism were somehow intertwined, fans of Goodman were seen as fascists themselves. On one occasion, one University of Chicago professor recalled that jitterbugs cheered Goodman “with the abandon of a crowd of Storm Troopers demanding their Fuehrer or a Roman parade greeting its Duce.” In response, however, acknowledging the music’s political undertones, more cautious public voices arose to counter these criticisms. The New York Times advocated that swing should be understood not as a “doctrine set to music” but instead, as “a revolt against doctrine” – and in that sense “Dictators should be suspicious of swing.”¹ Here, it would be enough to confirm that various jazz discourses existed in this period, ranging from those problematizing jazz and the doctrine of fascism, to those challenging the assumption of this association.

Keeping these various jazz discourses in mind, the following sections investigate the origins of the particular discourse of jazz that associates the music with Americanism, while also examining how its association was deconstructed outside America, notably in such countries as France, Germany and Japan – eventually engendering de-Americanized discourses of jazz. Reviewing the jazz scenes of these four countries in a comparative way provides us with a useful analytical lens through which to understand the dynamics that characterized the meaning of jazz both inside and outside America.

The emergence of “swing ideology”

It was during the New Deal era when some Americans started to advocate that jazz was “American music,” thus embodying the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Stowe identifies this specific type of jazz discourse as “swing ideology.” This ideology, demanding a freer and more democratic society, saw the formation of a loose anti-fascist cultural front that consisted of artists, labor unions and leftist intellectuals.² By clearly promoting the principle of racial integration when racial segregation remained in society from the hotel industry to public transportation, swing was able to connect people, therefore narrowing the gap between the ideal of freedom and democracy on the one hand, and the harsh reality of the times on the other. For example, it is well-known that Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, both African Americans. Ensuring his orchestra was racially integrated, he directly challenged the practice of racial segregation that still existed in the music industry. Also, Goodman financially supported African American bandleader Fletcher Henderson by asking him for musical arrangements.

Swing aimed to transcend race. While appealing to the black origins of the music – and by pushing a dynamic rhythm to the front – swing was usually played with a large ensemble with less collective improvisation. The music that put blues culture at its core was heard by a wide range of audiences from youth to the elite regardless of skin color. In this way, some believed that both white and black culture lived together in swing. Here a discourse that celebrated “American music” was born, aspiring to a racially integrated society. Goodman himself said: “difference of race, creed or color has never been of the slightest importance in the best bands.” Viewing swing as democratic music, he also declared that “there’s a sort of freedom about jazz.” Swing, which was reaching explosive levels of popularity among the wider public, was here explicitly tied to the notion of Americanism. The discourse that associated jazz with “American music” developed through the New Deal in America, though it naturally posed the question as to how well it accurately reflected social reality. When a large segment of the public believed American society consisted of only white people, some people drawn to swing began to consider how music could be harnessed to overcome racial problems.³

Of the many organizations that made use of swing during the 1930s for their own causes, the case of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) was the most striking. Expanding the influence to African American workers, particularly in the Harlem area of ​​New York where the so-called Harlem Renaissance had been blooming since 1919, the CPUSA organized concerts and meetings advocating racial integration. While some members of the party showed a sense of disgust towards swing as bourgeois decadent music, the party’s pragmatic policy of using the music for political purposes – deeply rooted in Harlem – prevailed after the high-profile Scottsboro case of 1931.⁴ Eventually, the CPUSA modified its extreme left stance at the seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935 – the same year that saw the beginning of the swing era. With the adoption of anti-fascist popular front tactics, a wide range of leftist forces started to collaborate and associate themselves with the party. To garner further appeal, the CPUSA even started to explicitly link Communism and Americanism in its public statements. The party secretary Earl Browder’s slogan, “Communism is 20th century Americanism,” vividly demonstrated the left-leaning Americanism of the New Deal era.⁵

In the late 1930s, a wide range of anti-fascist circles declared support for Ethiopia following Italy’s invasion of this country, also backing the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. At a fundraising event at Carnegie Hall for such causes, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and Count Basie appeared. In addition, the party organ, the Daily Worker, regularly published essays on jazz. When Waller suddenly died, a memorial concert was organized by the party youth organization in cooperation with Basie, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. The Daily Worker was supportive in connecting the ideals of Americanism and swing by praising these musicians in its pages, stating the concert for Waller “was a testimonial to a ‘good guy’ who made music so that all people could live in a world where there aren’t black people and white people any more than there are black keys and white keys on the piano.”⁶

Among those fascinated with the idea of ​​the popular front was Barney Josephson, known for opening Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1938. This jazz club broke the then normal practice of racial segregation and attracted such celebrities as Paul Robeson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Many fundraising concerts were held at this venue, including one for the Abraham Lincoln brigades that supported volunteer fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The cafe was also acknowledged as a place where John Hammond, a producer, critic and relative of Goodman through his youngest sister Alice’s marriage, discovered Holiday, who later became known for her distinguished voice in the song “Strange Fruit.” Interestingly, the composer of “Strange Fruit” was a Jewish high school teacher from New York, Abel Meeropol. Shocked by photographs of lynching incidents of African Americans, he accused the southern states of wanton violence with this song.⁷ As an active CPUSA member, he later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were arrested and sentenced to death for selling classified information on the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in the early 1950s. Since Columbia records refused to produce the song due to its provocative lyrics, the record was eventually released under the independent Commodore Records label, which had been established in the same neighborhood as Cafe Society by producer Milt Gabler.⁸ Inspired by the French jazz fan club, Hot Club de France, Gabler had formed United Hot Clubs of America ​​with Hammond and other jazz fans in 1935.

Critic Marshall Stearns, a frequent contributor to Down Beat, believed that jazz was one of America’s unique contributions to the art world. He insisted, in a similar way to Edgar Allan Poe, that jazz only became understood in America once it had been accepted overseas.⁹ Stearns was in a sense right. Jazz was appreciated and better understood in Europe well before American society began dancing to swing’s passionate rhythms. Since the 1920s, the relationship between jazz and America had been a major target of intense arguments in European intellectual circles.

Jazz à la mode

Local reactions outside America in encountering jazz varied. But there were some commonalities. In general, intellectuals, young people and musicians were considerably attracted to this music, due to its underlying modernism and cosmopolitanism as symbolic of the new era, while conservatives were often made to feel frustrated.

American participation in the First World War in 1917 brought jazz to Europe. In France, where 2 million American military personnel were stationed, particularly important was the 369th Infantry Regiment – dubbed the Harlem Hellfighters – band, led by Lieutenant James Reese Europe. Consisting only of African Americans, this regiment band conducted performances for Allied troops, bringing some joy to the battlefield. Due to their burgeoning popularity, John Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, ordered the regiment band to undertake a six-week French tour – the first tour of its kind – during which the band carried out jazz performances in 25 regional cities to wide acclaim.¹⁰ While US President Woodrow Wilson had declared a democratic cause for entering the war, racial segregation in the American military forces caused many French people to resent this contradiction. However, it is not difficult to point out that France as a colonial state also had its own racial prejudices at this time. Unlike American soldiers who returned home once the war was over, immigrants from the distant colonies were designated as “others” from inside the empire – despite forming only 3.5 percent of all immigrants – and were treated as potential threats to society. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the positive reception the jazz-playing African Americans received from French locals strengthened their view of France as a freer country than America.¹¹

Through the Jazz Age of the 1920s, this “American music” spread widely throughout the French cultural scene. Already in the late 1910s, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), generally beli...