4 J Azzand G Erman R Espectability J Azz Music Has First of All Nothing To

4 Jazz and German Respectability J azz music has first of all nothing to do with politics." With these words Reginald Rudorf began his 1964 memoir about his postwar efforts to pro- mote American jazz in East Germany, efforts that ended with Rudorf's ar- rest in 1957 and his subsequent emigration to West Germany. His statement may come as a surprise from someone who had suffered political persecution in East Germany for promoting jazz.Jrurther, it seems incon- gruous in the German context where jazz musicians and fans had been the subject of political persecution during the Third Reich, and, after 1945, had teen harassed in East Germany andjniblicly disdained in West Germany. Yet by the 1960s, Rudorf's statement was echoed by many West Germans.1 From the 1920s to the 1950s, jazz had many outspoken enemies in Ger- many^During these years, Europeans usually referred to all American popular music as jazz.Like their counterparts in the United States and else- where, German opponents of jazz frequently positioned the music outside the realm of culture; for them everything that "Culture" was supposed to be, jazz was not.2 Many of these attacks had found their culmination in Nazi attempts to prohibit jazz and in the Nazi persecution of jazz fans. Af- ter 1945, when jazz experienced a renaissance in both Germanies, opponents again took up the interlinked notions of sexual transgression and racial decay. They were particularly concerned about the jam sessions that Hot-Clubs put on in East and West German cities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the course of the 1950s, however, many Germans in East and West came to think of jazz as an acceptable musical form. The increasing respectability of jazz was linked to narrowing definitions of jazz and to re- defining the meaning of individual jazz styles—from Dixieland to bebop. Moreover, making jazz respectable required controlling the behavior of 137 138 / Jazz and German Respectability s Jazz and German Respectability I 139 jazz fans and especially the way they danced. In both Germanies, it was the late nineteenth century. He also discredited those jazz fans who were only in the second half of the 1950s that narrower definitions of jazz as dif- dancing and romping around at jam sessions in postwar German Hot- ferent from "lighter" popular hits gained widespread currency. Jazz pro- Clubs and other jazz joints. For Berendt, listening to jazz was an intellec- moters distinguished between "authentic" jazz on the one hand and "com- tual experience, and in his complicated and inaccessible study, he went to mercial" music and dances like boogie and rock 'n' roll on the other. In great lengths to show that j azz music represented "the essence of the mod- West Germany, radio host, writer, and producer Joachim Ernst Berendt be- ern age" as well as any twentieth-century philosopher could.5 came the most influential person to shape positive reevaluations of jazz. In Like many thinkers before him, Berendt asserted that, like modernity, East Germany, Reginald Rudoif, a social scientist, radio host, and writer, led jazz was characterized by an ever increasing androgyny. In the universities, the project of promoting the music. claimed Berendt, women had given up everything that distinguished them Efforts to make jazz respectable in Germany had to take into account ac- from men; in turn, the concept of masculinity had lost much of its former cusations of gender disarray, racial degeneration, and commercialism that meaning for men. In America androgyny had developed further; there, he opponents had leveled against the music. East and West German debates said, men even participated in beauty contests. "American life," he ex- about j azz were also always debates about African Americans, their culture, plained, "is under the dictatorship of women and is nonetheless shaped by and their history. Certain assumptions about proper masculinity and men." Berendt argued that this androgyny found its expression in both proper femininity underlay the efforts to make jazz respectable and also jazz and modernist twelve-tone music. related to changing East and West German views of African Americans. In Although he mourned androgyny as a "flight from tension" on the part the discourses on American jazz, as in the debates about movies and fash- of modern humanity—thus revealing his own ambivalence about moder- ion, East and West Germans negotiated and redefined the relationship be- nity—Berendt, unlike most critics of jazz, did not find the destruction of tween politics and culture.3 traditional femininity and masculinity that jazz symbolized a reason to dislike the music. He made clear that jazz could not be rejected simply because it came out of the bars of New Orleans or Chicago; after all, he ar- MAKING JAZZ RESPECTABLE IN WEST GERMANY gued, no one had criticized Euripides because the Greek tragedy had In 1950, in his first book on jazz, Joachim Ernst Berendt set out to present emerged from Dionysian orgies. Berendt thus did not deny the social ori- jazz and reactions to it with a critical eye toward the present. Berendt was gins of jazz, but instead argued that jazz, like all "good culture," had tran- born in 1922. During his youth the Nazis sent his father, a Lutheran min- scended those origins. He described the twentieth century as a world in dis- ister, to a concentration camp, where he eventually died. An avid jazz fan array and asserted that jazz grew out of this chaos, but nonetheless had the before 1945, the young Berendt became a radio host for jazz programs in power to order it. Good jazz, Berendt implied, was not the jazz of the Hot- the French Occupation Zone after his return from the Russian front. Well Club dance sessions, which symbolized gender upheaval in the minds of aware that racism had driven antijazz sentiment in Germany and else- many East and West Germans.6 where ever since jazz had emerged as a set of distinct musical styles in the In a 1952 article for the Frankfurter Hefte, Berendt developed his vision 1920s, Berendt asked his readers in the introduction to Der Jazz (The jazz) of jazz as an important artistic expression in more accessible terms. Using to put aside their prejudices and to follow his vindication of the music 4 formal analysis, Berendt distinguished a sequence of different jazz styles, This vindication relied on making jazz into a serious artistic and philo- from the Dixieland- and Chicago-style of the 1920s, to the swing of the sophical enterprise removed from the realm of consumerism and con- 1930s, and finally to the bebop and cool jazz of the postwar period. He drew sumer culture. Berendt carefully narrowed the definitions for what he con- on the systematic analysis that Frenchman Hugues Panassie had developed sidered "authentic jazz." He claimed that most of what was talked about as in the 1930s and argued that one jazz style followed the other almost log- jazz was in fact not jazz at all. Jazz, according to Berendt, was not a dance ically.7 Further, Berendt found parallels between the development of jazz music, and true jazz fans did not dance while listening to the music. and the trajectory of European music from baroque to classic to Romanti- Berendt thus disassociated jazz from the dance halls that had characterized cism and the recent modernist music of Stravinsky. In so doing, Berendt the arrival of consumer culture in both Europe and the United States since validated jazz as a serious artistic tradition, but at the same time made Eu- T 140 / Jazz and German Respectability Jazz and German Respectability I 141 ropean music the standard against which the "progress" of jazz was to be also continued to dance to swing, a new format for swing concerts in the judged. Ever more emphatically, he asserted that the popular hits and dance United States confirmed Berendt's contention that jazz was not a dance music that American and European radio stations were broadcasting were music. Since the late 1930s, the orchestras of Benny Goodman and Duke not jazz. Ellington had given concerts in New York's Carnegie Hall where dancing While Berendt acknowledged that jazz musicians had adopted and Jyid-heen prohibited.9 adapted European harmonies, .and instruments, he also emphasized the Berendt's real interest was the intellectual jazz of the years after 1945. African elements of jazz.and stressed that neither jazz music nor African He explicitly preferred the more Spartan, less danceable music of bebop American jazz musicians were^'primitive." He explained that European- and cool jazz over earlier styles. Bebop had been developed by black musi- trained ears had difficulty understanding the African influences, and espe- cians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in Harlem jazz clubs cially the rhythms of jazz. The New Orleans jazz of the 1920s, for example, around 1945. The small bebop combos put much emphasis on the impro- did not sound "beautiful according to the sensibility of white man," but it vising soloist and played a jazz characterized by unusual asymmetric was a truthful and adequate expression of the situation of the oppressed melodies and dense polyrhythms sometimes perceived as nervous. Berendt "for whom music is often the most perfect and only possibility to claim observed that it was hard "for the uninitiated" to understand this music. freedom and humanity."8 Berendt believed that whites had the moral re- Bebop musicians, according to Berendt, had tried to lift music onto an sponsibility both to feel compassion toward blacks and to try to understand "absolute sphere" independent of the feelings of the improvising musi- their music, for, as he made clear, whites had caused the plight of African cians and their audience.

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