Jazz and the Germans: Essays on the Influence of "Hot" American Idioms on 20th-Century German Music (review)

The fragmented design on the book's cover, an abstract image in colors similar to those of the German flag, may be interpreted as doubly symbolic, suggesting both the book's complex subject matter and the many blank spots clouding our understanding of it. Unfortunately, the ragged image on the cover also mirrors the uneven quality of the essays presented here, all of them an outgrowth of a conference held at the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1995.

But first things first. The table of contents greets us with a chronologically arranged list of ten topics. While most of the articles deal with the period between the world wars, no doubt a fruitful and interesting era, this volume deserves special credit for venturing into the second half of the twentieth century, a time that has received scant attention, mainly because jazz by then was relatively well established. In his introductory essay, editor Michael J. Budds stresses the importance of the paradigm shift that lies at the heart of this collection: "The notion that a relatively young nation, an upstart such as the United States, might 'teach an old dog new tricks'—especially in matters of music—is nothing less than historic" (p. 2). Jazz, of course, worked its way into Germany's musical life through sheet music, records, broadcasts, and visiting musicians, and was first imitated by German dance musicians. These facts alone would probably not have earned the awkward label "historic" had it not been for the classically trained composers who began to open their seemingly hermetic world to this new influence.

In "Jonny's Jazz: From Kabarett to Krenek," perhaps the strongest essay of the volume, Alan Lareau shows precisely this development for Ernst Krenek's 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf. Looking at German sheet music editions as early as 1904, Lareau gives examples of how jazz, African American, and African imagery connoted vitality and sensuality and gave rise to the figure of "Jonny" (or "Johnny") as a symbol of the African American jazz musician with great seductive power over the younger generation, "a 1920 version of Elvis Presley" (p. 24). Krenek's opera, contrary to its reputation of being a "jazz opera," takes a fairly distanced look at the jazz craze. Among many fascinating aspects provided by Lareau is the fact that World War I represents a caesura for the perception of African and African American imagery. It is often overlooked that Germany was a short-lived but aggressive colonial power in Africa from 1884 until 1918. After the war, with French colonial troops mostly from northern Africa occupying the Rhineland, the image of Africans suddenly gained a threatening aura. This shift itself is remarkable, and jazz-influenced German popular songs (with lyrics featuring either African or African American imagery) from before World War I might be profitably compared to similar songs following the war.

All would be well if subsequent essays were founded on the same level of research, bibliographical or otherwise. But, with few exceptions, the volume is disappointing. Frank Tirro sets out to explore how jazz traveled from the United States to Germany. Some of his observations and conclusions seem to rely on outdated literature. Tirro is not so far off in his belief "that jazz in Germany followed a totally different pattern of dissemination and growth from that which occurred in England and France" (p. 66). Yet he goes on to state that recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (p. 78) and Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven "were influential in spreading jazz throughout Germany in the mid to late 1920s" (p. 80). His music examples in this context are pointless, for recent research has...