Der Jazz

The idea of a stolid German at a jam session seems at first glance as unlikely as an Irishman at a temperance meeting or a Laplander in the bull ring. Nevertheless. jazz (pronounced yahtz) has come to Germany in such a big way that the Germans are now recognized by many as Europe's most frenzied buffs. Last week the German jazz season was in full swing: thousands gathered in Berlin for the Amateur Jazz Festival, following a Frankfurt bash that made the U.S.'s Newport Festival seem like a Sunday musicale.

Hausmusik. The most popular groups at both festivals bore nostalgic. New Orleans-styled names. The winning band at Berlin was called "Papa Kos Jazzin' Babies," and among the 23 bands at Frankfurt were the Riverboat Seven of Munich, the Diissel-dorf Feetwarmers. Berlin's Spree City Stompers. They belted out meticulous imitations of the legendary New Orleans bands of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Dodds. To listeners remembering old Okeh and Paramount recordings, the effect was sometimes eerily familiar: Frankfurt's Barrel House Jazzband, for instance, aped the disk of Dippermouth Blues with such studious care that they even mastered the ascending intonation of the famous cry. "Oh, play that thing." near the record's end. And a jazz singer named Inge Brandenburg, 31, belted out her numbers with a phrasing and intonation that made her a dead ringer for Billie Holiday.

Although milder American pop music was played in Germany even during the Nazi years, jazz as such was suppressed by the Nazis as "art/remder Niggerjazz"; in Frankfurt a few musicians used to rent boats and row back into the swampland along the Rhine to hold their jam sessions. Postwar jazz in Germany was fostered by U.S. Army bands and the Armed Forces Network, and there are now about 50 professional German combos and roughly 1,000 amateur jazz bands, many of them on high school and college campuses. Other amateurs play in abandoned bomb shelters or in the "jazz-houses" erected by German cities to keep youngsters off the streets. What has happened, notes one jazz authority, is that jazz has replaced the family musicale as the "Hansmusik of our time."

Grundlichkeit. What accounts for Germany's jazz boom? In some respects, jazz merely reflects the Germans' traditional musicality through a new prism. Germans are also inveterate collectors and joiners, and jazz gives them a whole new field to operate in. One well-known collector has 7,000 records; another, who lost his treasure in the war, is famed for having painfully rebuilt the "only complete Bessie Smith collection in Europe." For the joiners, there is the Deutsche Jazz Federation, which has 4.000 members in its 70 local "Hot Clubs."

Perhaps the biggest appeal of jazz is to the German Grundlichkeit, or pedantic thoroughness. The Cologne Conservatory now offers a two-year jazz course, partly conducted by a critic who writes under the name Dr. Jazz. German jazz buffs will write a dissertation at the drop of a flatted fifth. Recently, a German newspaper critic examined the jazz scene in this thicket of pseudo-Nietzschean prose: "The assembling of most refined musical means serves in the case of jazz to extract from the depths of the blood an experience which is realized with the clearest consciousness, not in order to spiritualize it as a performance but rather to reawaken the listener to a sense of the demonic in the unconscious."

The pedantic approach has so far stifled any real originality, but it has produced perhaps the most enthusiastic jazz audience in the world. "If they don't put mar ble busts of Beiderbecke and Ellington on the piano at home." remarked one critic last week, "it's only because such busts aren't available yet."

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