Merriam Webster defines Jazz as “American music developed especially from ragtime and blues and characterized by propulsive syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre.” Noticeably in this definition first word is American, having come from the west. Jazz is a very western musical experience having arisen in bars and the African American experience. This leads to many issues when Jazz finds its way to the Soviet states, how can you make something so typically American into something Soviet. The answer seems to be that they could not.
“There was no clear-cut understanding of how the Soviet Union and its culture were supposed to relate to the West. Jazz amplified this problem and forced cultural elites, musicians, and to a lesser extent, audiences to come up with their own answers to these questions.” (Beresford 98). Beresford makes it clear that the Soviet Union did whatever it come to but transform Jazz and to excuse it as something that came out of the workers struggle in the states. They describe Jazz preformed by Jews as a “joyous expression of [their] liberation.” (Beresford 121) This, in their theory, follows the great liberating force of Jazz for marginalized people in the West.
Do you think that these justifications should have been enough to get Jazz past the critics in the Soviet Union? Do you think that you have remove the American qualities of something that is by definition American? Were the leaders of the Soviet Union forced into accepting Jazz because it was defiantly popular to begin with?
