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.

A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation The music we call “jazz” arose in late nineteenth century North America—most likely in New Orleans—based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the “blues,” which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US—and Black American—contribution to global arts and culture. Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era’s most virulent economic—and racist—exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

Bringing together scholars from the fields of musicology and international history, this book investigates the significance of music to foreign relations, and how it affected the interaction of nations since the late 19th century. For more than a century, both state and non-state actors have sought to employ sound and harmony to influence allies and enemies, resolve conflicts, and export their own culture around the world. This book asks how we can understand music as an instrument of power and influence, and how the cultural encounters fostered by music changes our ideas about international history.

Pioneering a hermeneutic methodology for analyses of global governance, this is the first monograph that makes Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy relevant for global politics research. Drawing on the concept of "horizon" as the element that captures the dynamics of understanding in social interaction in order to analyse processes of international politics, this book shows that what is required is the embeddedness of meanings and ideas in human action and reflection. By advancing theory-building with regard to particular questions of global governance, it reconceptualises international relations as "politics among people". Providing a contextualised constructivist approach that highlights the importance of processes to which people are central, it challenges the use of collective concepts such as "state" and "nation" as units of analysis which continue to dominate international relations but which cloud the details of interaction processes. The two case studies of UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and Germany in NATO’s mission "Operation Allied Force" in Kosovo in 1999 are structured around this contextualised constructivist approach developed in the monograph. The studies reveal how interaction processes can be made accountable, leading to new vantage points of our understanding of governance problems. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in global governance, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricœeur and hermeneutic philosophy, the UN, humanitarian interventions, and foreign policy analysts.

Ontario-born jazz pianist Lou Hooper (1894–1977) began his professional career in Detroit, accompanying blues singers such as Ma Rainey at the legendary Koppin Theatre. In 1921 he moved to Harlem, performing alongside Paul Robeson and recording extensively in and around Tin Pan Alley, before moving to Montreal in the 1930s. Prolific and influential, Hooper was an early teacher of Oscar Peterson and deeply involved in the jazz community in Montreal. When the Second World War broke out he joined the Canadian Armed Forces and entertained the troops in Europe. Near the end of his life Hooper came to prominence for his exceptional career and place in the history of jazz, inspiring an autobiography that was never published. Statesman of the Piano makes this document widely available for the first time and includes photographs, concert programs, lyrics, and other documents to reconstruct his life and times. Historians, archivists, musicians, and cultural critics provide annotations and commentary, examining some of the themes that emerge from Hooper’s writing and music. Statesman of the Piano sparks new conversations about Hooper’s legacy while shedding light on the cross-border travels and wartime experiences of Black musicians, the politics of archiving and curating, and the connections between race and music in the twentieth century.

This research seeks to answer how the history of black ethnic struggles in the United States and the history of jazz are connected. The following issues are discussed: -Black culture in a white society during the twentieth century, -The role of jazz musicians, both black and white, in advancing integration, fighting for civil rights, and using their music as a voice, -Specific examples of musicians, music, and incidents that illustrate your points, -How the progress of jazz styles reflects the cultural changes of the century, and, -How the general ethos of dominant culture is evident in the world of jazz.

In Hungary, jazz was at the forefront of heated debates sparked by the racialised tensions between national music traditions and newly emerging forms of popular culture that challenged the prevailing status quo within the cultural hierarchies of different historical eras. Drawing on an extensive, four-year field research project, including ethnographic observations and 29 in-depth interviews, this book is the first to explore the hidden diasporic narrative(s) of Hungarian jazz through the system of historically formed distinctions linked to the social practices of assimilated Jews and Romani musicians. The chapters illustrate how different concepts of authenticity and conflicting definitions of jazz as the "sound of Western modernity" have resulted in a unique hierarchical setting. The book's account of the fundamental opposition between US-centric mainstream jazz (bebop) and Bartók-inspired free jazz camps not only reveals the extent to which traditionalism and modernism were linked to class- and race-based cultural distinctions, but offers critical insights about the social logic of Hungary’s geocultural positioning in the ‘twilight zone’ between East and West to use the words of Maria Todorova. Following a historical overview that incorporates comparisons with other Central European jazz cultures, the book offers a rigorous analysis of how the transition from playing ‘caféhouse music’ to bebop became a significant element in the status claims of Hungary’s ‘significant others’, i.e. Romani musicians. By combining the innovative application of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology with popular music studies and postcolonial scholarship, this work offers a forceful demonstration of the manifold connections of this particular jazz scene to global networks of cultural production, which also continue to shape it.