Nazis and Jazz

The Nazis were hostile to jazz on racist grounds and various restrictions were placed on it. A complete ban was impossible to enforce, partly because it was difficult to define exactly what it was: "Americano nigger kike jungle music... The quote is from Joseph Goebbels, who had banned jazz, along with foxtrots and the tango. Although repulsed by the 'terrible squawk' of jazz, he soon realized that swing between the harangues held listeners. The extent of the ban and the definition of the music had both been vague anyway".

An example of racist anti-jazz propaganda is an article 'Swing and Nigger Music Must Disappear' by 'Buschmann' from the 6 November 1938 edition of a Stettin newspaper: 'Disgusting things are going on, disguised as 'entertainment'. We have no sympathy for fools who want to transplant jungle music to Germany. In Stettin, like other cities, one can see people dancing as though they suffer from stomach pains. They call it 'swing'. This is no joke. I am overcome with anger. These people are mentally retarded. Only niggers in some jungle would stomp like that. Germans have no nigger in them. The pandemonium of swing fever must be stopped… Impresarios who present swing dancing should be put out of business. Swing orchestras that play hot, scream on their instruments, stand up to solo and other cheap devices are going to disappear. Nigger music must disappear'.

The nazi stance was admired by racists elsewhere in Europe. In Denmark Olaf Sobys wrote 'Jazz Versus European Musical Culture' (1935) arguing: 'Jazz was not born in nor has it ever been integrated into European culture. It was introduced from the violent need of a primitive race for rhythmic ecstasy and cannot grow organically here. It repre­sents mankind's lowest bestial instincts. Jungle jazz rhythm is an expression of the primitive Negro's erotic ecstasy... The fact that the white race tolerates this sort of thing indicates our culture's decline. Denmark should follow Germany. When Hitler banned jazz, it was a great idealistic act.'

In countries under Nazi occupation, and indeed Germany, jazz sub-cultures survived in the face of official hostility and persecution. In France, there were the Zazous:

'Zazou boys wore pegged pants with baggy knees, high rolled English collars covered by their hair, which was carefully combed into a two-wave pompadour over their foreheads, long checked jackets several sizes too large, dangling key chains, gloves, stick­pins in wide neckties with tiny knots; dark glasses and Django Reinhardt moustaches were the rage. The girls wore short skirts, baggy sweaters, pointed painted fingernails, hair curled to their shoulders, necklaces around their waists, bright red lipstick... They spent a lot of time in cafes, on the Champs Elysees or in the Latin Quarter... On Sundays they took portable gramophones to little exurban restaurants, played their swing records loud and danced...

The Zazous took nothing seriously. They opposed the regime by ignoring it, which was a political act whether they knew it or not. Wearing long jackets with wide collars and plenty of pleats is a political provocation during a highly publicized campaign for sartorial austerity. From time to time the police would raid a Zazou cafe and take them to the prefecture. They would be questioned and have their papers and addresses checked. Some were sent to the countryside to help with the harvest, after a haircut of course. One newspaper wrote: 'We are of the opinion that when the rest of the continent is fighting and working, the Zazous' laziness is shameful. The young men without their hair or collars now are going to get healthy sweating in the July sun, the girls will soon have thicker ankles, freckles on their sweet noses and calluses on their dainty hands. And then the world will be back to its natural order.'

'Danish "Swing Crazies" wore the same costume and hair-dos as the Zazous, they jitterbugged and were described by one journalist as 'an example of the depraved upper class and the result of too much permissiveness on the part of parents and teachers'.

All quotes from 'La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis' - Mike Zwerin (London: Quartet, 1985). See also: The White Rose and Zazous

July global round up

This month, rave shut down in England, religious police raid club in Malaysia, and Iceland's first Reclaim the Streets party.

Suffolk, England: Five arrested as police shut down rave ( Evening Star, 16 July 2007)
'Suffolk police today put ravegoers on notice that illegal parties would be shut down this summer.The warning came after scores of officers from across East Anglia were drafted in to break up a rave in a Suffolk forest. More than 70 officers were involved in the operation to stop the party at Ingham, near Bury St Edmunds, and five people were arrested on suspicion of organising the event. Police chiefs leading three units of officers - one each from Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk - said there had been few problems and the rave of up to 1,000 revellers had been stopped relatively peacefully thanks to the number of officers brought in.

The major operation, in which officers also seized sound equipment, follows two similar raves in recent months - one at Parham Airfield and the other at Euston, near Thetford - which both erupted in violence towards the police. Supt Alan Caton stressed illegal raves on privately owned land would not be tolerated in Suffolk. He said: “This is the start of summer and our message is clear. We have a duty to ensure where possible that rural places are not subjected to the noise and disruption that these parties cause. Where evidence is found to identify the people responsible we will do everything we can to bring them to justice.”

A police spokeswoman said officers were called to the rave on Forestry Commission land in the early hours of yesterday: “Our aim was to take swift action to disperse revellers, arrest organisers, seize equipment, minimise damage to land and prevent disturbance to local people.” The illegal party was still going on at lunchtime and ravers leaving the forest clearing insisted they were doing no harm. One, from near Newmarket, said: “It's not upsetting anyone - there are no houses around here. It's just young people having good time"... Tim Root, who lives in the village, said he only heard the rave as he walked his dog and could see nothing wrong as long as the parties were kept out of the way and the revellers left no damage or litter behind.

Malaysia: Nightclub Singer Facing Prosecution (The Star, 16 July 2007)

'The Perak Religious Department (JAIP) will decide on Aug 6 whether to charge nightclub singer Siti Noor Idayu Abd Moin for dressing sexily and “encouraging vice” by performing at a club. JAIP director Datuk Jamry Sury said he would wait for a recommendation from his enforcement personnel after they meet the 22-year-old at the department here on that day. On July 3, the department detained Siti Noor Idayu and several others during a raid at a nightclub in Tambun here.

In a move that drew criticism from non-government organisations, Siti Noor Idayu was ordered to explain why she had “exposed her body” and “encouraged immoral activities” by working at the outlet. However, Siti Noor Idayu had said she was not even drinking and wore a white sleeveless top and long pants when JAIP officers raided the nightclub' (picture of singer in offending outfit).

Iceland: Reclaim the Streets (Indymedia, 14 July 2007)

'REYKJAVIK, July 14th - Today, Bastille-day, around a hundred people raved all over Reykjavik's ring road in a carnaval against heavy industry. Iceland's first Reclaim the Streets began cheerfully as Saving Iceland ran down Perlan and onto Reykjavik's western ring. A clown army danced to the beats down into the city centre. This Rave Against the Machine was organized by Saving Iceland to "reclaim our public space, space to be free to dance, to be free from dreary industrial car culture and to voice a sound of festival in opposition to the grim industrialisation plans for Iceland," says a Saving Iceland activist.

When the crowd descended Snorrabraut on it's way to Laugavegur, the main shopping street, police blockaded the road and there was a standoff for an hour and a half. When the driver of the sound system tried to exit the vehicle, police attempted to arrest him, violently attacking bystanders. A number of people got injured and four arrested. Police went for people's throats, knocked people face down on the ground, leg-cuffed people and smashed a car window. Activists stayed non-violent. The crowd moved on to the police station down the road, and sympathizers welcomed us with a surprise second sound system'.

Video of party here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NenbTc0cQs4

Hampstead Heath Rave 1955

Steve Fletcher has sent this great photo of himself and then girlfriend at a jazz 'rave' on Hampstead Heath in 1955.

According to Steve, The Ken Colyer Band played at this event. Ken Colyer was a key figure in the 'New Orleans' infuenced English jazz scene in the 1950s, with regular all nighters at his club at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street, London WC1. The Ken Colyer Club also provided a platform for the emerging British R'n'B scene in the early 1960s, with The Rolling Stones playing there regularly.

The 1950s trad and revivalist jazz scenes interest me as a largely unwritten chapter in the history of English youth cultures. Most people assume that it all started with rock'n'roll, but as discussed elsewhere on this site jazz raves were being held from the early 50s.

There is something very timeless about this photo - with his stripy top and glasses Steve could have been a member of Orange Juice in the early 1980s or maybe The Long Blondes today.

More posts on 1950s jazz raves here.

The Ravers Next Step: into the 1960s

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a new scene was developing, based around 'traditional jazz'. The musical distinction was that while the former favoured the 1920s jazz band sound found on Chicago recordings by Louis Armstrong and others, advocates of the latter claimed that the real New Orleans sound was to be found in the music of players who had never left the city to head North, unlike Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. This search for the ever-receding holy grail of authenticity was mocked by some at the time. Jeff Nuttall recalls that "Uncle John Renshaw, a band­leader of the time, used to say with some irony 'I'm in the sincerity racket, meself.'"

Despite its antiquarian musical roots, the trad jazz scene (and the related skiffle scene) was very much a youth sub culture of 'ravers'. Nuttall recalls that in the mid-1950s:

"Soho was alive with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz could be played and heard informally and where the rich odour of marihuana became, for the first time, a familiar part of the London atmosphere. Sam Widges was the most popular. Also there was the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm. They were open most of the night and often the management would leave you to sleep where you sat. It was a place to stay in the dry if you didn't want to go home. It became obvious that parental control was going to stop at about the age of fifteen for a large number of young people. Teenage wages were going up and so were student grants. It was becoming possible to push the leaky boat of adult delusions a little further away. The Soho Fair, which ran annually for three years [1955-7], was a festival of the ravers. Bands and guitars and cossack hats and sheepskin waistcoats flooded out of the cellars and into the streets. It was so good that it had to be stopped, so good that it was in the first Soho Fair that the real spirit of Aldermaston was born'. Trad jazz bands provided the soundtrack on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to or from Aldermaston nuclear weapons base from 1958 (picture of dancers is from 1958 march).

In a 1962 New Statesman article, George Melly described 'An All-Night Rave at the Alexandra Palace', a "'trad' ball" where "Band followed band from 9.30 P.M. until 7.30 A.M. the next morning. The audience were dressed almost without exception in 'rave gear'... the essence of 'rave gear' is a stylized shabbiness. To describe an individual couple, the boy was wearing a top hat with 'Acker' painted on it, a shift made out of a sugar sack with a C.N.D. symbol painted on the back, jeans, and no shoes. The girl, a bowler hat with a C.N.D. symbol on it, a man's shirt worn outside her black woollen tights. Trad' dancing in the con­temporary sense is deliberately anti-dancing. When I first went to jazz clubs, there were usually one or two very graceful and clever couples. But today the ac­cepted method of dancing to trad music is to jump heavily from foot to foot like a performing bear, pref­erably out of time to the beat... Trad musicians have chris­tened these self-made elephants 'Leapniks'." The Acker referred to here was Acker Bilk, the jazz clarinettist and unlikely musical figurehead for late 1950s/early 1960s ravers.

The trad jazz scene as a youth movement was soon to be overwhelmed by The Beatles and everything that followed. In the semi-situationist journal Heatwave (1966), Charles Radcliffe included the ravers in The Seeds of Destruction, a ground-breaking survey of 'youth revolt':

"The Ravers... had some Beat characteristics and rather tenuous connections with the anti-bomb movement but their main preoccupations were Jazz clubs and Jazz festivals; this was the period when ersatz traditional (Trad) Jazz, as purveyed by Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and others was inordinately popular. Partly Trad's popularity arose in reaction to the decline of the small fifties Beat scene; it was easy to dance to and Jazz clubs were among the few places where teenagers could do more or less as they wished without adult interference. Partly it arose because the musicians did not take themselves too seriously and were often simply good-time Ravers".

Ravers' dress was a kind of "'music-hall-cum-riverboat-cum-contemporary-folk-art' with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol decorated bowlers, umbrellas, striped trousers, elegant jackets. The chicks had long hair, wore ban-the-bomb type uniforms (duffle coats, polo-neck jerseys, very loose around the hips, and jeans). The Ravers were, on the whole, distrusted by other groups with whom they came into contact; the Beats used the term 'Raver' derogatorily and the nuclear disarmers treated Ravers' 'superficiality' with superior amusement and occasional annoyance... The Ravers, as such, died with the 'traditional' Jazz boom but the 'Raver philosophy' continues and there are once again groups calling themselves Ravers. The term has likewise regained its approbatory meaning after the frequent critical use by the CND generation".

Here we have a phenomenon that was to re-emerge with 'ravers' from the 1980s onwards - the use of the term as a put down by the would-be serious minded.

The George Melly quote is reproduced from 'Revolt into Style: the pop arts' (1970); Jeff Nuttall from 'Bomb Culture' (1969). Image source: Science and Society Picture Library. For more on Heatwave, see the excellent Dancin' in the streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago. 2005

We would love to hear some first hand accounts of 1950s/60s raves - photos too would be great. If you were there why not leave a comment, or email transpontine@btinternet.com

Dancing questionnaire 1 - Neil Transpontine

I want this site to reflect people's personal experiences of dancing and musicking, so I've designed a short questionnaire which I've sent out to various people and which I will post as replies come back in. If you're really keen you can fill one in yourself and send it to me at transpontine@btinternet.com. You can also add another question of your own devising if there's something else you really want to say but can't squeeze into one of these questions! To pilot this I have filled it in for myself, Neil Transpontine.

Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I remember primary school discos in Luton. It was the 1970s and I won the best dressed boy competition (aged 11) – purple shirt with a big round collar, checked flared trousers, stack heels and a two tone suede bomber jacket (Robert Elms describes these ‘Budgie’ jackets in his book 'The Way we Wore'; Felt wrote a song about them). I remember trying to follow the girls' dancing moves, attempts at ‘The Hustle’ and kind of disco line dances. A few of us decided it was time extend our social lives beyond the confines of our own school, so we went to check out a disco at another local school. Dressed up and looking forward to a dance we were surprized to be set upon almost immediately and chased through the nearby Runfold Estate. Clothes, clubbing and running in the streets at the age of 11 - the pattern was set for the next 30 years.

What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?

My mum and dad met dancing at the California Ballroom in Dunstable – I guess that was pretty significant for me even if didn’t happen to me. I met my partner at the other great meeting place – work – but it was defininitely dancing and clubbing that brought us together from a drunken snog dancing to Chic in Upper Street after a Christmas party to several years clubbing all over London in the 1990s.

What’s the best place you’ve ever danced in?

Aesthetically, my favourite venue would be the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley (South London - pictured left), a wonderful old dance hall with velvet walls, chandeliers etc. In terms of the thrill of being there, I would say the M41 during the Reclaim the Streets party which closed down the motorway for a day in July 1996 - London Acid City – Our Time was Then.

You. Dancing. The best of times….

Hard to pin down one, but I suppose going to Club UK (in Wandsworth) with my new girlfriend (now wife) for the first time in 1994 would be up there. I can remember lots of details of the night – listening to a pirate station on the way out, J’s clothes, talking in the queue to some kids who’d done a bunk from the local children’s home to come out. Most of all I remember walking in and they were playing that Pigbag remix (Perfecto Allstarz – Reach Up), the whole place seemed to be exploding, everyone was dancing including the bar staff. Chemicals were obviously adding to the effect for me and most of them, but I also felt this sense both of instant community and continuity, as I’d seen Pigbag play this track live years before and had also seen and loved The Pop Group (Bristol post-punk agit-funkers) from whom Pigbag emerged.

You. Dancing. The worst of times…

Nothing terrible has happened to me personally, but in the early 1990s I helped put on a party at the 121 Centre in Brixton. There was a basement with a wooden staircase down to it. A guy fell straight from the top to the bottom, people carried him up (probably not the best thing to do in terms of first aid) but he died on the pavement outside – whether from the fall or that combined with drugs and alcohol I’m not sure.

Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?

After school and youth club discos I started out with post-punk gigs, getting my glasses smashed in the mosh pit at The Undertones (Aylesbury Friars), leaping over the barriers at the Albert Hall to get to the front when Echo & The Bunnymen played there (1983). Then on to anarcho-punk squat gigs, mid-1980s (Old Kent Road Ambulance Station, Kings Cross Bus Garage), rare groove/funk nights 1987/88 (Jay Strongman’s Dance Exchange at The Fridge in Brixton, PSV in Manchester), ‘world music’ clubs (Mambo Inn in Brixton, Whirl-Y-Gig in Shoreditch Town Hall), indie pop nights in the late 80/early 90s (Camden Falcon, New Cross Venue), clubs in West Belfast (Felons). Everywhere possible with increasing frequency in the 1990s from house music clubs (Club UK, Ministry of Sound, Leisure Lounge, The Gallery at Turnmills, The Cross, The Aquarium), trance and techno nights (Megatripolis at Heaven, Eurobeat 2000), drum and bass (Speed at the Mars Bar) to free parties/squats (Cool Tan and Dead by Dawn in Brixton, bus garage in Hackney, United Systems parties in Market Road, north London). The photo right is in Ibiza (where else?), 1995. Finally stopped for a breather due to children later in the 1990s, sporadic and eclectic dancing, DJing and musicking ever since, highlights in the last year including Norman Jay at Notting Hill Carnival and rediscovering dancing to indie pop at How Does It Feel to be Loved? in Brixton.

When and where did you last dance?

Sean Rowley's Guilty Pleasures at Everything Must Go in Soho, just before Christmas 2006. It was most people’s last day at work for a week or two, so it was like the Saturday night release feeling magnified in intensity, hundreds of people singing along to Carly Simon (‘I had some dreams there were clouds in my coffee…’) dancing on tables and in every available space. I started having this utopian fantasy about everyone deciding that they wanted to carry on like this all the time and refusing to go back to work after the break - a kind of disco general strike spreading across the planet.

You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?

Probably some epic house anthem, Scarlet Beautiful by The Beloved would certainly be up there as the song we played at our wedding. Your Loving Arms by Billy Ray Martin. Something like Joe Smooth ‘Promised Land’ or Bedrock’s 'For what you dream of' would also work. Or maybe ‘Walk away Renee’ (Four Tops). Or Belle and Sebastian’s ‘Boy with the Arab Strap’. Or…. Or….

Zazous: dancing under the Nazis in France

'Dancing, particularly upon Sundays, had been the rage among young people before the war, but after the Occupa­tion was banned both by Vichy and the Germans. The Germans were wary because such gatherings of young people might cause unrest. Vichy had other reasons: dancing was held to be indecorous when so many Frenchmen had been killed or were languishing in prisoner-of-war camps; it would encourage fraternization with German soldiers; it might promote promiscuity…Nevertheless, in early 1942 the prohibition began to be flouted. Cardinal Gerlier noted with regret that even some Christian families were infringing the ban, which he deplored because 'among all the different forms of recreation, dancing is the one that expresses joy most fully'. There was too much misery abroad and, he added in a reference to the Germans, it was wrong 'to dance under the gaze of those who observe us'.

Those ever-present 'observers' had lifted the ban in the occupied zone for their own troops by mid-1941 but had left the decision regarding French civilians to the Vichy authorities for 'if [they], in spite of the disgraceful defeat of their country, wish to dance, it is in the German interest not to prevent their so doing'. Since Vichy continued the prohibition, many private dancing schools, which were allowed, sprang up to circumvent the ban. Learning ballet and ballroom dancing was suddenly found to be a very popular activity. Measures were therefore taken to control the schools by imposing stringent conditions: not more than fifteen couples per session were allowed to take part; enrol­ments had to be for at least five sessions; apart from the dancers, only parents could be present; the sole musical accompaniment must be a piano or a gramophone; no drinks whatsoever could be served; advertising of classes was for­bidden.

The high fees demanded by the schools limited their clientele and frequently they were patronized by middle-class 'zazous', the contemporary equivalent of the 'teddy-boys' and their partners. Descriptions of this gilded youth vary. Simone de Beauvoir terms them rebels against the Revolution Nationale, wearing long hair 'a la mode d'Oxford', sporting umbrellas… and generally comporting themselves in an anarchic, Anglophile fashion… They affected an outlandish garb: the young men wore dirty drape suits with 'drainpipe' trousers under their sheep­skin-lined jackets and brilliantined liberally their long hair, the girls favoured roll-collar sweaters with short skirts and wooden platform shoes, sported dark glasses with big lenses, put on heavy make-up, and went bareheaded to show off their dyed hair, set off by a lock of a different hue. The 'zazous' used English expressions, read American literature, and delighted in crooning, in the style of Johnny Hess, 'Je suis swing, dadoudadou/ Dadou la. . .oua. . .oua.'

But the 'ploutocrato-zazous', the exponents of jazz, were not held in esteem by the extreme collaborationists. Vauquelin, of the Jeunesses Populaires Franchises, held them to be 'the victory of democratic besottedness and Jewish degeneracy . . . the product of twenty years of Anglo-Saxon snobbery on the part of decadents . . . the proof ... of the physical and moral degradation of a section of our young people'. Vauquelin's squads of bully-boys were ordered to 'get them'. Thus on June 14, 1942 the squads carried out raids at Neuilly, in the Quartier Latin, and on the Champs-Elysees, cropping the hair of any 'zazous' they could find.The police joined in the hunt as well.

Youth will none the less be served. Thus, as the war dragged on, the ban on dancing was increasingly disregarded and the 'bals clandestins' flourished. In the countryside the jeunesse Agricole Chretienne reported in 1943 that dancing was going on in almost every canton of the Rhone, not only in isolated barns and remote houses, but even in the small towns. In Paris students danced in bars off the Boul' Mich' and 'la jeunesse doree' in more sleazy establishments near the Etoile. Dancing, jazz, outlandish dress became marks of a veritable counter-culture of youth, one which differed from that of the Resistance because it was effete, but never­theless anti-killjoy, anti-prudish, and, in the final analysis, pro-Allied'.

Source: The Youth of Vichy France – W.D. Halls (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981)