Jazz in Czech Culture After World War One: Clash of Western Modernity with Central European Traditionalism.

Abstract

The paper deals with the reception of American culture in the interwar years, the time when the Czech cultural elites tried to abandon the traditional Central European patterns and reoriented themselves to embrace those of Western Europe and North America. The reorientation was accompanied by the discovery of exotic new genres like film and jazz. Perhaps surprisingly, the Western culture was enthusiastically received by the Left. The two prominent representatives of this direction were the left-leaning intellectual Emil František Burian and the Liberated Theatre (Osvobozené divadlo) with such individualities as the composer Jaroslav Ježek and its two main protagonists, playwrights and actors Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich. The paper focuses on the first Czech book on jazz music, E. F. Burian’s Jazz (1928), in which the author, apart from many misjudgements, constructed a novel model of culture hitherto unknown in Central Europe, the model that combined sports, social patterns, lifestyle, modernity, and left-wing politics. The difficulties with finding out what jazz really was are also treated as well as the factor of “technological reproducibility” (W. Benjamin). Lastly, the contribution of Vladimír Polívka, the leading informant of the Czech society about musical life in the United States in the interwar period, is assessed.

Keywords: jazz, American popular music, cultural reception, modernity, cultural Left, E. F. Burian, Jaroslav Ježek, Vladimír Polívka, age of technological reproducibility