Jazz als Politikum? In Deutschland erleben wir gerade eine abenteuerliche Debatte um die soziale Widerstandskraft improvisierter Musik. Anders als in den USA, dem Mutterland des Jazz, wo die Geschichte der improvisierten Musik immer auch als Begleitmusik der afroamerikanischen Emanzipationsbewegung verstanden werden kann, ist der politische Charakter des Jazz in unseren Breiten höchst umstritten.
Und doch ließ es sich jetzt Bundespräsident Frank-Walter Steinmeier nicht nehmen, in einer ausführlichen Video-Grußbotschaft an die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Leipzig die Freiheitsidee im Jazz stark zu machen. Gerade in Zeiten fortschreitender Demokratiegefährdung gehe es darum, das freiheitlich-demokratische Lebensgefühl, wie es dem Jazz innewohnt, zu reaktivieren. Steinmeier verwies dabei explizit auf die „Jazzwerkstatt Peitz“, die tief in der ostdeutschen Provinz fast zehn Jahre lang bis zu ihrem Verbot 1982 durch die SED den Free Jazz als Medium eines utopischen Möglichkeitsraums erlebbar gemacht habe.
Als nationales Kulturgut geadelt
Wie passt das alles zusammen? Das sicherlich nicht selbstverständliche Bekenntnis eines Staatsoberhaupts zur Freiheitsidee des Jazz war während des dreitägigen Festivals „Störenfriede: Jazz, Protest + Revolution“ zu erleben, das die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in ihren Foyers veranstaltete. Grund für dieses in einer Bibliothek eher ungewöhnliche Event war der Erwerb des Archivs der „Jazzwerkstatt Peitz“ von dem Festivalmacher Ulli Blobel – jetzt als nationales Kulturgut geadelt.
It is thanks to the head of the German Book and Writing Museum in the parent Leipzig institution, Stephanie Jacobs, that the Peitz archive, which includes more than a thousand media items with its posters, program notes, photos, correspondence and audio resources, is now available for critical research . The collection not only sheds special light on the history of the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, it also shows paradigmatically which cultural practices are possible in autocratic systems.
A feeling of survival
The fact that such places of musical imagination, where ideas of freedom that were not part of everyday experience in the GDR could proliferate unhindered, could only be achieved with compromises can be reconstructed using the “Peitz case” as an example. Where an attitude to life of non-conformity – for many young people in the GDR at the same time a feeling of survival – flourished, where the “principle of hope” could take on a variety of forms, one inevitably had to come to terms with the cultural bureaucracy in some way. If, as was possibly also the case with Peitz, boundaries were exceeded in the cooperation with the state security, in most cases these taboo breaches served – as two high-profile panel discussions in Leipzig made clear – to negotiate new leeway with state power.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier and even more emphatically the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk therefore advocated “painting a historically accurate picture of the festival in the many subtle shades of gray” far from any cheap moral prejudice. The creation of the “Jazzwerkstatt Peitz” shows how changeable the history of jazz in the GDR was – fluctuating between prohibition and toleration, adaptation and protest, instrumentalization and promotion – and what impulses still come from the free jazz today. apologists go out.
I live high in a prefabricated building
As in football, here too “the truth is on the pitch”, i.e. in the concert. When the GDR jazz veteran Conny Bauer – he had given his first solo concert in Peitz in 1974 – tried out his polyphonic songs on the bulky instrument in the performance “Das Basstromonnen”, the aesthetic advances of GDR free jazz were unmistakable . Like his Frankfurt colleague Albert Mangelsdorff, Bauer was also able to create entire chord sequences on the actual melodic instrument early on. Today he also sends his minimalist lines through a looper and has conversations with himself. Sometimes bouncing in a cheerful, folkloristic manner, sometimes rumbling in a threatening, dull manner: Bauer enjoys the entire range of sounds and yet can hardly deny the secret romantic in him. The sampled credo “I live high in the prefabricated building” gave his furious program an almost tragicomic character!
The Wuppertal saxophonist, composer and arranger Wolfgang Schmidtke had previously made a music-sociological statement with a new interpretation of John Coltrane’s epochal album “Ascension”. Unlike the original, the famous five-note melodic leitmotif was varied here again and again. With more brass instruments than saxophones, less spiritually charged ascension than aggressive down-to-earthness, Schmidtke’s version is a model of energetic expressiveness. Cacophony breaks into the action again and again, then the sound chaos clears up and passages full of poetry become audible for moments, only to soon sink back into wild collective improvisation. The whole is everything here; the individual only experiences himself in the frictions and conflicts of the community.
Copy every bit of crap from the West?
Guitarist Joe Sachse, another GDR jazz icon, was represented in the twelve-act concert program scrupulously curated by Blobel. While he initially paid homage to the compositional magic of Carla Bley as a soloist, Sachse’s Beatles homage, together with drummer Ernst Bier, could be heard as a belated answer to an infamous dictum by Walter Ulbricht from 1965: “Is it really the case that we don’t give a shit , which comes from the West, now have to copy? We should put an end to the monotony of je-je-je and what it’s all called.”
The lovingly brutal alienations of Fab Four classics like “Hey Jude”, “Something” or “Here Comes The Sun” demonstrated with all their percussion drive on the electric guitar body: those who were said to be dead live longer. Like the beat, which was attacked by the GDR leadership, free jazz was also able to have a not-to-be-underestimated impact on the mentality of East German youth – as the Leipzig Festival has now made abundantly clear. How well it was suitable in detail as a projection surface for dreams of better times and wishes for the future can perhaps be seen in the German National Library’s upcoming programs on memory policy.
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