| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

E. Taylor Atkins. Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 366. Cloth $64.95, paper $21.95.

To write the history of jazz in North America is a daunting task; to write it for countries like France, Germany, and Russia may be even more daunting. Jazz has been called the only true American art form ever, what with its roots in the cotton fields of the South and bordellos of the North, the Jews of New York or Chicago, or the Boston Irish. The multiethnic and multicultural mix of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century gave rise to jazz as we know it. It was the archetype and never had to worry about copying other music forms, such as the serious, classical genre (although a symbiosis was often enough tried: vide Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin, or Gunther Schuller). Internal politics passed it by or organically influenced it, often indirectly, such as jazz being played in the speakeasies of the 1920s because of Prohibition dictated by a narrow political class. 1

Jazz imported into France in the 1920s became a somewhat different product because aesthetics changed, even though politics seems to have had little or no bearing on it. In the Soviet Union, jazz, even if played felicitously as an art form, easily could turn into an elitist instrument of political dissidence, which threatened its existence. In Germany, the situation was similar after the Nazis took power in 1933; but it was also more complicated and even compromising, to the extent that the Nazi regime elected to make use of jazz music for purposes of inside and outside propaganda. . . .

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