German jazz
Even when under great criticism Bernhard Sekles initiated the first academic jazz studies anywhere at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in 1928 - the first courses in the United States were started in the mid-1940s.
In 1926, the radio began to regularly play jazz music, and as time progressed, by 1930, artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Paul Godwin's band, Red Nichols, and Peter Kreuder became popular with German audiences.
Theodor W. Adorno criticized the popular jazz of this period as predominantly functional music (Gebrauchsmusik) for the upper classes, having little if any connection to the African-American tradition.
After the Great War in Germany, Negrophobia coalesced with the preexisting anti-Semitism and flourished, especially since Jews were often depicted as having a racial affinity with blacks, possessing similar objectionable qualities.
Often, a great number of jazz band leaders were Jews, many from Eastern Europe, including Bela, Weber, Efim Schachmeister, Paul Godwin, and Ben Berlin.
Undoubtedly, sensuality has an affinity with dance, and it was pervasive in jazz and in the lyrics, but this became a means of judging it as void of morality, and even aesthetics, reduced to being inferior to "high German culture".
Those World War I veterans with Fascist pretensions and of the anti-Semitic Freikorps banded with other members in the National Socialist movement in denouncing Jews and blacks.
This burgeoning hatred of jazz and its subculture infected the entire Nazi party structure that Adolf Hitler and his followers were trying so desperately to erect.
It wasn't until 1931 that many crucial British and American jazz players began to leave the country as they faced increasing xenophobic harassment from colleagues and authorities.
Even people with a single Jewish grandparent like swing trumpeter Hans Berry were forced to play undercover or to work abroad (in Belgium, the Netherlands or in Switzerland).
Thus, for example, when jazz was finally prohibited by the Nazis at the beginning of the war, the clarinettist Ernst Höllerhagen left Germany for exile in Switzerland.
With the pressing wartime effort from 1941 to 1943, the Nazis accidentally fostered the jazz craze by forcing bands from Nazi-occupied nations in Western Europe to perform, bringing hot swing.
Several of Germany's most talented swing musicians, such as saxophonist Lutz Templin and vocalist Karl "Charlie" Schwedler, were active in a jazz band.
"[citation needed] Goebbels' propaganda was broadcast over pirated short-wave frequencies into America, Britain, and Canada in order to spread fear and weaken the morale of Germany's enemies (WFMU Staff).
The Nazi regime passed notorious edicts banning jazz records and muted trumpets calling them degenerate art or entartete Kunst.
There are also interviews with jazz drummer and guitarist Coco Schumann and pianist Martin Roman, who were saved in the camps so they could and had to play for SS officers and during executions in Auschwitz as part of the "Ghetto Swingers".
Ironically, many German prisoners first heard jazz in French camps, and then the occupying Allied forces introduced those records and sheet music into the country.
In the 1950s, following the model established in Paris, "Existential" jazz cellars (referring to the French philosophy) emerged in numerous West German cities.
In a short time it developed from a radio-band to a modern swing big band: Erwin Lehn and his Südfunk Tanzorchester (southern radio dance orchestra).
In order to raise the level of cultural recognition, concert tours by the German Jazz Federation (a merger of the clubs) were increasingly organised.
The quintet of pianist and composer Jutta Hipp played a central role in doing so; this group included the saxophonist Emil Mangelsdorff and Joki Freund, who also wrote instrumental compositions.
Whereas in America, the rhythmically accented and innovative Bebop enjoyed a heyday until the mid-1950s, this music---unlike the Cool Jazz that had also boomed in the 1950s---was a genre German musicians were unaccustomed to.
From 1958 to 1962 Kühn played (as the first German musician) with the orchestras of Benny Goodman and as a solo clarinettist with Tommy Dorsey - as replacement for Buddy DeFranco - one and a half years later.
Shortly thereafter, as if this appeal had been heard and had caused a new generation of jazz producers (such as Siegfried Loch, and Hans-Georg Brunner Schwer) to emerge, records by Klaus Doldinger, Albert Mangelsdorff, but also by Attila Zoller or Wolfgang Dauner came onto the market.
The best-known jazz groups in West Germany were the quintets of Albert Mangelsdorff (with Heinz Sauer and Günter Kronberg), Michael Naura (with Wolfgang Schlüter), and the quartet of Klaus Doldinger (with Ingfried Hoffmann.)
From the mid-1960s on, in the GDR, the trio of Joachim Kühn (who migrated to the West in 1966), Friedhelm Schönfeld, and Manfred Schulze found their own ways into free jazz.
At the same time, younger musicians like Herbert Joos, Alfred Harth and Theo Jörgensmann garnered public acknowledgment and aroused the attention of the jazz scene with their music.
In Frankfurt, a whole series of guitarists of international significance emerged, among them Torsten de Winkel, who should later appear on the world's stages with the likes of Pat Metheny and Joe Zawinul.
Economically jazz musicians in the GDR lived in comparatively secure or prosperous circumstances, because they worked in an environment of subsidized culture, and unlike their western colleagues did not need to follow the directives of the free market economy.
Over time, elements of jazz were increasingly integrated with other styles such as hip-hop, later drum 'n' bass and others, most prominently by the internationally successful duo Tab Two.
