25.03.1999

Cold War legacy

Phil Watson reviews 'Formation 60: modern jazz from Eastern Germany - Amiga 1957-69' (Various artists, Jazzanova Compost Records)

For those who think this review stands on the threshold of an elaborate cultural joke I will begin by quoting the liner notes: “The unique and refreshing vibes of these rare recordings from behind the Iron Curtain are always in our DJ boxes as they merge smoothly into the club sound of the 90s jazz movement.” That this turns out to be true will no doubt be bemusing to some people. For this crowd the fact that these tunes were initially released on Amiga, the German Democratic Republic’s state-owned record label, will be enough to damn it into obscurity. After all, it is simply inconceivable that communism can sponsor anything beyond the artistically banal.

The cultural history of the Cold War is often represented as the struggle of binary opposites: the eastern bloc with its emphases on tradition, folk sources and ‘realism’; the west with the themes of ‘freedom’, abstraction and the individual. It would be foolish to disown such a typology as a starting point, but when one comes to consider the creative products of this demarcation, reality becomes considerably more messy.

The same is true of the recordings collected here. All but one originates from the 1960s and it is in this era that the cultural opposition between east and west tends to founder, with both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’ subject to explosive social conflicts. It is in this social paradigm that particular art forms become vulnerable to re-elaboration, refracting that aesthetic experience back into social being (one only has to consider the shift in the west from abstract expressionism to pop-art).

The titles featured here give us some clues as to the nature of this shift. On ‘Chano’s track’ by Toby Fichelscher and Gunter Wilk is a tribute to Chano Pozo, Dizzy Gillespie’s percussionist. Similarly, the Modern Jazz Big Band 65’s ‘Kleines Lied für Eric’ pays due homage to Eric Dolphy. However, these are but subsidiary motifs. What is most revealing to the listener is the structure that these recordings seek to illustrate. On the first listen they appear almost too clipped and precise in their accents. In time the realisation dawns that this a masterly exploration of theme and improvisation, the two becoming interlocked, not in the cause of a bland exchange of equivalents, but of revealing their most sensuous characteristics.

The best exponents of this here are the Manfred Ludwig Sextet. The fact that the haunting melodies, ‘Scandanavia’ and ‘Gral’, use traditional German waltz forms in the pursuit of such innovation simply adds another dizzying contradiction, effortlessly surmounted.

Western jazz performers were faced with similar contradictions to those in the east. The ossification of bop into a ritual of theme-then-improvisation was running the risk of turning modern jazz into another avenue for abstraction. ‘Free jazz’ was one solution, but (and it is here that the purists will wince) it is the music of the American trumpeter Donald Byrd that immediately comes to mind.

Like the jazz musicians of the GDR, Byrd sought to break down the demarcations in bop. His solution was a turn to driving R’n’B rhythms that underpinned and nuanced his improvisations to an almost magisterial degree.

The answers posed by the recordings featured here are radically different in texture to those of Byrd, but they are rooted in a universal problematic that forces us to question the precise cultural legacy of the Cold War era.

Phil Watson