Jazz in Czechoslovakia

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Czechoslovakia's jazz roots were established by Jaroslav Ježek and Rudolf Antonín Dvorský in the 1920s and 1930s. Ježek's influence in this realm is particularly noted and by the time he immigrated to the United States in 1939, his compositions blending jazz and classical music were among the most popular music. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, however, jazz was banned and it was not until 1947 when the Australian jazz pianist Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band performed at a World Youth Festival in Prague that the jazz movement was revived.

When this movement began, the Stalinists were opposed to it, but as Josef Škvorecký writes in his The Bass Saxophone, “Its name was Dixieland. A type of the cannibal-music with roots so patently folkloristic and often (the blues) so downright proletarian that even the most Orwellian falsifier of facts would be hard put to deny them”.^[1] Similar to the situation during World War II, jazz was developed by Africans and as such, regarded as trash. As this movement grew, it became increasingly intertwined with the growth of the dissident movement.

Among the underground intellectuals, jazz was the genre that was most identified with. As the cultural scene in Czechoslovakia heated up, the jazz scene expanded along with it. In 1964, the First Prague International Jazz Festival was held, bringing hip bands of the time. When the Prague Spring occurred, jazz continued its success as an independent form that attracted the youth in all their rebellion. It was the music that was played at clubs and numerous individual bands formed. As one sees in Škvorecký's The Cowards, the day revolved around practicing jazz with the group and heroic daydreams. Even though the novel is set at the end of WWII, the books publishing in 1958 is clearly demonstrative of the excitement for jazz that is present at the time Škvorecký writes the novel.