A People's Music

A Peoples Music presents the first full history of jazz in East Germany drawing on new and previously unexamined sources and vivid eyewitness accounts. Helma Kaldewey chronicles the experiences of jazz musicians fans and advocates and charts the numerous policies state socialism issued to manage this dynamic art form. Offering a radical revision of scholarly views of jazz as a musical genre of dissent this vivid and authoritative study marks developments in the production performance and reception of jazz decade by decade from the GDRs beginning in the 1940s to its end in 1990 examining how members of the jazz scene were engaged with (and were sometimes complicit with) state officials and agencies throughout the Cold War. From postwar rebuilding to Stalinism and partition to détente Ostpolitik and glasnost and finally to its acceptance as a national art form Kaldewey reveals just how many lives jazz has lived.