“Jazz—Made in Germany” and the Transatlantic Beginnings of Jazz Diplomacy

Beyond romance

“…Before creating a narrative from the archive, the historian should unravel its conventions, criteria, and categories of classification, as well as the logics of its silences and incongruities (Stoler 2009). Some scholars have recently shown the multiple and contradictory perceptions of the US State Department-sponsored tours in Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany and Spain, revealing the frequent discrepancies between senders and receivers as well as the active role of local mediations and contingencies in jazz as public diplomacy (Hatschek 2010;Ritter 2013Ritter , 2018Dunkel 2014a;Iglesias 2017). Examining the relationship between the dissemination of jazz and the imperialism and propaganda of the United States relativizes the idea of jazz as 'a gift to the world' (Moreno 2016;Schenker 2019).…”