Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (With a New Chapter on the Final Years)

When the first intoxicating strains of jazz began to drift out of New Orleans and into the American mainstream, the people who created it could scarcely have predicted the enormous impact their music would have, not only in America but worldwide. Indeed, they could never have guessed that it would soon find its way to a most unlikely shore: the Soviet Union. Red and Hot tells for the first time the remarkable story of jazz in the USSR. Writing with style and insight, S. Frederick Starr uses this subject to present a fascinating “archaeological slice” of Soviet life from the earliest days of the Revolution to the present. Drawing on interviews with Soviet musicians, little-known recordings, and rare printed sources, Starr offers a look at the USSR “from below”—from the world in which real people live, rather than from the lofty perspective of Party ideologists. Since the Revolution, Starr shows, the Soviet government has decried the “decadent” cidture of the West, especially the popular culture emanating from the Unit- ed States. Yet, from the 1920s to today, jazz—a key product of that popular culture—has thrived in the Soviet Union, often winning devotees at the highest official levels. Consequently, the pendulum of government policy has swung back and forth over the years from denouncements of jazz as a bourgeois infection to celebrations of it as a great proletarian art form. Surprising anecdotes abound in this unique chronicle. Starr describes Stalin at a “dzhaz” concert in 1938; Soviet swing bands at the fighting front during World War II; a famous swing band in the Gulag Archipelago, comprised of prisoner-musicians who were punished for their “westernism”; “hippie” jazz fans of the 1960s; and the rock music explosion of the past decade, which the government has tried to co-opt and contain. The author’s conclusions are equally remarkable. We see that the Soviet Union is subject to influence from abroad and is not cut off from the outside as many people assume... that public opinion does exist there and makes itself felt at the uppermost levels of officialdom, influencing a policy that has been far from monolithic... and that American popular culture, for better or worse, represents a truly revolutionary force in the modern world.