Those interested in twentieth-century German history have become used to seeing jazz, and the reception of jazz, used as important political signifiers in discussions of culture, and above all its relationship to dictatorship and oppressive discourses of nationalism. There have been a number of studies of jazz under the Nazis, and more recently of jazz in the Cold War context, sometimes seen as a prominent symbol of “Americanization.” This excellent book by Andrew Wright Hurley goes much further, examining the constantly changing place of jazz in West German culture from 1945 right into the 1980s. In so doing, it makes an important contribution to larger debates on “the constructedness and dynamism of culture and identity in the second part of the twentieth century” (p. 232).

Although this book may be read as a tribute to the extraordinary efforts and achievements of one man in promoting and publicizing the merits of jazz in a society burdened with the (partly) suppressed memory of Nazi intolerance and racism, it is anything but a naïve assertion of agency in cultural history. While documenting meticulously the work of Joachim-Ernst Berendt as director of jazz programming at the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden, author of the frequently reprinted Jazz Book, organizer of Berlin Jazz Days (and numerous other festivals), producer of 130 jazz records for Saba/MPS and for other labels, ambassador for German jazz in many parts of the world, and early champion of “world music,” Hurley pays close attention to the constantly shifting discursive fields in which Berendt operated and to the political and economic structures that affected the production and reception of jazz.

Hurley therefore presents a careful discussion not only of the relationships between jazz and dominant political ideologies, past and present, but a nuanced consideration of the changing place of jazz in polarized West German understandings of high and low culture. There is a fascinating section on what some saw as the “emancipation” of “European jazz” from its American roots and models in the 1960s, and the particular difficulties caused in West Germany by the attempts made by some musicians to place their jazz in fruitful relationship with traditions of folk-music. Having represented jazz as the new universal music in the 1950s and aware that “folk-music” in Germany was burdened with chauvinistic and völkisch resonances, Berendt argued, typically, that the era of nationalistic folklore was over and that jazz musicians could work with “global folklore” (pp. 97–98).

The discussion of European-American and intra-European tensions is followed by a thoughtful examination of Berendt's tireless efforts in the 1960s and afterward to create fruitful syntheses from existing jazz traditions and from music of other cultures around the world, from Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and Africa. Berendt's enthusiastic support for cultural hybridity and his belief in the utopian possibilities of this “world music” are contrasted with those of western critics who interpreted jazz collaborations with “Third World” musicians as acts of postcolonial expropriation and with the increasingly exclusionist attitudes of some black nationalists. By 1970 Berendt felt compelled to warn of “fascist tendencies” he detected in the “roots discourse” which he felt was “endemic throughout the ‘Third World’” (pp. 209–210). In the closing stages of the book, Hurley highlights the growing importance of Berendt's own “New Age” spirituality, as the former “Jazz Pope” found himself increasingly marginalized in the globalized jazz scene of the 1980s. One can only admire the analytical dexterity with which this complex interplay of musical, cultural, and political discourses is treated.

It will, I hope, not appear churlish to make two minor criticisms. The Harvard style of referencing used is cumbersome and results in far too many sentences that are interspersed with cryptic names and numbers in parentheses. More importantly, although Joachim-Ernst Berendt is at the center of this book's narrative, he remains curiously distant as a rounded human being. There are, every now and then, tantalizing references to his history before 1946, when he took up his professional career in jazz, to his sexual life, and to his financial circumstances, but his intellectual relationship with jazz is largely treated in isolation from these more personal details. This book is obviously not a biography in any conventional sense, but it does place one man at the center of its analysis, and it stresses, convincingly, his extraordinary influence on the development of jazz in West Germany. It would have been both interesting and relevant to have explored further the relationships between Berendt's personal life and his public role. Hurley mentions one such area, Berendt's sexual preference for “coffee-brown” women of mixed-race (p. 152) and his linked championship of collaborations between European and black musicians, but this topic surely merits more attention. Hurley gives only the barest details of Berendt's four marriages and relegates them to a footnote. Similarly, Berendt's background before 1946 as the son of a Protestant pastor who died in Dachau and as a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front, is touched upon in Hurley's narrative. Hurley provides a few more details in a “Chronology” appended to this. Yet Berendt's unwavering hostility from 1946 onward to Nazism, or anything that in his view smacked of it, is central to the book. It would have been fascinating to have heard more about his relationship with jazz before 1946, if only to have provided greater context for the analysis of later years. The interesting “Personal Reflection” on Berendt by Wolfram Knauer (the director of the Jazz Insitute in Darmstadt), which is appended to the book and appears to confirm Hurley's unwillingness to discuss such personal matters himself, only whets the reader's appetite further.

Nonetheless, this is an important and carefully crafted study that will be of interest to all readers concerned with the development of Germany after 1945 and its relationship with “otherness” in the period between the collapse of the “Third Reich” and reunification in 1989.