This is the fourth volume in the “Jazz under State Socialism” series edited by Gertrud Pickhan and Rüdiger Ritter and published by Peter Lang. It consists of two theoretical chapters and seven articles dealing with specific countries (Poland, GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union).

“Jazz has never been just music” is the book's memorable opening sentence, and it conveys the authors' ambition: to explore the various dimensions of jazz as an aesthetic, cultural, social and political phenomenon, and to examine the multifaceted significances it acquired under state socialism. In their introduction, the editors offer a general analysis of the impact of jazz as a distinct musical idiom: “For admirers, jazz represented freedom” (7), whereas among its opponents, it elicited relentless hostility because it was “associated with sexuality” (7); it antagonized “intellectuals and composers active in the already established fields of music” (8); it “was seen as an American art form and a symbol of American dominance” (9); and it was “an aesthetic phenomenon” that deviated from established cultural norms (9). In the following chapter, Rüdiger Ritter describes the Cold War as the background against which jazz came to be perceived both as a domain of politicized cultural confrontations and also as an element of “cultural diplomacy” (in which, readers are reminded, Willis Conover was by far the most important participant). The bulk of the chapter is devoted to “the players” who shaped “the playing field of jazz” (17). The authorities never relinquished their determination to keep all artistic activities under firm control, but the strategies they deployed varied over time: periods when coercion was routinely used and punishments were meted out alternated with periods when efforts were made to placate and co-opt jazz fans. The musicians found themselves in a hybrid situation: obviously, they disdained the cultural dogmas underpinning “socialist realism,” but they also had to constantly collaborate with the communist establishment on which their careers depended. The listeners constituted an “imagined community” that embraced Conover's broadcasts as “part of their habitus” (34) and cultivated “the feeling of belonging” to “a global network” (35). While not ipso facto a dissident activity, the listening of jazz music was invariably linked to the effort to create “spaces of freedom which were beyond any kind of control” (36) and therefore contained an element of defiance in the face of a reigning ideological orthodoxy.

The two introductory chapters are informative, but the quality of the case studies that follow is uneven. Most chapters contain historical narratives from which readers will learn a lot about the arrival of jazz music in Europe in the 1920s–1930s, the ongoing interactions between jazz subcultures and the official cultural institutions of Marxist regimes in the post-war period, the impact of the concert tours undertaken by famous American musicians, the launching of jazz festivals and clubs in the “second world,” and the tension-prone ways in which jazz coexisted with musical genres like classical music, Estrada and rock amidst evolving local musical landscapes. Particularly interesting are the detailed analyses of jazz magazines—such as Jazz in Poland (Chapter 4), the bulletin of the Jazz Section of Czechoslovakia (Chapter 7), and Swing Club in Soviet Estonia (Chapter 9), which demonstrate that interactions within the jazz community were characterized by intellectual vibrancy and fervor.

At the same time, many of the case studies leave much to be desired. One problem is the quality of the English language: the volume is badly edited and contains numerous confusing passages and clumsy phrases. In terms of content, there is considerable overlap between the chapters: several of them cover the same empirical ground (Conover's radio program and Krzysztof Komeda's career) without adding anything new. Important questions are asked but never answered (why, in 1956, did the GDR communist authorities decide to put jazz activists on trial whereas their counterparts in Poland opted to launch an international jazz festival?). Finally, the authors seldom deal with the music itself. While it is true that jazz is not “just music,” it is first and foremost a musical idiom, and readers who approach this book with the expectation that they will find in it ample information about genres, musicians, recordings, discographies, and performances will be disappointed.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the case studies is that they rarely offer insights into the political meaning of jazz in state socialism. All authors agree that jazz had a political dimension, but their efforts to illuminate it yield results that are either trivial (the repeated observation that the relationship between jazz and politics was “complex”), or perplexing (as in the chapter on Hungary, where the dubious statement that “jazz lacked direct political significance” [114], is followed by the baffling claim that “the mythology of jazz” presents this music as grounded in “democratic values and socialist ideals” [115], and the puzzling contention that “modern jazz … embraces … the leftist critique of society” [123]).

The best case study is Peter Motička's chapter on Czechoslovakia. It focuses on the destruction of the Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Musicians' Union in the mid-1980s and reminds us that many jazz activists—like Tomáš Petřivý, Josef Kupka, Miloš Drda, and Pavel Wonka—lost their lives when a vicious attack on the subculture to which they belonged was unleashed. One of Motička's respondents points out that “Under the Bolshevik regime everything was ultimately politics” (167), which means that, “the complexity” of the jazz-politics nexus notwithstanding, the realities of state socialism were such that at any point in time the jazz community could be assaulted by the one-party dictatorship it lived under. As Motička demonstrates, jazz may have had many meanings under state socialism, but an essential truth about it was that people who loved this music found themselves in a precarious situation and were routinely made to suffer.