Jazz fanzines of the 1940s and 1950s

The hunger for a deeper look at the current popular music with roots in the West was strong among certain groups of young people in particular. However, no state-published magazine was allowed to meet these needs. Those interested had to help themselves through their own activities. Alongside the listening lectures pioneered by the publicist Emanuel Uggé (for more details see Vidomus Reference Vidomus2022) and the various events combining live music with explanatory commentary, such DIY consisted of typescript reproductions, distributed mostly in the form of letters, which can be described as fanzines.

This interesting phenomenon has its roots in the end of World War II, when a new generation of jazz enthusiasts emerged. Lubomír Dorůžka and Milouš Vejvoda exchanged letters with information about jazz news and realised that more and more people were interested. The letters evolved to the point of replacing the magazine. From September 1944 to February 1946, they named the exchange of letters Okružní korespondence (‘Circular correspondence’). Dorůžka (Reference Dorůžka1997, pp. 102–3) recalls that the letters were mostly copied outside Prague and that, by the end, the circulation reached almost 500 copies, mainly among musicians in amateur bands.

In the first post-war years, there were even attempts to establish a regular jazz magazine. First, there was an official newsletter of the ‘Gramoklub’ (the Gramophone Club): Zpravodaj Gramoklubu. After only three issues, a new state approved magazine, Jazz, replaced it. The older Uggé and younger Dorůžka joined forces to operate it. Unfortunately, the monthly journal was published only during 1947–8. After the communists took power in February 1948, it became ideologically undesirable, and jazz fans were left to themselves again.

According to the research of Petr Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, pp. 261–84), five jazz fanzines from the period 1944–58 have survived. The first, Oldtimer, was subtitled Časopis přátel pravého jazzu (‘Journal of the friends of true jazz’). The homemade newsletter of trumpeter Miloslav Klofanda focused on the revival of traditional jazz. Kotek and Hořec (Reference Kotek and Hořec1990, p. 150) reprinted its title page with a drawing of a black trumpeter, stating that only one single issue was produced in 1949.

The next in line, Boptime, was prepared by enthusiasts and music organisers Stanislav Titzl and Miloš Bergl. Between October 1951 and September 1952, 10 volumes were published. Titzl (Reference Titzl1967, pp. 27–9) later recalled the link to improvised sessions organised by the jazz double bassist Luděk Hulan and the inspiration by Okružní korespondence. The subtitle of the fanzine was ‘Music-Information Letter’. In both cases, the form of the letter was a cover-up manoeuvre for possible prosecution for illegal business or general dissemination of inappropriate information. Readers were sympathetic to this game, even though the letters had a cover picture with a graphic title and headings and were numbered like a regular periodical. Dorůžka and Poledňák (Reference Dorůžka and Poledňák1967, pp. 106–7) stated that it was a single copy, circulating among the leading Prague orchestras, and that musicians borrowed it from hand to hand. Titzl (Reference Titzl1967, p. 28) admitted to drawing on foreign magazines, such as Metronome or Down Beat; translations from them formed the core of the content and information about the domestic scene was more of a supplement. In the last issue prepared, a reader poll on the best domestic musicians was published.

We know about another jazz fanzine, Big Noise from new Brno, only from indirect allusions. Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, p. 293) deduced from a mention in a profile of Luděk Hulan (Titzl Reference Titzl1968, p. 298) that it was published by this musician when he was working in Brno's Gustav Brom Orchestra, separated from Prague's jazz life. He sent it out irregularly by post in several copies around the country and thus maintained contact with his Prague friends. It started in 1953 and probably ended in 1954. Independently of each other, fanzines with the short title Jazz also appeared. The first of these, surviving only in two issues, dated April and May 1952, was described by Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, p. 294) as typescripts of 16 and 19 pages and was probably A5 in size. The intended fortnightly publication bore the ambitious subtitle Časopis pro jazzovou hudbu a obory příbuzné (‘Magazine for jazz music and related disciplines’) and had a drawing of a musician on the cover. It worked engagingly with regular columns and genres such as interviews, surveys, reportage and reviews. With his reviews and annotations, he acknowledged his connection to foreign radio broadcasts, especially AFN Munich and RIAS Berlin.

Vidomus went on to generalise from the text some interesting findings about the wider semi-private jazz scene of the time. The anonymous writers (signed in the second surviving issue with unidentified ciphers) described regular record sessions, held weekly in apparently private settings, and even a fictional ‘concert’ compiled from popular recordings and a concert-listening session with a lecture by Emanuel Uggé. There was a sense of generational respect as well as ironic distance between the fanzine's authors and the elder Uggé.

A fanzine of the same name was also published in 1957–8 by cousins Otakar Kukla (1931–2008, later an art historian) and Zbyšek Sion (1938–, later a visual artist). It was associated with an informal ‘Gramoklub’ in Polička, East Bohemia, and in fact with a society of former grammar school classmates aged about 23–26 who met at home and listened to records. This fanzine was described by Vidomus also as a typescript, published in one or a few copies. It contained translations from the Polish magazine Jazz (founded in 1956) and excerpts from the older Czech legal magazine Jazz (the one that was published until 1948) as well as concert reviews. Zbyšek Sion illustrated the fanzine himself. Only two issues were published, and they probably did not survive.

The longest-running fanzine of this type was Jazz Express by Antonín Truhlář in Nová Paka (37 volumes in 30 copies plus transcriptions between 1955 and 1958). Kotek and Hořec (Reference Kotek and Hořec1990, p. 205) stated that it was distributed monthly in the form of a letter in several copies and was further rewritten and distributed by its subscribers. It was published irregularly. Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, pp. 288–92) drew attention to the socially and regionally more broadly defined readership of Truhlář's fanzine. The author even occasionally sent it abroad, especially to the GDR. As a young jazz fan, he had some experience of writing for the official press, such as the post-war magazine Jazz, Mladá fronta (‘Young front’), and others. According to surviving correspondence and private sources, Vidomus declared that, during the war, he had already been a subscriber to Okružní korespondence, to which he also occasionally contributed, and, according to some references, he knew the fanzines Boptime and Big Noise and maintained a lively correspondence with similar jazzophiles. As a precaution, Truhlář urged readers not to refer to the reproduction as a magazine to avoid possible persecution for disseminating illegal printed matter. Conversely, he alerted readers to the time and labour cost of the activity and encouraged them to make small financial contributions. Although the representation of authorial content gradually increased in the case of Jazz Express, in the case of Boptime, translations from foreign magazines were the basic means. Vidomus pointed out that Truhlář was closer to the German language circle of magazines (Jazz Revue, Jazz Podium, and Schlagzeug) and books (especially Das Jazz Buch by Joachim Ernst Berendt). A relatively large part was represented by translations from the Polish magazine Jazz.

Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, pp. 254–6) compared Czech fanzines from the end of the Second World War and from the communist era of the 1950s and found similarities; for example, both lacked expressions of political opposition and criticism. That is why he did not call them samizdat, which are assumed to be laden with connotations of political resistance and reflections of high culture. Even so, private publishers were coming into the field of vision of the state security, which was trying to gain, for instance, Truhlář as an informant about its contacts and to discourage him from further publishing the fanzine through intimidation. Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, pp. 298–303) documented these facts with analyses of contemporary police reports and official reports from 1959. As Kotek and Hořec (Reference Kotek and Hořec1990, p. 208) pointed out, at the same time, the number of semi-official bulletins of various newly emerging local jazz clubs was growing: the Brno-based Zpravodaj pro členy Jazz klubu, the Vsetín-based Svět jazzu, the Hradec Králové-based Zpravodaj pro taneční orchestry and the Pilsen-based Hlas mladých. The hunger for literature on jazz on the part of listeners and musicians, as well as the overflow of creative energy on the part of potential authors, grew stronger until it resulted in the preparation of the Sborník statí a příspěvků k otázkám jazzu a moderní taneční hudby (‘Proceedings of essays and contributions on jazz and modern dance music’), as the subtitle of the yearbook Jazz 58 (1958) showed. Under the organisational leadership of a young but experienced team of editors (Miloš Bergl, Lubomír Dorůžka, Jan F. Fischer, Jan Rychlík and Jaromír Hořec), a volume about the thickness of a book was created with various shorter and longer articles, among which was a text by the composer Jan Rychlík about a comparison of jazz and contemporary classical music and Dorůžka's review of Alfons M. Dauer's specialist German book Der Jazz. The initiative was literally ahead of its time – the entire print run of 15,000 officially legal copies was eventually condemned by the censors to be destroyed for unspecified ideological reasons. It was not until two years later that it was possible to renew the activity and to start a series of yearbooks under the title Taneční hudba a jazz (‘Dance music and jazz’), which continued until the end of the 1960s. The first issue of the series in 1960 updated the contents of the destroyed 1958 version.

The journalistic plurality of the 1960s

After the barren period of the 1950s, the journalistic pluralism of the 1960s developed. In the official magazines, in which jazz and modern dance music had been rather ignored or mentioned in a negative sense, such as the daily press or Hudební rozhledy (‘Music outlooks’), a space opened up for writing that was less subject to the pressures of censorship. The focus of the magazine Lidová tvořivost (‘Folklore creativity’), oriented towards amateur folklore ensembles, was proving to be outdated and exhausted, while there was no specialised periodical on contemporary popular music, which was booming in the context of small-form theatres. At the turn of 1962 and 1963, the magazine was transformed into two successors: Taneční listy (‘Dance lists’), dedicated to dance art, and Melodie (‘Melody’), which would soon become the flagship of Czechoslovak popular music journalism under Lubomír Dorůžka (editor-in-chief of the magazine since 1964), Stanislav Titzl, Antonín Truhlář and new names such as Zbyněk Mácha, Jiří Černý, Jaromír Tůma, J. K. Sýkora, Antonín Matzner and others. A. Matzner grew up in Pilsen's musical undergrowth of the early 1960s, where he also participated in the founding of jazz club and in attempts to publish its newsletter. In 1965–6, he worked as the manager of the Astoria Jazz Club in Bratislava and developed cooperation with a Slovak journalist, Igor Wasserberger. They collaborated on the first published specialised jazz dictionary, Jazzový slovník (‘Jazz dictionary’, Wasserberger Reference Wasserberger1965), and they later wrote a book of portraits of international jazz personalities (Matzner and Wasserberger Reference Matzner and Wasserberger1969). Although Matzner did not have an academic background, he was involved in the possibilities of professional jazz research (Matzner Reference Matzner1965) and wrote more extensive reflections on jazz in the contexts of contemporary classical music and art jazz compositions (the so-called ‘third stream’), painting, photographs, and poetry and prose (Matzner Reference Matzner1967) and in a social and philosophical context (Matzner Reference Matzner1969). He based his reflections on practical orientation in sound and notational materials and a very good knowledge of foreign literature. While Melodie also contained a small news and review function, it was the aforementioned yearbook Taneční hudba a jazz that was the vehicle for more general and longer works such as the latter two.

As far as jazz was concerned, the potency of Czech music journalism only emerged after the 1950s. Several musicians wrote books about jazz: composer and drummer Jan Rychlík (Reference Rychlík1959), clarinettist, saxophonist, composer and bandleader Karel Krautgartner (Reference Krautgartner1961), and multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator Karel Velebný (Reference Velebný1967). The musicologists Poledňák (Reference Poledňák1961) and Geist (Reference Geist1966) wrote concise overview books for the general public, and Dorůžka, with the writer Josef Škvorecký, prepared several publications with annotated sources and translations (Dorůžka and Škvorecký Reference Dorůžka and Škvorecký1961, Reference Dorůžka and Škvorecký1964, Reference Dorůžka and Škvorecký1966, and Reference Dorůžka and Škvorecký1970Footnote ⁴). One of the most important contributions was the book Československý jazz (‘Czechoslovak jazz’, Dorůžka and Poledňák Reference Dorůžka and Poledňák1967), mapping the history of the Czech jazz scene. The rapid development of research and journalism was accompanied by the development of international contacts, which resulted in the cooperation of some of the journalists with the jazz department at the University of Graz in Austria and the publication of some contributions in the yearbook Jazzrforschung/Jazz Research. In addition to Dorůžka and Josef Kotek – a specialised popular music researcher at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences – the aforementioned Antonín Truhlář began to publish extensively here, especially reviews of Czech publications on jazz.

Profiles of and interviews with popular singers began to appear in magazines for children and youths. For example, Pionýr (‘Pioneer’), published from 1953 on, moved into pop culture from the mid-1960s. It was renamed Větrník (‘Pinwheel’) in 1967 and returned to Pionýr in 1970. The weekly newspaper Mladý svět (‘Young world’), aimed at older youths, was also a witness to the new era from 1959, and, during the 1960s, it increasingly focused on popular music. From 1961 onwards, one of the greatest personalities of Czech music journalism, Jiří Černý, grew up there. In 1963–5, he was the head of the cultural section and participated in the beginnings of the poll for the most popular performers of domestic popular music, the Zlatý slavík (‘Golden nightingale’). After that, he was mostly a freelancer and his main medium was the magazine Melodie. With his wife Miroslava, he prepared the first Czech radio hit parade programme, Dvanáct na houpačce (‘Twelve on the swing’) in 1964–9, in which they included newly released and sometimes unreleased recordings. He wrote a book about the most important Czech singers (Černý Reference Černý1965) and, with Miroslava, the first detailed Czech response to the Beatles (Černý and Černá Reference Černý and Černá1966). Černý was also an editor or author of many sleeve notes for LP records. He was a typical example of an influential publicist of the era, holding an aesthetically and ethically clear line of opinion regardless of the social and political changes in society. His critical viewpoint was a defining one for many readers and listeners. All of the essentials of his rich journalistic work were later summarised in the six collections Jiří Černý … na bílém (‘Jiří Černý/Black/ … on white’, 2016–21).

Despite the good conditions for the development of journalism in the 1960s, the newly developing rock music lacked adequate coverage. Once again, fans had to help themselves. In 1965–6, young fans of the Olympik Theatre Club and the rock band Olympic, which often performed there, Vladimír Kouřil and Jan Okrouhlík, prepared four issues of a fanzine reproduced in 20–30 copies on a mimeograph called Fan-Club Olympic.Footnote ⁵ They sold the copies to the club's visitors. The main creators of the club, Miroslav Šimek and Jiří Grossmann, liked the reproduction and, in September 1966, they started to publish the print monthly under the banner of the theatre club Klub Olympik. Since the club hosted the elite of Czech rock music at the time, the fanzine became a sought-after specialist magazine about rock music, which is still a valuable source of much contemporary information. Similar attempts at rock fanzines were made by the operators of other newly emerging rock clubs. Michela et al. (Reference Michela, Lomíček and Šima2021, p. 41) recalled the cyclostyled monthly magazine of the Music f Club, the Beat Fan Club in Brno and Časopis skupiny Synkopa & Bes Clubu (‘The magazine of the band Synkopa & Bes club’) in Přerov, as well as attempts in other cities. In the end, only the joint efforts of several of them resulted in a proper magazine – the Prague Music f Club, Aro-cola Club and Beat Fan Club founded the agency Spojené pražské kluby – Spektrum (‘United Prague clubs – Spectrum’). They were patronised by youth organisations in the city districts of their headquarters, and, thanks to this, they were able to start publishing a ‘club magazine’, Pop Music Expres, in newspaper format in 1968. Despite its name, it mainly covered news from the world of rock music and helped to profile new faces in rock journalism, such as Petr Dorůžka, Ondřej Konrád, Jan Křtitel Sýkora, Jan Hrůza and Hynek Žalčík. In its second year, this ‘Bulletin of the United Prague clubs’ attempted to emancipate itself into a more general ‘monthly for pop music fans’, but political changes in the country after August 1968 led to its demise.

A similar fate eventually befell the promising and necessary fortnightly Aktuality Melodie, an independent supplement to the monthly Melodie, focused on mapping the dynamically changing contemporary pop music scene. After two years, the communist authorities, representing the already emerging post-August so-called normalisation, decided to abolish it. Sýkora (Reference Sýkora1968) still managed to prepare a small book of portraits of rock groups.

The occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops led by the USSR, starting on 21 August 1968, stopped the social and political development towards freedom of expression and pluralism of opinion. A 20 year period in which censorship, self-censorship and the fear of violating rules was restored under the dictatorship of the newly controlled political and cultural authorities. It was officially called ‘normalisation’ by its architects. However, the situation, including that in the field of writing about popular music, was definitely not normal. A variety of publishing platforms from the 1960s disappeared: Klub Olympik, Pop Music Expres, Aktuality Melodie, Taneční hudba a jazz and many others.

Do-it-yourself writing in the 1970s and 1980s

During the 1970s and the 1980s, Czech writing on popular music followed several lines, from highly censored magazines and books to sporadic underground ventures. Between the two opposite poles was a wide grey zone with more or less DIY outputs from various social organisations.

First to official writing. The newly established socio-political conditions resulted, among other things, in long-lasting rigidity and a lack of lively exchange and development in the field of culture and art. Under these conditions, researchers employed at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences or at universities paradoxically had enough time and ‘peace’ to complete the synthetic work begun in the 1960s. In addition to the dominant focus on classical music, they had a certain amount of consideration for popular music. Among its results are the volume ‘Music’ within the series Československá vlastivěda (Očadlík and Smetana Reference Očadlík and Smetana1971), Dějiny české hudební kultury 1890/1945 I and II (Smetana Reference Smetana1972 and Reference Smetana1981), Hudba v českých dějinách (Lébl Reference Lébl1983) and Hudební věda I, II, and III (Lébl and Poledňák Reference Lébl and Poledňák1988).

Melodie remained the only monopoly magazine for popular music, and L. Dorůžka had just left the position of editor-in-chief. The magazine, covering all genres, aimed to be as free as possible even with new editors. Alongside the skilful editors Čestmír Klos and František Horáček and the already established external publicists Petar Zapletal, Jiří Černý, Jaromír Tůma, Ondřej Konrád, Petr Dorůžka, Miloš Skalka and Vojtěch Hueber, other personalities appeared over time, especially Jan Rejžek, whose sharp condemnations of kitsch often caused controversy. A collection of his articles from 1974 to 1993 was published in the anthology Jak tohle vůbec můžete otisknout! (‘How can you even print this!’, Reference Rejžek2015).

According to Diestler's analysis (Reference Diestler, Vaněk and Krátká2014, pp. 298–306) the mainstream Czechoslovak popular music scene was gradually divided into a few clans, the leaders of which accepted the rules of censorship and, moreover, tended to abuse their ties to the communist authorities and controlled access to the labels, the capacities of which were very limited. The efforts of Melodie to promote mischief were eventually met with a radical solution by the higher authorities – the editorial office was dissolved in 1984. A loyal but totally incompetent management was put in charge of the magazine, so, for four years, the form and content of the magazine were something of a laughing stock. This unsustainable situation was only remedied at the end of 1988. Most of Melodie's contributors in the period 1984–8 took advantage of the offer of Gramorevue's editor Vojtěch Lindaur and wrote for this magazine, thus contributing to the improvement of this originally advertising publication of the Supraphon record company and publishing house. Gramorevue emancipated itself in that period and opened up space for relatively independent contributions.

The journalistic overload of the late 1960s gave rise to a new magazine in Brno, Opus musicum. Thanks to the fact that it was largely devoted to classical music and emphasised artistic design, it managed to continue publishing even during the period of the so-called normalisation. The Brno musicologist Jiří Fukač (Opekar Reference Opekar2022, pp. 217–21), who also published extensively in the magazine, was instrumental in its creation in 1969. The journal was and still is published six times a year in a modern design with a focus on music culture in a broader context. Jazz and popular music had an open door here, in both news and reviews of concerts, festivals, books and recordings and in longer, more general, articles. Ivan Poledňák and Miroslav Foret, a young sociologist from Brno, were particularly active contributors.

In the 1970s and 1980s, not many books on popular music were published by the big state publishing houses. Among the exceptions were several books by Lubomír Dorůžka, who managed to publish an engagingly written theoretical study about the tension between the industrial, the commercial and the artistic aspects of popular music, Populárna hudba. Priemysel, obchod, umenie (‘Popular music. Industry, business, art’, Reference Dorůžka1978), a brief overview of the development of the basic genres of popular music and their personalities, Panoráma populární hudby (‘Panorama of popular music’, Reference Dorůžka1981), and the monograph of the composer Karel Vacek (Reference Dorůžka1984). To this brief overview can be added the book for young people, Hudba černá a bílá (‘Music black and white’) by Z. K. Slabý (Reference Slabý1984), which briefly explained the development of world jazz, supplemented by a small photo dictionary of Czechoslovak jazz. Then there was a monograph about one of the most important personalities of that time, the flautist, saxophonist and composer Jiří Stivín, written by Ivan Poledňák (Reference Poledňák1989). Last but not least, let us recall the important work on the Encyklopedie jazzu a modern populární hudby (‘Encyclopedia of Jazz and Modern Popular Music’), to which both academic scholars and a broad front of publicists working outside academic institutions have contributed. In addition to the volume with subject entries (Matzner et al. Reference Matzner, Poledňák and Wasserberger1983), three biographical volumes were published by 1990.

Prior to 1989 honest memoirs by musicians could only be published in exile. Josef Škvorecký, a writer whose stories often revolved around jazz, founded Sixty-Eight Publishers in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. Memoirs of two musicians of the swing era who went into exile after February 1948 were published here. The swing pianist, composer and lyricist Jiří Traxler (Reference Traxler1980), who lived in Edmonton, Canada, wrote his memoires. In addition, swing accordionist and bandleader Kamil Běhounek (Reference Běhounek1983), who settled in Germany, wrote his confessional memoirs.

The unhealthy political situation of the 1970s and 1980s pushed some Czech artists, especially rock musicians and folk singers–songwriters into completely unofficial positions. The Czech underground was born. Its legacy has been dealt with in the most detail by Martin Machovec (Reference Machovec2008, Reference Machovec2019) and Jaroslav Riedel (Reference Riedel2016). In addition to concerts and recordings, literary works, exhibitions and performances, the Czech underground had its own written reflection. In accordance with Vidomus (Reference Vidomus2024, p. 256) and Karel Šima I will refer to the output of the underground by the word of Russian origin – samizdat. Unlike a fanzine, which was produced in an apolitical circle of fans of a particular musical genre, ‘samizdat was viewed presented clear political positions and featured mostly intellectually ambitious highbrow content’ (Šima Reference Šima2022, p. 279). Machovec (Reference Machovec2019 pp. 185–211) analysed the samizdat literature of totalitarian Czechoslovakia, including the most influential text defining the Czech underground, ‘Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival’, written by Ivan Jirous in February 1975 (Jirous Reference Jirous and Špirit1997, pp. 171–98). The concept of the American underground was extended by Jirous to more general positions in the conditions of communist Czechoslovakia

Ivan Jirous characterised the goal of the underground in the West as to destroy the establishment. In contrast, he believed that the goal of the underground in the Czechoslovak country was to create a second culture, utterly independent of official communication channels, social appreciation and the establishment's hierarchy of values. In 1973, Ivan Jirous and the Plastic People of the Universe started to be associated with other supporters with a similar approach to the possibilities of self-realisation within the communist society. His distance from Jirous's conception of the underground, the representatives of which ‘respect nothing but themselves and their opinions’, was expressed in 1975 by the artist Milan Knížák, whose ensemble Aktual otherwise naturally fit into the underground context (Opekar Reference Opekar2020b, p. 20). In his open letter ‘Avantgarda jako teror (Dopis všem, co znají okruh kolem Jirouse a také mne)’,Footnote ⁶ he stated, among other things: ‘I am happy that these people do not have power, […], if they came to power, I would be (and probably not only me) sentenced to life imprisonment’.

Some other activities, at the time concealed from the wider public or scattered among a few individuals, were reported in files published after 1989, for example the so-called Mařenická kniha (‘Mařenice book’), an artistically conceived diary manuscript by the underground poet and performer Pavel Zajíček between 1973 and 1975 from the village of Mařenice, where he worked with several friends. It was completed and first published as a samizdat in 1977, not long after Zajíček's return from prison.Footnote ⁷ It was a handmade, large-format samizdat conceived as a book artefact and contains 23 pages. Valenta (Reference Valenta and Kudrna2019, pp. 54–69) described it as a surrealism-influenced collage of texts, colours, visual elements, photographs and small objects (glued fabrics, nails, stone fragments and other small objects). Another, more generally important, contemporary document is the so-called Hnědá kniha (‘Brown book’), which is a collection of texts concerning the prosecution of dissidents. Its first publication dates back to the end of 1976, when Jaroslav Kořán and Vendelín Komeda published a samizdat collection of documents about actual court proceedings and their responses.Footnote ⁸

The unofficial activities culminated in three editions of secret festivals of the second culture in 1974, 1976 and 1977 and in quite a large distribution of private recordings on cassette tapes during the 1980s, many of which had individually hand-painted covers with text attachments. There were even numbered editions (Petr Cibulka's S.T.C.V. and Mikoláš Chadima's Fist Records), which were copied for an ever-growing number of interested parties. Reflections on the underground culture found an important platform in 15 editions of the unofficial, secretly produced, magazine Vokno, published between 1979 and 1989 by František ‘Čuňas’ Stárek, Silvestra Chnápková and Jiří Němec. According to the proceedings of Alternativní kultura (Alan Reference Alan2001, pp. 187, 189, 191, 198, 479), the samizdat Vokno was distributed to all major cities in Bohemia and Moravia and several copies were sent to Slovakia. The circulation ranged between 350 and 380 copies, which were read by about 7000 readers. Vokno inspired the creation of the other underground periodical Revolver Revue, and during the 1980s, the journals also provided space for controversies between these communities, for example between Ivan Jirous and Mikoláš Chadima or between Egon Bondy and Alexandr Vondra with the participation of Ivan Lamper. The magazine Vokno even had separate supplements. A leaflet periodica, Voknoviny provided up-to-date information about planned cultural events such as concerts, exhibitions or festivals and repression of the underground from 1987. Between 1987 and 1989, 19 issues of Voknoviny were published.

Next we move to the semi-official publishing activities of the normalisation period. One of the most important roles in this respect was played by the ‘Jazzová sekce’ (Jazz Section). It was founded in 1971 as a branch organisation of the ‘Svaz hudebníků’ (Musicians Union). All of its publications were intended for the internal use of the members of the association and were not subject to the same censorship processes as the officially published literature. One of the most notable was the Jazz Bulletin. A total of 28 issues including two double issues were published between February 1972 and July 1980. From its initial focus exclusively on jazz, the bulletin gradually responded to readers’ demand for texts on new and avant-garde trends in other artistic fields. The Jazz Bulletin eventually evolved into a more broadly focused cultural magazine, with jazz rock, alternative rock, literature not available elsewhere and experimental theatre. In addition, there were book editions, stand-alone publications, and attempts at other new magazines.

Another periodical was the news bulletin 43/10/88, published from 1979 to 1988; other publications were non-periodicals, including a single issue of an intended periodical, Dvanáctka, on blues and traditional jazz (1983). The range of contributors grew from an expanding base of active members and sympathisers – mostly amateur journalists and photographers. Among the writers on jazz, for example, Vladimír Kouřil stood out, but he also wrote a brief history of Czech rock ’n’ roll (Reference Kouřil1981). Kraus and Šonka (Reference Kraus and Šonka1981) prepared a book of photographs and translated texts about John Lennon. Among the authors writing about genres other than jazz, Josef Vlček was prominent. He contributed to the bulletin and prepared separate explanatory publications: Punk Rock (a text of his lecture at the ‘Divadlo hudby’ – Theatre of Music on 19 May 1978), Ambientní hudba a insdustriál (‘Ambient Music and Industrial’, Reference Vlček1987), the three-volume dictionary guide Rock 2000 on foreign rock bands (Reference Vlček1982, Reference Vlček1983a, Reference Vlček1984) and Rock na levém křídle (‘Rock on a Left Wing’, Reference Vlček1983b) – an apology to the new wave music by which the Jazz Section reacted to the destructive campaign against young new wave rock bands. Josef Vlček also expressed the basic ideas, defining its content and scope, in a 21-point text, Úkoly české alternativní hudby (‘Tasks of Czech alternative music’), published as an enclosure to the programme of the 9th Prague Jazz Days at the beginning of November 1979. Vlček stated that ‘alternative music is a current that seeks to create distinctive music beyond the commercial and aesthetic dictates of the media’. He sharply contrasted it with the character of normalising pop culture: ‘the artistic norms of our media in the entertainment industry are a badly disguised cloak of self-interest, hypocrisy, corruption, narrow-mindedness, conservatism’. He elevated the pursuit of originality, spontaneity, quirkiness and sincerity above technical ‘prowess, perfection or proximity to modern jazz or classical music’. He encouraged musicians to record their own music on tapes or cassettes instead of gramophone records, the production of which was controlled by state record companies and inaccessible to most alternative musicians. One of the musicians of the alternative scene, a self-taught connoisseur of Eastern currents of thought, Vlastimil Marek (Reference Marek1985 and Reference Marek1988), expanded the scope of the Jazz Section to include insights into the music of oriental countries. The Jazz Section also published anthologies, catalogues and publications in the field of visual arts, literature and theatre that were not available elsewhere.

Some Czech jazz fans criticised the Jazz Section for deviating from jazz, but its representatives perceived the term jazz to refer to the whole interesting contemporary culture. The activity of the Jazz Section became a thorn in the side of the communist regime, so it variously strictly controlled, limited and prohibited its activity. Its activities were frozen after 1980, and its leading activists ended up in prison after purposefully fabricated trials.Footnote ⁹ One of the last efforts at self-defence was the publication of Jací jsme (‘Who we are’, Jechová Reference Jechová1986), which generalised the results of a survey of members published in the newsletter in 1984. These results revealed an assessment of cultural events and the background for the development of jazz and other genres that was quite different from the official state one. The booklet also provided a complete overview of the Society's 15 years of activity, including a list of events and publications. As summarised by the Danish historian and translator Peter Bugge (Reference Bugge2008, p. 282), thanks to its legal status, the Jazz Section could reach a wider audience than was possible just for underground or samizdat music. For over 10 years, the Jazz Section taught dozens of amateurs how to work professionally and independently in the sphere of culture and offered access to otherwise confidential information for thousands of people. In 1983, a new organisation outside the structure of the Musicians’ Union, the Česká jazzová společnost (Czech Jazz Society), was founded. The society attracted many traditional jazz lovers who could not reconcile themselves with the avant-garde and rock profile of the Jazz Section. The society started to publish its own large bulletin, Akcent, in 1987 and issued eight volumes until 1990. Among the contributors were experienced jazz authors Aleš Benda, Antonín Matzner, Vojtěch Hueber and others.

Under the umbrella of the Union of Musicians, another section emerged in 1977 – the ‘Sekce mladé hudby’ (Section of Young Music). It started to organise concerts and workshops (for instance a workshop on music journalism) and issued a journal and publications. Between 1979 and 1982, eight issues of the magazine Kruh Footnote ¹⁰ (‘Circle’), in the period 1981–1985, 20 issues of the newsletter Členské informace Sekce mladé hudby Footnote ¹¹ were published. Among the authors were Ladislav Zajíček, Ondřej Konrád, Jan Rejžek, Jiří Vejvoda and Jiří Černý. Among the publications were a book of translations of texts about John Lennon (Zajíček Reference Zajíček1982), memoirs of drummer and bandleader F.R. Čech Z mého života (‘From my life’, Čech Reference Čech1983) and a book by Petr Dorůžka on Frank Zappa, Šuplík plný Zappy (‘A drawer full of Zappa’, Dorůžka Reference Dorůžka1984). Participants in the music journalism course prepared in 1984 a samizdat collection of their works entitled Špaček (‘Starling’). Only about 20 copies were distributed to musicians and publicists. Its second issue was to be dedicated to the Czech new rock wave scene, and the authors’ collective was finally persuaded to prepare the texts for official publication by Panton. This eventually happened, although the manuscript waited several years for publication under the title Excentrici v přízemí (‘Eccentrics on the ground floor’, Opekar and Vlček Reference Opekar and Vlček1989).

In 1981–3, another section with a different founder and place – the ‘Folková sekce Klubu mladých při Domu kultury v Ostravě-Porubě’ (‘Folk Section of the Youth Club at the House of Culture in Ostrava-Poruba’) – prepared several issues of the Bulletin Folkové sekce (‘Folk Section Bulletin’). It produced texts about local festivals and other events, short reports, a survey and interviews from the pens of authors such as Milan Kaplan, Zlata Holušová, Jiří Krátký, Karla Václavíková and Petr Vaněk. At the end of the 1980s, several issues of a fanzine called Folkové noviny were published in Brno, edited by Michal Přibáň, later a literary historian and editor, among others the head of the authors’ collective of Český literární samizdat (‘Czech Literary Samizdat’, Přibáň Reference Přibáň2018). Unofficial writings of the trampFootnote ¹² movement and song devotees were studied by Petr Náhlík (Reference Náhlík2017). He also pointed out examples where fanzines and club magazines initiated the creation of regular magazines as early as the 1960s (Kompas, Tulák, Gagarinec, Kaktus, Březová kůra and others). Even in this case, however, they were banned at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s and the fans were left with fanzines again (Náhlík Reference Náhlík2017, pp. 226–7). Náhlík mentioned Stanislav ‘Houla’ Zárybnický as its first creator in the normalisation period: Dým (1972–80). Zárybnický was also one of the editors of the official magazine Portýr, published since 1970 at the ‘Porta’ festivals of country, folk and tramping music. When censorship crackdowns increased, he began privately publishing the samizdat Poportýr (1981–8), in which he disseminated articles that had been deleted (Náhlík Reference Náhlík2017, p. 230). He was also one of the enthusiasts who distributed recordings, transcribed song lyrics and entire songbooks.

Another example is the newsletter for fans of the ‘Semafor’ theatre and its work, in which popular songs played a crucial role. The so-called ‘Jonáš klub’ lasted until 1967, when the ‘Klub spřízněných duší divadla Semafor’ (Semafor Theatre Soulmates Club) was founded in Prague. The minor-form theatre ‘Semafor’, its main authors Jiří Šlitr, Jiří Suchý and Ferdinand Havlík, and their fans and supporters were close to swing and jazz but also to beat or folk music. Throughout its existence, it published a newsletter irregularly but successfully as well as undertaking diverse publishing activities, like books with song lyrics. Texts that would not have passed the censorship of the official publishing house could be published here, and many publicists gratefully accepted the opportunity.

Občasník was a Beatles fan club fanzine. The content consisted, among other things, of extended articles based on compilations of foreign sources and emphasising historical and discographical issues. Zappostrophe was again, for a change, a printed publication prepared by the Frank Zappa fan club based in Brno for its members from 1986. Jan Blüml (Reference Blüml2020, p. 21) assessed:

From a different barrel, we can mention for example Fonogram (‘Phonogram’), the newsletter of the ‘Svazarm’ gramophone club, founded in 1977 and active at least until 1987. This included exchange of information of a technical nature concerned shellac records but also their contents. The specific music scene of one Prague locality, Hanspaulka, genre-oriented around blues, soul, folk rock and rock, also spawned its own homemade fanzines. Some of them were related to more general community activities, including sports (Posel záhrobní 1971, ABN 1973–82, Dynamit 1973–74 and Pišva 1974). The music was mostly devoted to Lógr (meaning the sediment that remains in a mug of coffee prepared by pouring over ground coffee). Lógr was disseminated between 1977 and 1983 and had no official institutional patronage. Similarly, the fanzine Za 2 piva, subtitled ‘Dependent Music Magazin’, was published between 1988 and 1991 and then merged with the new official UNI magazine, published by one of the Jazz Section's successor organisations, Unijazz. The amateur typographical fanzine Druhá strana (‘Second Side’) had a rock orientation, and three issues survive from 1985 to 1986.

We can conclude the overview of Czech semi-official writing on popular music with a few publications, which were permitted officially, only their distribution was restricted. Some publications emerged under the auspices of a youth organisation, encouraged by the Rockfest festival project, held in the second half of the 1980s through the ‘Socialistický svaz mládeže’ (Socialist Youth Union): the Profiles of Rockfest 1986–8 and Rocknoviny managed in 1989–90 by Jaroslav Špulák. Another official state organisation that sponsored some new publications was the ‘Ústav pro kulturně výchovnou činnost’ (Institute for Cultural and Educational Activities). For example, it published the periodical Rock Revue from 1989 and a year earlier it had published Josef Vlček's small dictionary of rock genres, Rockové směry a styly (Reference Vlček1988, ‘Rock Directions and Styles’).

From the historicisation of popular music to popular music in historiography

In November 1989, the communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia, as it did in other countries of the former Soviet bloc. After the Velvet Revolution, as it was called, the country embarked on a democratic path. Journalists and writers could publish without censorship, various publishing houses were founded and many magazines were created. Of course, the possibilities were not unlimited, especially when it came to issues of financial complexity and project returns.

The prestigious magazine Melodie was bought by a new agency established by the famous singer Karel Gott and the pop music manager of the previous normalisation era František Janeček. Melodie gradually lost its importance until it finally disappeared completely at the end of the decade. Radek Diestler (Reference Diestler2023, pp. 95–6) wrote about the beginning of the decade: ‘The 1990s were invaluable for those who wanted to read, and therefore write, about music. Not only for the rich bounty of primarily musical reading. A great deal of space was devoted to music topics in the social weeklies, led by Reflex [….] Each newspaper had its “pop editor” who looked to create an ochre of freelancers’. However, this situation gradually worsened to the disadvantage of specialised music magazines, the sales of which fell, especially after 2000.

The most important journalists of the time were concentrated around the new magazine Rock & Pop, which was started immediately in 1990. Rock & Pop was founded with the intention of publishing a weekly newspaper. However, it began cautiously as a fortnightly publication and eventually economic and operational difficulties forced it to become a monthly one. The rockier Bang! started as a weekly, but even that did not last, and after various changes including name changes – Big Beng from 1996, it ceased publication in January 2023. Diestler also paid attention to rock fanzines, the boom of which did not end after 1989 but instead peaked. Many fanzines transformed into legal magazines but usually not for a long time (Diestler Reference Diestler2023, pp. 105–9; see also a chapter in the book by Michela et al. Reference Michela, Lomíček and Šima2021, pp. 69–116). An example is the monthly Rock Report, later Report, now just the online iReport, which began as a heavy metal fanzine and focused on a wider range of rock music with overlaps with electronic music and hip hop, published between 1990 and 2010. Spark magazine, focusing on the hardest genres of rock music, has been published since 1992.

Specialist magazines for other genres emerged; specifically, Folk & Country appeared immediately in 1990, Muzikus concentrated on musical instruments and other equipment for musicians appeared in 1991, magazines devoted to electronic dance music started with Trip2House in 1996, which transformed into Trip in 1998 and later into Tripmag in parallel with Bassline (1999), and finally the hip hop magazine Bbarák commenced publication in 2001. The magazine Harmonie (‘Harmony’), newly established in 1993, regularly dealt with jazz and world music alongside classical music and is still published today. Popular music of all genres was also covered by the monthly Hudební rozhledy (‘Music outlooks’), traditionally focusing mainly on classical music and ending in 2021. The active successor of the Jazz Section, which was backed by a long series of concerts, festivals and the UNI monthly magazine with overlaps with literature and other fields, is most likely to be considered the Unijazz association, led by Čestmír Huňát. Furthermore, the monthly Fullmoon, published since 2010, has overlaps with film, design, comics and so on in addition to contemporary music. Diestler commented on the fundamental transformation of paracultural studies after 2000: ‘At the end of the millennium, music journalism entered the internet. Leaving aside the web versions of established print titles, […] several servers emerged that soon created a counterbalance to the ‘brick and mortar’ magazines and fanzines and, especially in terms of responsiveness of news service, surpassed them: Decibel, Freemusic, Musicserver, Techno.cz (Diestler Reference Diestler2023, p. 38).

After the Velvet Revolution, it was possible to publish various books of memoirs or retrospective interviews without censorship. Readers were most excited about those on rock and underground: Hlavsa and Pelc (Reference Hlavsa and Pelc1992) about the group Plastic People of the Universe, Chadima (Reference Chadima1992) providing a testimony to the alternative rock of the 1970s, Hruška (Reference Hruška1999) on the history of the unofficial scene in the region of Valašské Meziříčí, Topol and Weiss (Reference Topol and Weiss2000) about underground writer and lyricist Jáchym Topol, Hajniš (Reference Hajniš2003) about the band Primitives Group, Odvárka's (Reference Odvárka2003) contribution to the stories around the Plastic People of the Universe, Vondruška (Reference Vondruška2005) on the group Umělá hmota, Rössler's (Reference Rössler2009) memories of life in the Czech underground of the 1970s, Michl's (Reference Michl2012) stories about the groups Umělá hmota and DG 307, Pospíšil and Jurásek's (Reference Pospíšil and Jurásek2015) stories about the groups Garáž, Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307, Smetana's (Reference Smetana2015) book capturing experiences in underground communities around groups such as Primitives Group, DG 307 and Plastic People, Neduha's (Reference Neduha2016) life story of musicians of folk and alternative music, including an Austrian exile, and others. For further information see also Opekar (Reference Opekar2020b, pp. 8–9).

The jazz scene also produced a large number of books focusing on memoirs, interviews or monographical treatments of personalities: Dorůžka reported interviews with Czech musicians in Reference Dorůžka1992, presented personal memories in 1997, published a monograph with M. Ducháč on swing and popular music bandleader, Karel Vlach, in 2003, and published personal impressions in 2004; Zapletal et al. (Reference Zapletal, Majer and Brom1994) compiled a monograph of jazz bandleader Gustav Brom; two views were published on the activities of the Jazz Section, by Srp (Reference Srp1994) and Kouřil (Reference Kouřil1999), then a dialogue between Kouřil (Reference Kouřil2006) and jazzman Milan Svoboda; Barek (Reference Barek1999) wrote about the life and career of versatile guitarist Jiří Jirmal; Smetáček (Reference Smetáček2006) published the memories of a clarinettist and leader of an influential traditional jazz group; Suchý (Reference Suchý2006) wrote a monograph of swing singer Inka Zemánková; Polák (Reference Polák2006) presented a monograph about swing composer and bandleader Jaroslav Malina; Poláček (Reference Poláček2017) published a jovial interview with the trumpeter Laco Déczi; Konopásek and Plocek (Reference Konopásek and Plocek2018) wrote the memoirs of a flute and baritone saxophone player; and Müller (Reference Müller2020) published a monograph on the interwar bandleader and publisher R.A. Dvorský.

Several biographical books based on interviews with musicians such as Vladimír Mišík, Vlastimil Třešňák and Luboš Andršt were written by the publicist Ondřej Bezr (Reference Bezr1999, Reference Bezr2007 and Reference Bezr2020). The phenomenon of folk songwriting was the subject of a book by organiser and journalist Michal Konečný (Reference Konečný2016 and Reference Konečný2018), singer-songwriter Jiří Vondrák (Reference Vondrák2004) and Vladimír Vlasák (Reference Vlasák2008), who went from the samizdat Špaček and the Jonáš Klub Newsletter through Melolodie and Rock & Pop to the brisk daily journalistic work at Mladá fronta Dnes. Three books by L. Dorůžka (Reference Dorůžka1990, Reference Dorůžka2002 and Reference Dorůžka2010) covered jazz history: a brief survey of the international context in the first one, a detailed view of the Czech music scene in 1968–89 in the second one and a look at the jazz scene after 1989 in the third one. It could be considered as a continuation of the historical description of the beginnings of Czech jazz by Dorůžka and Poledňák (Reference Dorůžka and Poledňák1967).

The publicists Ondřej Konrád and Vojtěch Lindaur (Reference Konrád and Lindaur1990) published a basic historical overview of Czech rock based on their earlier magazine texts from the late 1980s. Separate publications were also issued for the harder branches of rock (Svítivý Reference Svítivý1991; Korál and Špulák Reference Korál and Špulák1993; Fuchs Reference Fuchs2002) and a special national rock monograph was published by Slovak colleagues (Jurík and Šuhajda Reference Jurík and Šuhajda2008). The unique vinyl discography of Czechoslovak rock, Československý rock na gramofonových deskách 1960–1997, was the result of many years of passionate collecting and dedicated diligence of the authors Balák and Kytnar (Reference Balák and Kytnar1998) and had its predecessors in the fanzine forms of typescripts from the 1980s. Two volumes of the encyclopaedia by the journalist Wich (Reference Wich1999) prompted compilations from older Czech and major foreign encyclopaedias on rock and pop. Furthermore, the encyclopaedia of Zdeněk K. Slabý with the contribution of his son Petr (Reference Slabý and Slabý2002) opened the doors to the world of alternative and experimental music abroad and in the Czech Republic.

A very interesting and in a way unique phenomenon of Czech non-academic writing is the spontaneous historiography of rock music of particular Czech regions (Opekar Reference Opekar2020a). Since the 1980s and 1990s, some 40 titles have been published mapping the rock music scene in various areas of the Czech Republic. Each of the authors approached their task independently of the others, following purely individual motives and using their own perspective. The preparation of the individual publications was not coordinated in any way. While some of these books are strictly personal recollections (Holub Reference Holub2006; Bašta Reference Bašta2012), most publications combined the author's memories with information gained through interviews with other participants in the events (Bednařík Reference Bednařík1994; Hruška Reference Hruška1999; Sonda Reference Sonda2001; Pešta Reference Pešta2011; Rott and Kůda Reference Rott and Kůda2012), and some publications were close to novels (Sychra Reference Sychra2007). Sometimes the authors even engaged in systematic and detailed source research in private collections and institutional archives (Cidlina Reference Cidlina2016; Horák Reference Horák2018; Diestler Reference Diestler2019). All of the books contained photo documentation, and some of them were accompanied by a selection of surviving historical recordings. The category of eyewitness authors has been readily expanded by a younger generation of authors, especially university students, who have taken a rather broader perspective on the topic without an emotional burden.

The targeted effort to include popular music among the objects of interest of institutionalised archives and museums began in the Czech Republic only in the 1990s outside the academic sphere, that is, on the basis of newly founded civic associations. The first such society was the independent library and reading room ‘Libri prohibiti’, which was founded in Prague under the baton of former dissident Jiří Gruntorád in October 1990, and its audiovisual department two years later. The library's collections consist of samizdat and exile literature, an archive of documents, personal collections and an audiovisual department containing samizdat and exile recordings, especially from the time period 1948–89.

Another civic association, founded in the 1990s, is the ‘Popmuseum’, until 2016 with the official name ‘Muzeum a archiv populární hudby’. Since its establishment in 1998, it has focused not only on archiving but also on making archival documents available to the public through thematic exhibitions. It focuses on all Czech and Czechoslovakian popular music. It collects written documents, recordings and audiovisual recordings, musical instruments and instruments related to the development of rock, jazz and other genres of popular music as well as memorabilia related to important personalities or events, photographs, posters, manuscripts from estates, specialised books, music, costumes and other archival materials.

Owing to the lack of a tradition of systematic oral history and therefore the small number of interviews with rock music and underground veterans, it surprisingly remained a research subject for ‘Česká televize’ (Czech TV). For the documentary series Alternativní kultura (‘Alternative Culture’) about alternative cultures in the international and Czech context, Bigbít (‘Big beat, i.e. ‘Czechoslovak rock music’) on the history of Czech and SLovak rock music in 1956–89, and Fenomén underground (‘Phenomenon of Underground’) about the development and forms of the Czech, not only musical, underground in 1945–89, it carried out a large number of new and purpose-driven interviews, the details of which were motivated by the desire to supplement the previously unfeasible mapping of the phenomena in question, the scope of which exceeded by many times the usual needs of a television documentary. It was not until 2000 that the ‘Ústav pro soudobé dějiny Akademie věd České rpubliky’ (Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences) established an academically managed project, inspired by foreign methodology, called the ‘Centrum orální historie’ (Centre for Oral History), which began systematically documenting and researching the cultural and social activities of the people of previous decades and publishing works based on these findings.

After 2000, the Czech founders of musicology about popular music passed away and the focus of the majority of Czech musicology remained on classical art music. The University of Olomouc, with Jan Blüml, later took the initiative in teaching and researching popular music along with the University of Komenský in Bratislava with Yvetta Kajanová. Conversely, the availability of sources on the history of popular music through print or audiovisual media, together with the persistent public demand for investigations into the communist period and its crimes, encouraged a wave of interest in pre-revolutionary alternative music phenomena among new generation of Czech historians. Examples include books by historians such as Vaněk (Reference Vaněk2010), who probed the lifestyle of rock music fans and the authoritarian regime's crackdown on rock music with the help of documents and the archive of the Centre of Oral History, Koura (Reference Koura2016), who investigated the lifestyle of swing fans and dancers during the Second World War, and Daniel (Reference Daniel2023), who wrote about the role of popular music among Czech youths after 1989.