Getting the jazz. The “Degenerate Music” exhibition of the
“Reich Music Festival”, Düsseldorf, 1938 © Ullstein Bild
“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the
German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as
well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass
instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa,
hat, etc.” (Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef
Skvorecky’s ‘Bass Saxophone’) The day the Nazis rolled tanks
into Paris – the land of “Americano, nigger, kike, jungle music”
(Goebbels, 1939) – the cave-clubs of Saint Germain dimmed.
Montparnasse went quietly. Pigalle’s cosmopolitan nightclubs
folded and the Champs-Elysees muted the footlights. In fact, two
million Parisians had already left town. Many jazz-junkies,
gypsies, peddlars of swing, negres – all now in danger of being
freighted to their death – considered catching the A-Train
elsewhere. Paris was preparing to go underground. But the
Gestapo went straight to work. Loudspeakers decl