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Late-Stalinist ideological campaigns and the rupture of jazz: ‘jazz-talk’ in the Soviet Estonian cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2014

Heli Reimann
Heli Reimann*
Affiliation:
Wismari 10-4, Tallinn 10136, Estonia E-mail: heli.reimann@helsinki.fi
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Abstract

This paper on Soviet Estonian jazz explores the dynamics of the processes which temporarily extinguished jazz from the public arena during late-Stalinism. This microhistory inflected study draws on the conception of ‘rupture’ through a close reading of the way jazz was constructed in the official narratives of the Estonian cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar. Jazz in Estonia experienced no rupture during the first postwar years, but then the three successive Stalinist campaigns, each with gradually decreasing tolerance towards jazz, led finally to the temporary public disappearance of the music in 1950. The strategies enforced in the late 1940s, such as anti-jazz orchestra reform, dance reforms that banned the foxtrot and the other modern dances, and the eradication of the word jazz from public discourse, all served to silence the ‘formalistic’ musical form by framing it with negative connotations and by shaping the taste of the masses according to Soviet ideological paradigms.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , October 2014 , pp. 509 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

1.

This paper is a part of my doctoral project on Soviet Estonia jazz at the University of Helsinki supported by the Finnish Doctoral Program for Music Research.

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