ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the origins of the current jazz discourse – both inside and outside America – which equates jazz with “American music.” The interwar period is examined to explore the genealogy underpinning the “American music” discourse. During the New Deal era, some Americans started to believe, supported by leftist groups, that jazz was quintessentially “American music” embodying the ideals of the Founding Fathers. The jazz historian David W. Stowe identifies this specific type of jazz discourse as “swing ideology.” Meanwhile, jazz outside America was gradually de-Americanized through various interpretations of the music. Accordingly, in Nazi Germany, Vichy France and Japan, jazz was strategically used to propagate their own anti-American causes during wartime. Being American and non-American simultaneously, jazz outside America had already started to take on a certain hybridity in the interwar period.
