ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the critical jazz discourse by investigating the anti-American element of jazz in some Western countries in the period from the late 1940s to the 1960s. In France, where jazz was understood as originating in black culture, the music rarely embodied Americanism but rather the weak and oppressed. The French Existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, criticized America through Les Temps modernes while still loving jazz – a development perhaps not unrelated to the declining status of postwar France. The situation was similar for another declining empire, Britain, where trad jazz revival reached its high point during the 1950s, reflecting certain imperial nostalgia. In West Germany, jazz served as a medium for overcoming a negative historical image, through which its own jazz ambassadors program commenced in the 1960s with the support of the Goethe Institut. Whereas in Japan, jazz discourses in the 1960s turned “black” as they empathized solidarity between the Japanese and “colored people” outside Japan. This chapter shows how jazz not only served as a medium to criticize America, but also influenced national identities in different and diverse corners of the world.
