Jazz in Word: European (Non-) Fiction by Kirsten Krick-Aigner and Marc-Oliver Schuster (eds.) (2018)

In May 2014, the “Jazz in Word” conference was hosted at the Amerika Haus in Vienna, and the huge, interdisciplinary gathering of jazz researchers, poets, journalists, writers and literary scholars went on to discuss the many faces and the important influence of jazz on culture worldwide and in particular on Europe. On these 450+ pages present now, the texts, results and additional essays and poetry are finally published as Jazz in Word: European (Non-) Fiction.

The book is loosely subdivided into the chapters Pre- and Post-World War I, The interwar Period, and 1945 – Present; this made obvious the European context of the conference, since for American jazz research (and jazz music) the war years or the end of the war was of less importance than to the Europeans, particularly to the citizenry of Austria and Germany. Naturally, American musicians left the service, went back to work, record production was possible again, and so forth.
But in Europe, and particularly in the two countries mentioned, people had to make up more than a decade of “lost” cultural developments in the arts and democratic processes. The 2014 meeting was aimed to identify “both the thematic and geographic scope of jazz in Europe in order to examine verbalizations of jazz in the 20th century up to the present.”

As there was a strong European perspective to the conference, interesting and rather exotic topics were presented, such as jazz in early Vienna, jazz dance and German expressionist women, Thomas Mann and jazz, literary jazz by René Schickerle, Ernest Bornemann, Günther Grass, Franz Kafka, and Lili Grün, jazz in German and Austrian (Beat) poetry, jazz in Lithuanian literature and jazz reception in Viennese Feuilleton, among others.

For American readers, this conference program and the present volume may offer many new insights, since jazz conferences mostly devote their main topics to American, i.e. national experiences in the art form. Many scholars and authors, some renowned, and some newcomers, held speeches that are now available here in print. Sascha Feinstein is a well-known name when it comes to jazz research, he also held the keynote address “Jazz as a Liberator of Language.” Most other speakers will be largely unknown to the majority of jazz scholars, since many are foremost specialized in European or German studies. Helmut Neundlinger, Primus-Heinz Kucher, Matthiejs de Ridder, Veronika Hofeneder, Lina Užukauskaitė, Konrad Nowakowski, Luigia Tessitore,Wolfgang Lamprecht, Thomas Antonic, and others provided interesting facts and conclusions to the conference.

The volume’s editors, Kirsten Krick-Aigner, professor at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and Marc-Oliver Schuster, Assistant Professsor at Vienna University, were also the ones responsible for putting together the event and selecting the final speakers.

A most resourceful volume of jazz studies, bursting with fresh ideas and perspectives, this time not from an American point of view.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2018

Kirsten Krick Aigner and Marc-Oliver Schuster (eds.) Jazz in Word: European (Non-) Fiction. Königshausen u. Neumann, 2018, 464 p.