Director: Reinhard Kungel (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
A tour bus makes it way through the German motorway system. Signposts point to Augsburg and Stuttgart. On the side of the bus, which we see a lot in the film, in huge letters, stands the name of a company which leases out transport to travelling musicians. In case we missed it, the company also gets a prominent plug in the end credits. It’s a good job that my memory for names is so bad, as I think it has got quite enough publicity already.
Inside the bus are 5 young musicians – three female (drums, double bass and singer), and two male (trumpet and piano). I didn’t quite get how these people know each other, and whether the tour is a one-off or they play together regularly. I certainly didn’t catch a band name. But they play well, a sort of jazz which is neither too old-fashioned, nor has too many notes. We switch between watching and listening to them playing, and hearing them talk about their music.
We meet other musicians. The SWR big band consists pretty exclusively of old white men, most of whom were born in the 1920s, and some of whom died before the film was released. Creating the film has obviously been a labour of love. Director Reinhard Kungel has been collecting material for over a decade, so it’s not just some of the performance which are now archive footage. The SWR band members have countless stories of their long careers to explain, of which more later.
The third main performers are the band Feindsender, which consists mainly of the young Swiss singer Hannah Weiß and her jazz tutor Tizian Jost on piano and vibraphone. Through Hannah’s questions we learn a little of the history of jazz – that it is a Black music form but that some of its early standards, like Ol’ Man River, were written by Jewish Exiles (in this case Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein). IF German history had gone differently, maybe Broadway would be in Berlin.
Before we hear any more important history, we have the important debate. We’re talking about German jazz after all. Just how do you pronounce it? The musicians are divided pretty equally between those who use the US-American term “jazz”, and those who use the more Deutschified “Yaz” („[jat͡s]“). A couple take the more pragmatic option and say that it doesn’t mean what you call it. What’s important is what it sounds like.
Back to the history lesson. German jazz has an history. The world’s first jazz club opened in Frankfurt-Main in 1928. Within 5 years there were no more clubs, as the Nazis saw the music as decadent, Jewish-Bolshevik, and too US-American. They still allowed jazz programmes on the radio, to dispel international reports of a jazz ban. Musicians like Coco Schumann and the Ghetto Swingers were allowed to play, and apparently Hermann Göring also liked a but of jazz.
Jazz musicians faced similar contradictions in the DDR, where the music was once more seen as being too US-American. Unlike in the West, where occupying US soldiers had kicked off a wave of post-war interest, in the East jazz was treated with suspicion. Nonetheless one interviewee Karlheinz Drechsel reports that despite early tussles with the Stasi, before the wall came down, he had been officially installed as the presenter of a jazz programme on State radio.
This historical information reaches us in brief snippets in between both vintage footage and scenes of interviews and performances (most spectacularly Paul Robeson singling Ol’ Man River). I found this diverted from the histories, and would have preferred to have a more systematic description of how jazz developed in Germany. We learn, for example, that there was a brief revival in the 1970s through modern jazz, but not really about how jazz co-existed alongside pop and rock music.
Apart from some discussion early in the film, the issue of race is not mentioned. On one level this is understandable – jazz in Germany appears to be mainly a white man’s (and increasingly white woman’s) game, although we do occasionally spy a Black musician. It would have been interesting to learn how this affected the music and the discussion around it. What does it mean that a music form which was created by Black people is almost entirely played by White musicians locally?
There is a little discussion about the sexual division of labour – in German academic institutions it is taken as normal that men teach (and learn) playing instruments, whereas women teach (and learn) singing. The fact that the young band contains as many instrument-playing females as males tends to suggest that this is starting to break down, but it would have been nice to have heard the, talk about their personal experiences a little more.
Towards the end, the musicians are asked whether jazz has a future. The older musicians are more pessimistic, fearing that pop music has now taken over, and there is no longer any place on the radio for jazz. This is less the case regarding live performances. We do see the musicians performing at various venues, including at Berlin’s Quasimodo question. Nonetheless, the best answer about the future of jazz comes from Hannah Weiß: “yes, and it’s female”.
From watching the performances, you see how jazz has developed to an extent that I’m not sure it’s fair to see it as a separate entity. There is more diversity between the types of jazz music that we hear over the course of the film than between some of the performances and modern (and older) music. Many songs would not be out of place in a set by Mary Coughlan or Camille O’Sullivan, to name just two singers still performing to fairly large audiences.
Jazzfieber told me a story I didn’t know I wanted to know, and challenged some of my old prejudices about jazz music. Which is pretty much what you want from a documentary, isn’t it?
CinePhil 