Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Stanley Kubrick's Unmade Film About Jazz in the Third Reich


Cooper Square Press

Kubrick wanted to tell the tale of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a swing-loving Luftwaffe officer who wrote about the music scenes in Nazi-occupied cities using the pen name "Dr. Jazz."

James Hughes
Mar 25 2013, 8:31 AM ET

In 1985, Stanley Kubrick was handed a book on the survival of jazz in Nazi-occupied Europe. A snapshot of a Luftwaffe officer casually posing among black, Gypsy, and Jewish musicians outside a Paris nightclub caught his eye. It looked like something out of Dr. Strangelove, he said. He'd long wanted to bring World War II to the screen, and perhaps this photograph offered a way in.

"Stanley's famous saying was that it was easier to fall in love than find a good story," says Tony Frewin, Kubrick's longtime assistant (and, for the purpose of disclosure, an editor-at-large at my former magazine, Stop Smiling). "He was limitlessly interested in anything to do with Nazis and desperately wanted to make a film on the subject."

Kubrick has long been associated with creating arresting visions of warfare. When it was announced [ http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/todd-mccarthy-7-directors-who-426406 ] this month that Steven Spielberg will produce Kubrick's screenplay Napoleon as a television miniseries, the initial speculation was largely about how the ambitious battle scenes, originally conceived to maximize tens of thousands of extras, will be achieved.

However, it's Kubrick's interest in jazz-loving Nazis that represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis [ http://www.amazon.com/Swing-Under-Nazis-Metaphor-Freedom/dp/0815410751 ], published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for "hot swing" and other variations of jazz outlawed as "jungle music" by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as "travel letters," which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick's title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.

"Stanley was fond of titles in search of screenplays [ http://cinephilearchive.tumblr.com/post/40346319747 ]," Frewin says. "And Dr. Jazz was such a rich subject—the contrast of what was going on in the camps, on the Eastern front, and yet here was a German officer who was having a good time listening to jazz. Stanley was also drawn to what this said about music and its ability to unify people and transcend even rigid political differences."

While a script for Dr. Jazz never materialized—and the project was later shelved, in part due to Aryan Papers [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/03/stanley-kubrick-the-aryan-papers.html ], a film set in occupied Poland that Kubrick abandoned in the mid-'90s despite an intensive preproduction—Zwerin's research remains engrossing today.

Though stationed in Paris for more than 20 years as the jazz critic for the International Herald Tribune, Zwerin never acclimated. "I consider myself on loan, like a Picasso," he writes in Swing. "One year led to another and now I find myself without a place to hang." Parisian loneliness had become "literally breathtaking, a gasp not a gas." Seeking refuge, Zwerin traveled the continent collecting interviews with the jazz preservationists who gathered in basements and backrooms during occupation, and filed their reminiscences in the IHT, among other publications. (Swing is a collection of his columns that reads like a collage, with digressions upon digressions.)

Zwerin is at his best when conversing with musicians—at one point he even brandishes his horn for a post-interview blowing session—but the more surreal findings come from encounters with the occasional toe-tapping retired Nazi officer. In the skies over London, we learn that a Luftwaffe ace tuned into the BBC while crossing the Channel, hoping to catch a few bars of Glenn Miller before bombing the radio antenna. On the ground, when the Royal Air Force rained bombs on Vienna, a trombonist in a Nazi swing band "would stick his trombone out the window and play 'St. Louis Blues [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j_AzM7TTNo (next below)]'

instead of hiding in the cellar." (In order for that particular jazz standard to pass muster in Vienna, the title was first changed to "Sauerkraut.")

Throughout the book's mere 200 pages, Zwerin unearths lost notes from the underground. A Django Reinhardt record was worth two kilos of butter on the black market. A German objector fondly recalls scoring the plum assignment of tracking down the cream Louis Armstrong preferred for his chapped lips; the brand was available only at pharmacies in Berlin. Upon receiving the shipment of lip salve, which was smuggled Stateside through a Paris club owner, Louis mailed his unknown German aid a personal letter of thanks.

Not all accounts are as lighthearted. Zwerin mourns the Jewish musicians who clung to life by entertaining guards in concentration camps, and those on the run, like Eric Vogel, a Czech jazz trumpeter who soaked his valves in sulfuric acid when Nazis invaders began confiscating instruments. The acid served "to keep anyone from playing military marches on a jazz trumpet." In a 1961 article for Down Beat, Vogel claims his life was spared during a ghetto roundup when an SS officer who had eavesdropped on one of his jam sessions recognized him at headquarters and escorted him home, borrowing some of his jazz records and books as compensation. In Frankfurt, musicians wandered the streets whistling "Harlem [ http://www.last.fm/music/Paul+Howard%27s+Quality+Serenaders/_/Harlem ]"—if a fellow musician recognized the tune, he whistled back.

These clandestine cues and back-alley trysts were a draw for Kubrick. "Stanley thought there was a kind of noir side to this material," says Frewin. "Perhaps an approach like Dr. Mabuse [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bLMRPpSToI (next below)]

would have suited the story. Stanley said, 'If only he were alive, we could have found a role for Peter Lorre [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lorre ].'"

One intriguing character to cast would have been the German musician Ernst Hollerhagen, who one of Zwerin's interview subjects claims "played the clarinet as good as Benny Goodman, but he had not been born black or Jewish or American." (Goodman records could be purchased in Germany until 1938, Zwerin writes, "then somebody must have realized he was Jewish. After that you could buy Artie Shaw records because they did not know his real name was Arshawsky.") As an act of defiance one night after a show in Frankfurt in 1942, Hollerhagen walked up to a table of musicians at the club, "clicked his heels, raised his right arm, and said in a loud voice so everyone could hear: 'Heil Benny!'"

"Stanley was a great swing-era jazz fan," Frewin says, citing Goodman as one of his favorites. "He had some reservations about modern jazz. I think if he had to disappear to a desert island, it'd be a lot of swing records he'd take, the music of his childhood: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Harry James." Kubrick had long wanted to use a particular Harry James track in a film, and felt Dr. Jazz afforded the perfect opportunity. When it appeared in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, according to Frewin, "it really miffed Stanley that Woody beat him to it." The title, ironically, was "I've Heard That Song Before [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2hk_CIZeo (next below)]."

When Mike Zwerin died in 2010, Swing Under the Nazis remained underreported in tributes and appreciations, which is perhaps fitting, given Zwerin's allegiance with artists whose best takes didn't always make it to tape. "I started out to explore a neglected corner of history but it ended up exploring me," he writes in the book's introduction. That his exploration never reached a wider audience is hardly a fault. He whistled a tune down an empty street and Stanley Kubrick whistled back.

Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/03/stanley-kubricks-unmade-film-about-jazz-in-the-third-reich/274225/ [with comments]


--


Josef Skvorecky on the Nazis' Control-Freak Hatred of Jazz


Image: Ecco Press

J.J. Gould
Jan 3 2012, 11:23 PM ET

Just over two weeks after the death of Vaclav Havel [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/what-vaclav-havel-understood-only-democracy-guarantees-peace/250150/ ], another Czech literary figure who played a key role in his country's Communist-era dissident movement, Josef Skvorecky [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Skvorecky ], died of cancer Tuesday. He was 87. Once upon a time, Skvorecky had been a vital force behind the intellectual and spiritual current that culminated in 1968's pro-democratic Prague Spring. After the Soviets put an end to it all, Skvorecky and his wife Zdena Salivarova took refuge in Canada, where they founded the dissident publishing house 68 Publishers [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68_Publishers ] and lived ever since. As Matt Welch explains [ http://reason.com/blog/2012/01/03/josef-kvoreck-rip ]:

It was 68 Publishers, founded in 1971, that proved to be a lifeline to both Czechoslovak literature and dissidence, publishing samizdat works from the likes of Havel and Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal that would often be re-smuggled back into the country.

Some people left Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion (just as many escaped Hungary after 1956), and -- quite understandably -- turned their backs on the mangled countries they left behind. Škvorecký was not one of them. He was committed to helping his native land, helping his native language, and perpetuating the free flow of ideas under arduous circumstances.

Skvorecky left no shortage of legacies to remember him by, but one of the more notable themes in his nonfiction writing is an emphasis on, as Welch puts it, "the oftentime minute similarities between applied fascism and communism." And some of Skvorecky's more notable variations on that theme in turn are found in his recollections and insights on the common totalitarian hatred of, among all things, jazz. Here he is writing in the introduction to his novella The Bass Saxophone [ http://www.amazon.com/Bass-Saxophone-Josef-Skvorecky/dp/0671556819 ]:

In the days when everything in life was fresh -- because we were sixteen, seventeen -- I used to blow tenor sax. Very poorly. Our band was called Red Music which in fact was a misnomer, since the name had no political connotations: there was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music and we, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that in jazz blue is not a colour, so we called ours Red. But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did; for jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successfully ruled in my native land.

Anyone who finds this proposition fascinating won't, I promise, be disappointed to read the rest of this book, or for that matter all of Talkin' Moscow Blues: Essays About Literature, Politics, Movies, and Jazz [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0886191963/ ]. But maybe the single most remarkable example of 20th-century totalitarian invective against jazz that Skvorecky ever relayed was here in the intro to The Bass Saxophone, where he recalls -- faithfully, he assures us ("they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind") -- a set of regulations, issued by a Gauleiter -- a regional official for the Reich -- as binding on all local dance orchestras during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Get this:

1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;

2. in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;

3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;

4. so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);

5. strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);

6. also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);

7. the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;

8. plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;

9. musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);

10. all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

Being a Nazi, this public servant obviously didn't miss an opportunity to couch as many of these regulations as he could in racist or anti-Semitic terms. Such, after all, are the National Socialist equivalent of soothing conventional wisdom. But that's just it: If you're a Nazi, and you can pass something you don't like off as a "Negroid excess," or a manifestation of "Jewish Fremason-ry," it helps you with the kind of Nazi cred you need insulate yourself from having to justify what's wrong with the music as music. More than that, it helps you hide your fear of the deeper resonance the music has with people as people. In an interview given in Prague in 1968, relayed in Talkin' Moscow Blues, Skvorecky noted that "jazz is, above all, a kind of fraternity." That's not an entirely obvious thought if you come from the same part of the world jazz itself does.

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/josef-skvorecky-on-the-nazis-control-freak-hatred-of-jazz/250837/ [with comments]