Any Such Permissiveness

I’m not quit sure how I wound up on this collection.  (Well, now I do.  I just had to hit return a few times.)  I’d been listening to Phil Woods and “The Rights of Swing.”  There is a big brass version on the album where the trumpeter Benny Bailey is featured.  So what else is there on Spotify by the one, Benny Bailey?  There’s an album date of his and the only other thing is an appearance of his on collection of Swedish Jazz:  “Svensk Jazzhistoria Vol 8. 1956 – 1959.” 

Those are good years.  And the collection is beautiful.  I am working and working and don’t really have time to curate right now.  Someone has done a tasteful job.  Looking further it appears there is only one other volume of the series available:  “Jazz Attacks, Volume 5. 1943-47.”  Sweden remained neutral during the war and so jazz had a chance to continue to flourish. 

I just had a look as I assumed that jazz was completely banned under the Third Reich as an enemy cultural product.  I found an interesting article on ‘Music and the Holocaust” http://holocaustmusic.ort.org/politics-and-propaganda/third-reich/jazz-under-the-nazis/ and while Jazz was increasingly banned in 1937 and 1938, it enjoyed a brief resurgence after the initial war victories.  However after the defeat in Stalingrad and Goebbels declaration of “Total War”there was a definitive end to any such permissiveness.   And as Jews fleeing Denmark headed to Sweden, presumably some jazz musicians did as well. 

This late fifties collection has a lovely song on it called “Misty and Blue” what is particularly notable.  Gentle, spacious until the trombone solo that comes in loud and brash like a Viking might.  I don’t know what it says about me but I find all the Swedish chatter between tracks rather endearing, the way that a neighboring language like German might be frightening.  And thinking of all those musicians who found refuge and acceptance there in Paris, Copenhagen and “dear, old” Stockholm, you realize how many, many stories there must be as the art form metastasized.   

I want to listen to Volume 10 from the early sixties.  The cover looks cool.  I can’t seem to locate it though on any service I might stream. (And Youtube is usually exhaustive for this sort of thing.) I wonder if anything definitive has been written in English about this topic?  The Wiki page on Jazz in Sweden is just an introductory paragraph and a list of sources.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_jazz

Celebrating, once again, the pursuit of a jazz thread.  I’ll have to share this with some Swedophiles I know.