Ádám Havas. <i>The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora</i>

Ádám Havas’s recently published book invites a number of important questions about the cultural, ethnic, and social history of the so-called Hungarian jazz diaspora and about the very definition of jazz itself. How many meanings does jazz have? Who has the right to describe it? Issues like these motivate Havas’s discussions of the social circumstances in which Hungarian jazz music was (re)invented and lead the author to insist that “the future of an effective jazz historiography must include detailed micro-histories” (3). Accordingly, The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora largely consists of two case studies on the Hungarian jazz scenes of the twenty-first century in which the author analyzes the aesthetic contrasts between what he identifies as “mainstream” and “free” jazz networks. Given that research into Hungarian popular music has hitherto tended to focus on cultural policy, Havas’s work is particularly noteworthy for shifting our critical attention to problems of racialized distinction, ethnicity, prestige, symbolic hierarchies, and to the social functions of the evolution of jazz when it comes to shaping ethnic groups, communities, and individual lives.The term “jazz diaspora” was introduced into mainstream jazz discourse in 2006 by the Australian scholar Bruce Johnson in a chapter he contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Jazz. There, Johnson claims that “the jazz diaspora is . . . a case-study of the negotiation between local cultural practices and global cultural processes, between culture and mass mediations. In such negotiations, diaspora is the condition of the music’s existence and character. Jazz was not ‘invented’ and then exported. It was invented in the process of being disseminated.”1 Since then, Johnson’s analyses of the relationship between globalization and local jazz cultures have inspired many researchers, including Havas, who was especially influenced by Johnson’s 2020 book Jazz Diaspora.2 More recently, Havas and Johnson have collaborated on editing a special issue of the journal Popular Music and Society entitled “Jazz Diasporas,” as well as the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies, with David Horn.Havas illustrates the complexity of the jazz diaspora by providing unconventional—but sociologically supported—interpretations of the contemporary Hungarian jazz scenes. In general, his aim “is to connect the exploration of the genesis and structure of the Hungarian jazz diaspora to transnational jazz discourses” and thus offer readers an alternative view of the Hungarian jazz diaspora (4). To do this, he follows Johnson by first renouncing the dominant, US-centric narrative of jazz history.Havas begins by elaborating the possibilities of an authentic representation of jazz diaspora. In chapter 1 (“On the Crossroads of Cultural Sociology and Jazz Studies”), the author deals with theoretical issues of jazz studies. He then proceeds to a general historical background of Hungarian jazz in chapter 2 (“The ‘Othering Effect’ of Jazz: Cultural and ‘Racial Hierarchies’ in Hungary’s Jazz Age”) and chapter 3 (“Polarisation, Acceptance and In-Betweenness: Jazz in State Socialist Hungary”). In the first case study, chapter 4 (“Struggles that Matter: The Social Constructions of Bebop and Free Jazz”), he represents the social genealogy of the current Hungarian jazz scene by highlighting the questions of authenticity, prestige, and the legacy of the avant-garde movement. Before his conclusion, he offers in chapter 5 (“Othering Whiteness: Permanence and Change in Romani Musicians’ Jazz Habitus”) a profound insight into the inner circle of Hungarian Gypsy jazz musicians.The two historical sections concerning the interwar period (chapter 2) and Hungary’s socialist era (chapter 3) call for different kinds of sources than the case studies. In these two chapters, Havas relies mainly on articles published during those times and interviews made by journalists and historians, while the case studies, which are the richest in primary sources, are substantiated by the author’s interviews and informal conversations with contemporary jazz musicians. Significantly, however, Havas declines to divulge the names of his interlocutors—a choice that is suggestive of the present political situation in Hungary.In chapter 1 Havas compares ethnomusicological and social-historical approaches to jazz history and also lays out the main concepts and development of jazz studies. Then, before tracing the dynamic trajectory of Hungarian jazz during the state-socialist era, Havas contextualizes, in the next chapter, its social genealogy and aesthetic “considerations”: scrutinizing the reception of the evolving genre between the two world wars, Havas argues that “jazz was a major cultural factor in the ‘whitening’ of professional Hungarian Gypsy musicians, while the assimilated Jews dominating the entertainment industry increasingly came to be represented as a threat to the ‘national’ popular culture” (12). Moreover, throughout the book Havas also makes a point of exploring what he calls the “internal dynamics” of the developing Hungarian jazz music, with an emphasis on the opposition between entertainment (“playing for a living”) and the progression of art (“playing for pleasure”). With this analysis, Havas also seeks to demonstrate the usefulness of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology for revealing and organizing certain aspects of the Hungarian jazz diaspora that would otherwise remain invisible, for example, the struggles of the musicians.According to Havas, the unwavering opposition between mainstream and free jazz was originally established by the “competition” of musicians shaped by cultural policy in the early 1970s (chapter 3). To develop this theme, Havas examines the cultural status of Hungarian free jazz and its founding father, György Szabados, and explains the political and social context of the era. The author demonstrates the high aspirations of a distinctive Hungarian free jazz, rooted in Hungarian folk music, which were realized for a few moments in the seventies. But despite the attempts of Szabados and his contemporaries to create a kind of “national jazz” through experimentation, neither the national nor the international jazz field recognized its potential value.Having thus elucidated the general historical, social, and theoretical facets, Havas moves on to highly specialized case studies of two parallel and contrary twenty-first-century jazz scenes, namely, “mainstream jazz” and “free jazz.” In chapter 4, the two forms are differentiated across twelve categories, such as choice of venue, structural principles, musical identity, and aesthetic aspects, providing an original interpretation of “living” Hungarian jazz. Indeed, the work as a whole relies on an extensive set of distinctions that Havas uses to evaluate Hungarian jazz as such. These include, for example, the differences between “Western entertainment music” and national dance music, between improvisations and standards, and between the cultural policies of Poland and Hungary. Importantly, these oppositions highlight the legitimacy and the necessity of alternative narratives, which could theoretically be as numerous as the subgenres of jazz itself.Chapter 5 presents the musical biography of a Romani jazz artist who derives his authentic license to participate in “playing the jazz” from his family history. For the international audience, this case study and its historical background give an appropriately nuanced picture of certain complexities of Hungarian culture and society, including the ambivalent status of those Romani musicians who, notwithstanding this ambivalence, would themselves preserve the national music across two world wars and then go on to play jazz for a living, eventually becoming the preeminent figures of mainstream jazz during the socialist period.In this chapter, Havas continues the unpacking of the Romani musicians’ individual “microhistories,” showing how such narratives generate the metahistory of the Hungarian jazz diaspora. For one thing, the formerly nomadic artists safeguarded a traditional Hungarian style of song called magyar nóta through two world wars. From the 1970s onward, they carried on the legacy of the great American jazz musicians. By interpreting ethnicity as a factor in the legitimation of jazz, and jazz itself as a tool of social mobility, Havas convincingly shows that ethnicity is one of the most decisive and characteristic elements of the formation of the Hungarian jazz diaspora, and indeed of jazz in general.Havas’s interdisciplinary work thus constitutes a rare exploration of the significance of, and the reasons for, the semiperipheral status of the Hungarian jazz field during the Kádár era. His research highlights the local components that have fundamentally determined the landscape of contemporary Hungarian jazz—especially the culture of the Romani music families and the heritage of the apostle of Hungarian free jazz, György Szabados. Ultimately, no other book provides such a comprehensive overview of the Hungarian jazz diaspora and the contemporary Hungarian jazz field.

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