Adam Havas, Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society (CECUPS), Department of Sociology, University of Barcelona

Cultural Difference in Eastern Europe: Diasporic Movements in Jazz and the Geopolitics of Popular Music Aesthetics

Based on the recently published monograph, The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora, the presentation will explore East European cultural difference through the historical dialectics of racialized conceptualizations of jazz. The analysis informed by 29 in-depth interviews, four-years of ethnographic research and the discourse analysis of historical sources is an attempt to synthesize Bourdieusian genetic sociology and postcolonial thought. To this end, the talk focuses on carefully selected case studies encompassing the cultural struggles of the interwar era, the aesthetic distinctions within jazz in state socialism and the contemporary dynamics of the jazz field polarized along Bartók oriented free jazz and mainstream jazz camps. This genealogical perspective does not only reveal the embeddedness of regional popular music and jazz aesthetics within global structures of aesthetic regimes, but offers critical insights into the longue durée social logic of Hungary’s geocultural positioning in the “twilight zone” between “East” and “West.” The presentation will also cast light on how the transition from playing “coffeehouse music” to bebop became a significant element in the assimilation strategies of Romani musicians, and on how playing jazz continues to function as means to express geoculturally conditioned cultural difference. It is argued that the field of jazz does not only “challenge” the status quo of nation state level cultural hierarchies but it is a domain that turns the social hierarchies upsidedown with a significant potential of what I refer to as “othering whiteness.” By combining Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology with popular music studies and postcolonial scholarship, I seek to demonstrate the manifold connections of this particular jazz scene to global networks of cultural production, which also continue to shape it.

Keywords: Jazz diaspora, globalisation, cultural difference, geopolitics of jazz, Eastern Europe