I Like to Sing Hot [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 353-368]

I LIKE TO SING HOT
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the German trombonist Walter Paul and, last but not least, Bedrich Weiss,
who did most of the arrangements for the band although, at that time,
he already had to do them clandestinely for he was a Jew. He was also
an excellent instrumentalist: first as a trumpet player, then as a clarinetist,
and later, in the Terezih Ghetto, he also played the oboe in the Terezin
Symphony orchestra under the baton of Karel Ancerl, who much later
became the director of the Czechoslovak Philharmonic and eventually
of the Toronto Symphony. Weiss' arrangements were far ahead of the
times and listening to them even today one cannot comprehend how a
young man of only twenty-two, cut off from the West, could have come up
with sounds that are so very surprisingly modem. But Weiss was obviously
a musician of rare genius. And it is symptomatic of the evil times that
the two members of the Ludvik band who did not survive the war were
Weiss, who ended his days in Auschwitz, and Willy Paul who, as a German,
perished eventually on the Eastern Front.
Bedrich (or Fricek as he was known to friends, or Fritz as his German
jazz colleagues called him) Weiss' name leads me to the darkest chapter of
the story of jazz under the Nazis. One of the many good amateur groups
in Bmo, the capital of Moravia at the time when Emil Ludvik was organizing
his orchestra in Prague, was a combo consisting of the Paskus brothers
(guitarist and drummer), the clarinetist Kolek and the trumpet player and
arranger Erich Vogel. The guitarist Pavel Paskus died a few years later in
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Eric Vogel survived to become the chronicler
of the most legendary jazz band of the Nazi era, the Ghetto Swingers of
Terezin.
Many mystical things have been said about why the two big totalitarian
ideologies of our century hated jazz. It is usually believed that the spirit
of freedom which the music exhales was anathema to everything these
ideologies stood for. I prefer a more mundane explanation. The Communists hated it because it is American music, and America associates with
capitalism and democracy. The Nazis hated it for a different reason: because
jazz is American music and America associated with capitalism and
democracy. Both ideologies had additional reasons: many of the great
jazzmen were Jews who were a parasitic race to the Nazis and cosmopolitan
participants of a world-wide Zionist conspiracy both to the Nazis and
to the Stalinists. Moreover, jazz was the creation of Blacks, whom the
Nazis did not persecute only because there were no blacks-except for a
few stray individuals like George Scott in Warsaw, the son of a Negro father
and a Polish mother"3-in their sphere of power, and who gave Soviet
musicologists much ideological headache as Fred Starr has described in
Red and Hot. The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union.
Even great Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
were banned by the Aryans, and the partially-Jewish Johann Strauss
escaped the ban only because Dr. Joseph Goebbels feared that an interdict