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

364
JOSEF SKVORECKY
subliminally and concentrated on squeezing the girls on the dance floor
were now forced to keep their ears open to the music, which, in turn,
compelled the bands to pay more attention to the quality of what they
were playing. The unfavourable attitude of the Nazis-and not just of the
Nazis-to the new and to many provocative sounds led to a spontaneous
creation of the type of jazz which later, when the Communists tried to
mold jazz into that shape again, died out. In order to understand what I
have in mind you would have to have a fair knowledge of Czech folk songs.
But I'll try to explain.
Not only the Nazis were against jazz: the traditional Czech popular
music was the waltz and mainly the polka. It took people trained on these
melodic but simple tunes a long time before they got used to jazz or even
accepted it. Jazz was therefore condemned by many Czechs as well, for
reasons partly aesthetic (an unbearably noisy, crazy music), partly ideological (foreign music, alien to the taste of our nation). The position of
these, let's say, pop-folklorists was strengthened by the wave of chauvinistic
patriotism which was a natural consequence of the traumas of first Munich
and then of the Nazi occupation. The linguistic purists emerged again and
tried to replace foreign words with Czech neologisms, with much less success, however, than their German counterparts. While Kraftwagen or later
Fernsehen became natural-sounding parts of the German vocabulary,
"jeidik," the neologism for "automobil" was only used as a joke. Etymologically it was O.K.-derived from the verb "jezdit" (to drive) but it
sounded like "jezek" (the hedgehog). For that matter, a similar wave of
de-foreignization of Czech carried out in the Sixties, faltered mainly on
the word "jazz." The new spelling-"diez"-never caught on because it
orthographically reminded everyone of "drez" (a trough); and, to be precise,
also because it was not only suggested, like "jeizdk," by the powerless
purists but ordered as obligatory by the powerful Communist establishment.
The pop-folklorists tried to force the polka and even the, by then
largely extinct, folk music down the throat of the swing generation. The
jazz fiends responded by busily composing a large number of swing tunes
which, to the pop-folklorists, were even more abhorrent than the Tiger
Rags and St. Louis Blueses of American provenance. One of the earliest
ones was an orchestral arrangement of the old marching song How Beautiful
the World Looks (Krdsny vzhled je na ten boiz svet) which lent itself to
swing as easily as some of Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues. Another one,
by Kamil Behounek and Karel Kozel of I Like to Sing Hot fame, was a hit
interpreted first by Milada Pilatova and, after her disaster in Zlfn, by Zdena
Vinckova, bearing the title of an ancient folk song The Bagpipes Played
(Hrdly dudy). Here is a rough translation:
The bagpipes played in the pub
And everybody liked their music.