The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora

What a complex, brilliant little book! It’s best to read it as
• a tour de force in the ethnography of performing arts, putting the field of jazz in Hungary on the map of the social sciences world-wide,
• a courageous renewal of the Bourdieusian dialect of sociology, from the sidelines of European bourgeois modernity,
• an ethnography of the place of ‘race’ and identity as they appear in the cosmos of the creative arts, and dance in the double bind of Dirty Whiteness and (dis)privilege,
• an insider-outsider take on the whirl of radically open-ended art,
• an account of creative lives that vibrate between bebop inspirations and the “burden of free idioms”, negotiating the all-important informal scripts played in the “Roma” and “assimilated Jewish” scenes, and
• a sparkling allegory for semiperipheral east-central Europe, a tiny universe of its own, forever in search of a sound—finding a voice that it can regard as its own.

József Böröcz, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA

What a complex, brilliant little book! It’s best to read it as
• a tour de force in the ethnography of performing arts, putting the field of jazz in Hungary on the map of the social sciences world-wide,
• a courageous renewal of the Bourdieusian dialect of sociology, from the sidelines of European bourgeois modernity,
• an ethnography of the place of ‘race’ and identity as they appear in the cosmos of the creative arts, and dance in the double bind of Dirty Whiteness and (dis)privilege,
• an insider-outsider take on the whirl of radically open-ended art,
• an account of creative lives that vibrate between bebop inspirations and the “burden of free idioms”, negotiating the all-important informal scripts played in the “Roma” and “assimilated Jewish” scenes, and
• a sparkling allegory for semiperipheral east-central Europe, a tiny universe of its own, forever in search of a sound—finding a voice that it can regard as its own.

József Böröcz, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA

'I am promoting a fascinating, inspiring and lively lecture in the seminar series of the Department of Political Science at CEU. Presenting his new book, The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora (N.Y.: Routledge, 2022), Ádám Havas offered a global socio-cultural, conceptual history of the subject. Accordingly, Hungarian jazz had emerged in the interwar period via the collaboration of Jewish and (in the era’s phrase) Gipsy musicians. Through integrating tradition, innovation, and emulation, these multiclass/multiculture teams - both dissidents from and loyal to their own cultural contexts - created qualitatively new music, and thereby subverted traditional socio-cultural hierarchies. So unique and attractive the new „Global Southern” variant had become that, after and despite the seas of blood let by perpetrators of the Holocaust and Porajmos, and then despite being banned during Hungary’s Stalinist period, Hungarian jazz not just survived, but – albeit only through forced emigration of its cultivators - could be successfully re-exported to the USA and Western Europe. Later, tolerated or even promoted by János Kádár’s soft dictatorship, jazz returned to and became, somewhat surprisingly, part of high culture in Hungary. I could go on with what else I learned ... So good to have the opportunity for breaking free from the "iron cage" of the abstract, general, and bloodless categories of increasingly "sciency" social science.'

Professor Béla GreskovitsUniversity Professor at the Department of International Relations, and Department of Political Science, at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, recipient of the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research (2013) for his book Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, written together with Dorothee Bohle, and published by Cornell University Press in 2012.

'Focusing the processes which have shaped jazz in Hungary as an autonomous cultural field, it reveals the agency of ‘other’ jazz practices with the explicit objective to reconfigure center-periphery relations only too well-known from dominant US-centered jazz historiography. Writing from a geopolitical and epistemological position at the margin (in Hungary, jazz studies – a “disciplinary vacuum” as described by the author – is only at the very beginning in an Academia trying to survive the Fidesz regime), one cannot underestimate the intellectual effort and stamina to craft this book.'

Professor André DoehringUniversity of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Head of the Institute for Jazz Research

'A sociologist by training, Ádám Havas has mobilized an impressive theoretical apparatus to map the path of domestic jazz with its shifting cultural status, meanings, subgenres, and internal fault lines. Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology is effectively combined with postcolonial studies and new jazz studies. We must moreover welcome his erudition and analytic skills brought to bear on an internationally barely known jazz diaspora in a small semi-peripheral country like Hungary.'

Anna SzemereAuthor of Up From the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (2001)

'In order to place jazz music within the Hungarian national culture, the author not only gives attention to the East-West division of the music but also investigates the role of Hungarian jazz in the context of Central European culture. The book examines the contribution of musicians with Romani and Jewish origins in the transformation of jazz from café to bebop style, which has led to the contemporary global form of the genre.'

Yvetta KajanováProfessor of Musicology at Comenius University in Bratislava