TY - JOUR A1 - Jakelski, Lisa T1 - Review 2: "Composing the party line. Music and politics in early cold war Poland and East Germany" / David G. Tompkins. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013. ISBN 1557536473 (2022) N2 - The history of music-making in postwar East-Central Europe has lent itself all too readily to clichés. The music, the stereotypes go, was worthless propaganda; the composers were cowed, and the whole region marched in lockstep to the beat of Moscow's drum. Scholars working in the fields of musicology and cultural history have started to add much-needed nuance to this oversimplified picture. David Tompkins is one of them. The product of extensive, painstaking archival research, Composing the Party Line traces the encounter of music and politics in Poland and East Germany during the early Cold War, a period Tompkins defines as lasting from 1945 until approximately 1957. Along the way, Tompkins challenges outmoded ways of thinking about the intersection of cultural production and political power in the formerly socialist societies of East-Central Europe. Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:521-opus4-12412 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jakelski, Lisa T1 - Review: "Jazz in Poland. Improvised Freedom"/ Igor Pietraszewski. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang Verlag, 2014. ISBN 978-3631643198 N2 - Poland in the 1950s and 1960s boasted a jazz scene of remarkable vibrancy. State-sponsored festivals in Sopot and Warsaw gave audiences the chance to hear jazz performers from all over the world. Local groups crafted their own sound, releasing seminal recordings such as the Krzysztof Komeda Quintet's Astigmatic (1966). The sounds of jazz permeated the films of Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polański. An important part of Poland's cultural and social history during the post-Stalin Thaw, jazz remains a lively element in the country's contemporary musical life. Igor Pietraszewski's Jazz in Poland: Improvised Freedom investigates Polish jazz as both a historical and present-day phenomenon. The second in the Jazz Under State Socialism Series edited by Gertrud Pickhan and Rüdiger Ritter, this book is part of an ongoing effort to understand the significance of jazz in the cultures and societies of East-Central Europe. Pietraszewski is ideally placed to carry out such a study. His experiences as a jazz saxophonist and board member of the Jazz on the Odra Festival in Wrocław give him an insider's insight into the musical world he describes. His training as a sociologist, on the other hand, enables him to approach his subject with an outsider's detachment. Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:521-opus4-10845 ER -