The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora

by Ádám Havas

Overview

Drawing on an extensive, four-year field research project, including ethnographic observations and 27 in-depth interviews, this book is the first to explore the hidden diasporic narrative(s) of Hungarian jazz through the system of historically formed cultural distinctions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367677794
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/19/2022
Series:	Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ádám Havas is a Sociologist and jazz researcher based in Budapest, Hungary.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: On the crossroads of cultural sociology and jazz studies

Chapter 2: The ‘othering effect’ of jazz: cultural and racial hierarchies in Hungary’s jazz age

Chapter 3: Polarisation, acceptance and in-betweenness: Jazz in state socialist Hungary

Chapter 4: Struggles that matter: The social constructions of bebop and free jazz

Chapter 5: Othering whiteness: Permanence and change in Romani musicians’ jazz habitus

Conclusion: Counter-discourses, jazz diasporas and the reconfiguration of the canon

Index

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher