... the CIA and the avant garde???????????????? Yep!!!!!!!!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.

Jazz in East Germany

In East Germany, the development was more clearly arranged. In the 1980s, there was a greater exchange between jazz musicians from West and East Germany. If the cooperation took place within the borders of the GDR, normally a non-German musician was also invited to give this event an international complexion. Economically jazz musicians in the GDR lived in comparatively secure or prosperous circumstances, because they worked in an environment of subsidized culture, and unlike their western colleagues did not need to follow the directives of the free market economy. In addition to a comparatively wide Dixieland scene in the area and mainstream American-style jazz, free improvisational music developed in a way that Fred Van Hove (later relativated) spoke misguidedly of the, "Promised Land of Improvised Music".[15]

so is Wei Wei being sponsored by MI6/SIS/CIA .... ?

the trouble with paranoia is that it so often fails to live down to reality .....

[amateur51]

the trouble with paranoia is that it so often fails to live down to reality .....

So true

Many thanks for the alert to a fascinating if depressing programme - I hope.

[Serial_Apologist]

Larry Stabbins is good on jazz life behind the Iron Curtain, having played over there with Tony Oxley, among others, who did a lot of work to foster good E-W jazz relations. Another was the Oxford-based baritone sax and tarogato player George Haslam, whom some may know from his duo recordings with Mal Waldron in the 1980s. George, who must be retired now, was a scientist in his other life who crossed the divide many times, staying often in Hungary, where he co-formed the Anglo-Magyar Quintet with Hungarian jazz musicians, some of whom were also scientists. That period of Perestroika now seems like a golden age in terms of the possibilities for dialogue opening up between leftist dissidents in the E Bloc countries and anti-capitalists from the West, all to be snuffed out as the transitional governments sold off state-owned industries a penny apiece.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm sure that there was a programme with more or less the same title on C4 about fifteen years ago (somewhere in the attic, I have it on videotape). A fascinating and grimly comic story.