19 FLORIAN NOACK The whole of Berlin is indecent at the moment: the cabarets are more outrageous than anywhere else and Munich is starting to snarl as it listens from afar to these Jewish composers who are knocking the German heritage off its pedestal: Weill and his murderous heroes, Spoliansky who has written the first homosexual anthem, and Schulhoff who enjoys slumming it with jazz. Soon enough, the first two will make good their escape, while Schulhoff will perish in a prison camp. In Berlin, the party is frenzied, sexual, alcoholic, brimming with narcotic paradises: a certain Germany wants to forget the Great War, and while the party is still in full swing, the more vigilant are already taking flight, having observed the fascists getting their weapons ready for the next war. In a few years’ time, all this music will be ‘degenerate’, according to the swastika bearers. Meanwhile, at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, there’s a crowd, such a big crowd, and among all those drinking and smoking heads, you can make out Jean Cocteau beating a drum and Francis Poulenc looking at the company with a mischievous eye. Igor Stravinsky is not far away, taking notes. It’s a scramble, you don’t know what you’re listening to. That’s only to be expected: it’s jazz. In the midst of this hubbub, certain things jump out at you, names, words: stride, that music which launches pianists’ left hands into an assault on perilous basses; Fats Waller . . . ‘Fats’? Yes, because he’s on the plump side, but his jazz gets you moving like a very demon . . . James P. Johnson, a more grounded musician. Who’s that again? Johnson and his ragtime which has broken through frontiers. A bass, a chord, a bass, a chord, and syncopations that get on waltzers’ nerves.
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