Free Jazz in the Age of Non-Alignment

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Art II: Charting Liberation: Insights on Art from Yugoslav Socialism and Post-Socialism I

Abstract

In the 1970s, a series of US State Department-sponsored concerts brought titans of experimental jazz to Yugoslavia, including two legendary concerts by Ornate Coleman (1971) and Charles Mingus (1975). Despite being on US government-supported tours, both artists performed politically subversive works: Coleman’s quartet presented a new piece by bassist Charlie Haden entitled “Song For Che,” for which Haden would just weeks later be detained by Portuguese authorities after dedicating a Lisbon performance to the anticolonial struggle in Angola and Mozambique. Four years later, Mingus would be chastised by his own government for performing his civil rights protest songs Fables of Faubus and Remember Rockefeller at Attica at Belgrade’s Dom Sindikata.

I aim to investigate the local and international contexts of these and other performances of experimental and political jazz in 1970s Yugoslavia. What did it mean for practitioners of Black American Music in an alleged “post-civil rights” era to perform in Yugoslavia on behalf of the US government? How was this music received (geo)politically and aesthetically by local artists and audiences? And how can the emancipatory legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement and Black American Music be brought into dialogue with one another regionally and globally?

Author

• Mat Muntz, UC Berkeley