This book is a historical and interpretive study of the movement of jazz experimentalism in
West and East Germany between the years 1950 and 1975. It complicates the narratives advanced
by previous scholars by arguing that engagement with black musical methods concepts and
practices remained significant for the emergence of the German jazz experimentalism movement.
In a seemingly paradoxical fashion this engagement with black musical knowledge enabled the
formation of more self-reliant musical concepts and practices. Rather than viewing the German
jazz experimentalism movement in terms of dissociation from their African American spiritual
fathers this book presents the movement as having decisively contributed to the decentering of
still prevalent jazz historiographies in which the centrality of the US is usually presupposed.
Going beyond both US-centric and Eurocentric perspectives this study contributes to
scholarship that accounts for jazz's global dimension and the transfer of ideas beyond
nationally conceived spaces.
