(Organized by Danpop – Danish Centre for Popular Music Culture - https://cc.au.dk/en/danpop/)

Jazz and swing became the great new types of popular music between the two world wars. They were new, youthful, energetic and danceable. And they were outspokenly American, just like the Hollywood films that featured them.

Disseminated throughout much of the world, and negotiating traditional hierarchies of race, class and gender, the sounds of jazz and swing music along with their dance cultures became core signs of alterity: youth and modernity. In all of these respects, they were highly contested too. In other words, interwar jazz and swing reveal early examples of a transnational youth and pop musical culture.

In recent years, scholars have done much to map and analyze jazz and swing music culture from historical perspectives. With this seminar, we want to highlight these styles as pivots of a transnational popular music culture of turbulent era between two world wars.