Robert Palmer, Lisa Dalbello - Rules Are Made To Be Broken

This is from Hugh Marsh's album "Shaking the Pumpkin".

The composers are Hugh Marsh, Jonathan Goldsmith and Kerry Crawford, the recited text is an excerpt from the book "The Bass Saxophone" by Joseph Skvorecky. Lyrics below.

The photo by Gianmaria Visconti shows the memorial (representing barbed wire) in Mauthausen Concentration Camp (Austria). (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 License.)

No copyright abuse intended, but if the owners mind, the video will be deleted, of course.

RP: There was even a swing band in the notorious Buchenwald, made up for the most part of Czech and French prisoners. And since those were not only cruel but also absurd times, people were put behind barbed wire because of the very music that was played inside. In a concentration camp near Wiener Neustadt sat Vicherek, a guitar player who had sung Louis Armstrongs scat chorus in Tiger Rag and thus, according to the Nazi judge, defiled musical culture. Elsewhere in Germany several swingmen met a similar fate under a set of exraordinary regulations which were binding for all dance orchestras.

LD: Pieces in foxtrot rhythm are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics. As to tempo preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones. However, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo be tolerated.

RP: It was Goebbels who declared, Now I shall speak quite openly on the question of whether German Radio should broadcast so-called jazz music. If by jazz we mean music that is based on rhythm and entirely ignores or even shows contempt for melody, music in which rhythm is indicated primarily by the ugly sounds of whining instruments so insulting to the soul, why then we can only reply to the question entirely in the negative.

LD: So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the music of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit, as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Free-Masonic yowl.

RP: New little Goebbelses started working diligently in fields that had been cleared by the old demon. They had their own little Soviet Bibles, primarily the fascistoid Music of Spiritual Poverty by V. Gorodinsky and I. Nestyevs Dollar Cacophony. Their vocabulary was not very different from that of the Little Doctor, except that they were, if possible, even prouder of their ignorance. They characterized jazz and jazz-inspired serious music by a rich assortment of derogatory adjectives: perverted, decadent, base, lying, degenerate. They compared the music to the moaning in the throat of a camel and the hiccupping of a drunk.

LD: Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized miltary marches). The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions. If a pizzicator effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the fingerboard which is henceforth strictly forbidden.

RP: And despite Hitler and Goebbels the sweet poison of the Judeonegroid music (that was the Nazi epithet for jazz) not only endured, it prevailed - even for a short time in the very heart of hell, the ghetto at Terezin. The Ghetto Swingers ... theres a photograph of them, an amateur snapshot, taken behind the walls of the Nazi-established ghetto during the brief week that they were permitted to perform - for the benefit of the visiting Swedish Red Cross officials. They're all there, all but one of them already condemned to die, in their white shirts and black ties, the slide of the trombone pointing diagonally up to the sky, pretending or maybe really experiencing the joy in rhythm, of music.

LD: Musicans are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones and substitute for them a suitable folk instrument.