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Despite our supposed familiarity with the 20th-century police state--predicted by Kafka, anatomized by Orwell, and discussed in each day's newspapers--the facts of it still startle. The Nazis had a strict set of rules governing what they called "Judeonegroid music," and in "Red Music," an indispensable essay on the fate of jazz in the Nazi-occupied Czech republic and in Communist Czechoslovakia that introduces the English-language edition of
The Bass Saxophone, Josef Skvorecky presents them in deadpan paraphrase:
5) strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cow-bells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl.
This arresting introduction is followed by two novellas, "Emöke" and "The Bass Saxophone," about the possibilities for art and individualism under totalitarian rule. The former is a love story of sorts. Set at a rural resort in Communist Czechoslovakia, it recounts a cynical young man's attempted holiday seduction of a Hungarian beauty, a woman who has renounced any hope of sexual love in favour of a mishmash of Theosophic spirituality. "The Bass Saxophone" also takes place in a small Czech community, but one under German occupation, shortly after the battle of Stalingrad. It is the story of a young saxophonist who, through his fascination with an almost-mythical instrument, is coaxed into playing for the enemy.
All of the characters in The Bass Saxophone have been maimed--physically, culturally, emotionally, or spiritually--by their existence under totalitarianism. The realism of the stories often seems more like surrealism, and Skvorecky's language often segues into flights of lyricism, paralleling the music that animates the book. Skvorecky's best writing is to be found in his longer novels, but The Bass Saxophone is an ideal introduction for readers who want to become familiar with his work before taking on The Engineer of Human Souls or Dvorak in Love. --Jack Illingworth
