". Einige Anmerkungen zur deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehung im musikalischen Nachkriegsdeutschland
“Jazz, GI’s and German Fräuleins”, those are three of the clichés which characterize the German-American relationship in postwar Germany. After years of not being able to hear American jazz, young German musicians finally were confronted by the real thing: not just through original American records which could be obtained more easily, not just through listening to AFM radio broadcasts which were highly influential on the taste of postwar youth in Germany, but through meeting Americans and American musicians themselves. There were different instances in which such meetings took place: American military bands which played not just for army-related events but also for the German public; German musicians who were engaged to play in GI clubs all over the American controlled area; American musicians who joined their German colleagues in after hour jam sessions in German clubs; American musicians who stayed in Germany after their release from the army; German musicians who made an international career and finally moved to the US. The paper discusses the first three of these instances and asks for further research in this field of German-American relationship. There are many more interviews to be done about working conditions (in GI clubs, in German clubs etc.), about things learned on both sides (both musically and socially), about personal contacts (among musicians and musicians, among musicians and non-musicians), about the reception through Americans who heard their own music being played in Germany by their former war enemies, etc. Knowledge about the relationship between German and American musicians at that time helps to understand the development of German jazz in the 1960s when the music began to “emancipate” itself more and more from its American parents and to develop its own stylistic ideas and character.