La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Jazz Under the Nazis

From dust jacket notes: "For a brief time in a Europe threatened and then occupied by Nazi Germany, jazz was heard everywhere - as ubiquitous as rock 'n' roll is today. In a personal search for the story of that time - which those who experienced it call 'The Golden Age of Jazz' - Mike Zwerin, musician and jazz critic, spent two years traveling across eastern and western Europe talking with the survivors who loved and played jazz under the Nazis. He discovered a cultural resistance to the German edicts, slogans, and guns that was fought with drums, horns, and guitars. Mike Zwerin tells the story with the vigor and intensity of his own involvement with the music, an emotional and intellectual commitment that enables him to re-create the memories and creative moments of these singular and unlikely jazzmen under Hitler: the Ghetto Swingers, a jazz band of Jewish prisoners that 'toured' Auschwitz and Theresienstadt; the Luftwaffe pilot who switched on the BBC 'hoping to catch a few bars of Glenn Miller' before bombing its antenna; the suave black bandleader who was the toast of Warsaw during the occupation; and Django Reinhardt, the brilliant guitarist and quintessential gypsy who played and lived as if there were no war and refused to leave France even as thousands of his people were shipped to concentration camps. When the Nazis banned jazz outright as entartete - decadent - musicians responded by changing the titles of American songs - 'St. Louis Blues' became 'La Tristesse de Saint Louis' - setting the stage for a confrontation that endured through the war and liberated the spirit of a conquered Europe...."