From "New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History" by Bruce Boyd Raeburn (curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University).

"Yet it is clear that Charles Edward Smith did not subscribe to the Communist view that jazz was of black culture and for black audiences alone."

Since we discussed Louis Harap in a recent thread, here is a relevant quote form the same book.

"Harap's interest in "noncommercial music" was hardly fortuitous. He was a staunch Marxist."

Since we talked about John Hammond recently, here is Duke Ellington on Hammond and communism from

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/289222.html

"One of the strongest attacks on Hammond came from Duke Ellington, writing in Down Beat in 1939. Ellington acknowledged that Hammond had earned the gratitude of some musicians but charged that his judgment had become "slightly warped" and his "prejudices a little bit unwieldy"because of his work as "an ardent propagandist and champion of the 'lost cause'," identifying himself with "the interests of the minorities, the Negro peoples, to a lesser degree, the Jew, and to the underdog, in the form of the Communist party." Ellington soon retracted the red-baiting charge: "It was my intention to merely infer that the political affiliations of Mr. Hammond bordered on the 'left wing'."

There is a lot more about communism, blacks, and jazz. Nick LaRocca was neither the first nor the only jazz musician to mention communism in the context of jazz.

Albert