I'm John Betts with Ivan Estradner, who is a musician, and appreciates music as I cannot, although as a fan,

I'm always appreciating of people who appreciate music. So American jazz is an acquired taste.

Several generations dominated by the story is the progressive music. I don't think that's the case

anymore. It's now considered classical,

but it turns out the Kremlin's afraid of it. It's a man. Avana, this would make no sense if I hadn't

read recently a new book by Ian Baruma, a story about his father being dragoon by the Hitlerites

from his home in Holland to work in a factory

in Berlin under the bombs of the British and Americans because all of the German males were

at the front or badly damaged in hospital. And so therefore he was inside Berlin as a Dutch

national observing the conduct of the regime. They banned jazz. They banned swing

music. The same thing you're reporting. I'm unaware if the Kremlin knows this irony. But why ban

jazz? What's the explanation? So, John, I always like to make jokes that one of the key reasons why I moved to the United States is because of American psychological operations and soft power.

Because I'm a huge fan of American music and jazz music in particular.

So I really very much enjoy listening, Miles Davis, and similar artists.

But the reason why my colleague Max Lesser and I, we wrote about this,

it's because there was International Jazz Day a couple of days ago.

And one thing that we were discussing, it's about the history of jazz,

how actually jazz, whether it's freedom and improvisation,

has always been a threat to different regimes.

So during the Cold War, for example, jazz was America's very powerful non-nuclear weapon.

It was music, not bullets, you know, that contributed to the fall of Berlin War. And the United States

used jazz music to offer a glimpse of freedom, you know, to people living under repressive regimes.

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