Chopin is dead, all right, and in 1943 the Germans were doing their best to keep him that way. In occupied Poland, Poles were forbidden to perform his music from the first year of the occupation, and his statue in Warsaw's Łazienki Park had been blown up on May 31, 1940—the first monument in the city the Germans destroyed—and its bronze cut up and melted down. People played him anyway, at secret concerts in private apartments.

The June news from Poland was worse. On the morning of June 30, 1943, General Stefan Rowecki, code-named “Grot,” commander of the Home Army, the underground force that answered to the Polish government in exile, was arrested at a safe apartment on Spiska Street in Warsaw, betrayed by Gestapo informers inside his own organization. He was flown to Berlin and held at Sachsenhausen, and was killed on Himmler's order in August 1944, just after the Warsaw Uprising began. The statue came back in 1958, recast from the surviving mould. A swing arrangement of Chopin is a small act of defiance, but it is the kind a dance band can afford.