A little more than a decade after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay opened the first Berlin Jazz Festival, Kieser returns to King’s thesis that jazz is a transformative, Black American medium, creating strength and beauty out of struggle. In an effort to encapsulate that concept in a single image, Kieser photographed the confident and calm face of a Black man bursting through wallpaper featuring 19th-century images of a Black dandy smoking a cigar. Kieser wanted to demonstrate that Black jazz musicians in the United States were breaking through such Uncle Tom stereotypes and demanding respect. Since the information about the concert only appears in small print at the lower margin, Kieser’s poster becomes more a statement of solidarity than an advertisement for a festival, bringing American politics into West German music culture. Kieser’s posters did not escape criticism from some of the Black performers they promoted. Some musicians spoke out against his use of Black bodies as symbols of primitivism or strength, divorced from the diversity of lived Black experiences in the United States and sanitizing their struggles for West German audiences.