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Beyond Le Boeuf: Interdisciplinary Rereadings of Jazz in France - William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. Music of the African Diaspora, 4. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001. xix + 191 pp. ISBN 0 520 22537 6. - Jody Blake, Le tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. viii + 207 pp. ISBN 0 271 01753 8. - Ludovic Tournès, New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999. 501 pp. ISBN 2 213 60364 2.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Andy Fry
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , 2003 , pp. 137 - 153
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Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2003

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References

1 Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Tyler Stovall, Paris noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York, 1996), xv–xvi. A generation younger than Shack, Stovall dedicates his book to the memory of his grandfather, who also served as a soldier in France during the First World War. Although Paris ‘never impressed [Stovall personally] as a paradise of racial good feelings’ (p. xv), this is still basically the story he tells.Google Scholar

3 For a recent account, see R. Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (Oxford, 1995).Google Scholar

4 ‘C'est le métissage, croisement fantasque de races, mélange capricieusement dosé, greffé, altération violente, contamination, transfusion de sève, qui multiplient, exaspèrent – et minent, comme chez cette adorable Florence Mills, morte, fleur maladive, à vingt-quatre ans – la vitalité de “l'homme de couleur” d'Amérique… . Chez ces afro-américains, nous sommes en présence non d'une tribu indigène à l'état de sauvagerie paradisiaque, mais d'une population … mixte, bigarrée au possible …; l'explosion suprême et ultime d'une singularité ethnique en décomposition.’ André Levinson, ‘Le métissage au théâtre’, Comoedia, 21 July 1929; a slightly adapted version of this article also appears in his Les visages de la danse (Paris, 1933), 270–3 (pp. 270–1). Note that Levinson claims in part to be summarizing an earlier piece by Pierre Brisson (‘Au Musichall’, Le temps, 17 June 1929), but he misreads his basically positive conclusion; Florence Mills was in fact 32 when she died. All translations are my own; my thanks to Gilles Rico for his assistance.Google Scholar

5 Ralph Schor, L'opinion française et les étrangers en France, 1919–1939 (Paris, 1985); Histoire de l'immigration en France, de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1996). The newspapers surveyed were L'action française, Le temps, La croix, L'aube, L'oeuvre, Le populaire, Le peuple and L'humanité.Google Scholar

6 Schor, Histoire de l'immigration, 90, 117.Google Scholar

7 For more detail see Matthew F. Jordan, ‘Jazz Changes: A History of French Discourse on Jazz from Ragtime to Be-Bop’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, California, 1998), Chapter 7, ‘Zazou dans le métro: Occupation, Swing and the Battle for La Jeunesse‘, 323–94. This dissertation is forthcoming as a book.Google Scholar

8 See, for example, Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca, NY, 2000); Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London, 2000); Brett A. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst, MA, 2002).Google Scholar

9 Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre, 100. Blake omits to mention Watkins (published after her 1992 University of Delaware dissertation, from which this book derives), who is one of the few authors to discuss jazz in France in the context of artistic primitivism. See also Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar

10 See Leighton, Patricia, ‘The White Peril and L'art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism and Anti-Colonialism’, Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), 609–30, and Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, 1989).Google Scholar

11 See, for example, Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910–1925 (Middletown, CT, 1975), and Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, 1991).Google Scholar

12 Slightly later, jazz's ambivalent signification was well captured by Jean Cocteau, who described it as a ‘curious amalgam of the rhythm of machines and the rhythm of Negroes – of the banal cry of the poster and the advertisement of New York and the wooden idols/fetishes from the Ivory Coast’ (‘Notebook on Art, Music, and Poetry’, manuscript in Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, cited in Jann Pasler, ‘New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Jean Cocteau's Identity’, Musical Quarterly, 75 (1991), 255–78 (p. 269).Google Scholar

13 The term ‘Surrealist-ethnographer’ is James Clifford's: The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 168.Google Scholar

14 Picasso's dancers have been identified as ‘la France’ (Marianne complete with Phrygian cap) and ‘le peuple’ (in worker's blue). See Nochlin, Linda, ‘Picasso's Color: Schemes and Gambits’, Art in America, 68 (December 1980), 105–23, 177–83 (pp. 117–18).Google Scholar

15 ‘Le jazz le plus dissonant, le plus sauvage, tel qu'on doit en entendre parmi les peuplades les plus arriérées’; ‘Revenir au tam-tam, au xylophone, au hurlement des cuivres, au bruit, ce n'est pas progresser … L'art nègre appartient à un passé lointain qu'il est inutile de ressusciter.‘ Pierre de Lapommeraye, Le ménestrel, 85/44 (2 November 1923), 453–4.Google Scholar

16 ‘Mais cet Adam et cette Eve noirs? Tout nous porte à penser que les nègres sont aux hommes primitifs ce que notre lézard est à l'iguanodon: taille, couleur, nature, tout a changé le cours des siècles; et les religions fétichistes sont évidemment, elles aussi, non de vénérables archetypes, mais des déformations souvent ridicules d'une religion primordiale sublime.’ J.-H. Moreno, Le ménestrel, 86/48 (28 November 1924), 495 (concerning a revival performance). I suspect that ‘Moreno’ was in fact Jacques Heugel, Le ménestrel's editor.Google Scholar

17 Darius Milhaud, Notes without Music, trans. Donald Evans (London, 1952), 127 (the New York edition Blake used appears to be paginated differently).Google Scholar

18 Darius Milhaud, ‘Jazz-band et instruments mécaniques: Les ressources nouvelles de la musique’, L'esprit nouveau, 25 [1924] (unpaginated). An earlier version of this article appeared as ‘L'évolution du jazz-band et la musique des nègres d'Amérique du nord’, Courrier musical, 25/9 (1 May 1923), 163–4, and has been reprinted several times, including in Milhaud, Études (Paris, 1927), 51–9.Google Scholar

19 Milhaud, ‘Jazz-band et instruments mécaniques’, cited in part by Blake, p. 140. (Milhaud also argued here that he derived the orchestration for La création du monde from black bands.) Among Blake's other evidence for the 1920s' reassessment of jazz are the writings of critic Émile Vuillermoz. She is misleading, however, in saying that he published in his Musiques d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1923) ‘a retraction of comments he had made in 1918 in an article on “Ragtime et jazz-band”’ (p. 70): in fact, this is a revised version of the very same text (unidentified clipping dated 6 October 1918 in Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Collection Rondel, Ro 585, ‘Le jazz et les spectacles nègres'). Both are rather ironic in tone but, if less than eulogizing jazz, are far from denouncing it. What is different is that the second version, not the first, considers jazz a black art, which seems to run contrary to Blake's notion of the ‘whitification’ of jazz. In this respect, it is interesting to compare another study by Olivier Roueff, who argues that critics progressed toward an understanding that jazz was black only by about the mid-1920s. This thesis is at least as vulnerable as Blake's to the production of counter-examples; but the contrast is telling of the different narratives the material can support. See ‘De l'Amérique mécanisée à l'Afrique sauvage: Le processus d'objectivation du jazz à travers la presse (1917–1932)‘, Denis-Constant Martin and Olivier Roueff, La France du jazz: Musique, modernité et identité dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Paris, 2002), 87–143. This useful text also includes another short history, by Martin, and a collection of reprinted articles from the inter-war period.Google Scholar

20 Milhaud, ‘Jazz-band et instruments mécaniques’.Google Scholar

21 French neo-classicism has, of course, been aligned to similarly traditionalist (and politically conservative) agendas. See Messing, Scott, Neoclassicism in Music from the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor, 1988), and, particularly, Richard Taruskin, ‘Review: Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 16 (1993), 286–302.Google Scholar

22 ‘Le music-hall, le cirque, les orchestres américaines de nègres, tout cela féconde un artiste au même titre que la vie’; ‘Ces spectacles ne sont pas de l'art. Ils excitent comme les machines, les animaux, les paysages, le danger.‘ Jean Cocteau, Le coq et l'arlequin (1918), repr. in Le rappel à l'ordre (Paris, 1926), 11–75 (p. 30).Google Scholar

23 ‘La leçon de rythme nous met le nez dans nos mollesses. Mais si nous nous laissons enlever par ce cyclone, c'est une autre forme de mollesse’; ‘Ce qui m'intéresse serait de connaître la réaction contre les crymbales [sic]. Car, de ces tumultes, un ordre neuf se dégage toujours.’ Jean Cocteau, ‘Jazz-band’ (4 August 1919), Carte blanche: Articles parus dans Paris-Midi (1920), repr. in Le rappel à l'ordre, 137–41 (p. 141).Google Scholar

24 ‘Après les frissons, les caresses, les pénombres, les enlacements, les dissonances précieuses, les nuages, les ondines, les guirlandes, les parfums, les vagues, les ironies de la musique impressionniste, Le sacre, et plus tard le Jazz band, arrivèrent comme une troupe d'éléphants bariolés marchant sur Capoue.’ Jean Cocteau, ‘Erik Satie’, Action: Cahiers individualistes de philosophie et d'art, 2 (March 1920), 15–21 (p. 20).Google Scholar

25 It is worth noting, for example, that Cocteau's newspaper column on the bal musette (which Blake cites in connection with postwar nationalism and nostalgia) was actually published three months before that on the jazz band. See Carte blanche, article of 26 May 1919, repr. in Le rappel à l'ordre, 103–5, and ‘Jazz-band’.Google Scholar

26 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago, 2002).Google Scholar

27 Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 96. This chapter previously appeared as ‘Jamming at Le Boeuf: Jazz and the Paris Avant-Garde’, Discourse, 12/1 (1989–90), 3–27.Google Scholar

28 With one exception: the book's bizarre index will easily be surpassed. To find references to ‘cakewalk’, for example, one must look under ‘d’ for ‘dance’, subcategory ‘ragtime and jazz’; to locate La revue nègre, ‘m’ for ‘music halls’, ‘productions in’; and ‘m’ works for Stravinsky, too – ‘musicians and composers’, ‘modern‘!Google Scholar

29 ‘L'histoire du jazz n'est pas seulement celle des musiciens qui lui ont donné vie, elle est aussi celle des médiateurs qui l'ont fait connaître, ainsi que celle du public qui l'a reçu.‘Google Scholar

30 The fascinating story of Sidney Bechet's success as a music-hall performer in the 1950s told in Chapter 11 is something of an exception, but only because he was seminal in building a new French audience for jazz.Google Scholar

31 Thèse de doctorat d'histoire, Université Versailles-St-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 1997.Google Scholar

32 See, for example, two essays in Black American Literature Forum, 25/3, special ‘Literature of Jazz’ issue (1991): John Gennari, ‘Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies’, 449–523 (and his Critiquing Jazz, Chicago, forthcoming); and Scott DeVeaux, ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography’, 525–60 (also in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O'Meally, New York, 1998, 483–512). See also the essays in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC, 1995).Google Scholar

33 Jacques Maritain, Art et scolastique (Paris, 1920), 69, cited in Hughes Panassié, Le jazz hot (Paris, 1934), 346.Google Scholar

34 See Rousso, Henry, Le syndrome de Vichy, de 1944 à nos jours (Paris, 1990).Google Scholar

35 However, Tournès also considers how Delaunay used his movement between zones in the course of Hot Club activities to pursue resistance work (for which he briefly landed in jail), and the assistance the Hot Clubs provided to musicians who had been interned.Google Scholar

36 Legrand's ban was reduced on account of later service to the resistance.Google Scholar

37 ‘Déviation de la conception et de l'esprit du jazz et nombreuses erreurs d'ordre technique. – Propagande exagérée en faveur du style re-bop.‘ Hughes Panassié, Bulletin du Hot Club de France, January 1948.Google Scholar

38 Bulletin Panassié, 3 (22 October 1947).Google Scholar

39 Hughes Panassié, Bulletin du Hot Club de France, August 1955 and October 1961.Google Scholar

40 I am translating Tournès's much-used term ‘jazzistique’, which I believe originates with Boris Vian.Google Scholar

41 La revue du jazz, October 1949 and November 1949.Google Scholar

42 Tournès does not observe how ironic this was in the case of Rebatet: before the war he had been one of the most outspoken critics of jazz hot and a frequent sparring partner of Panassié.Google Scholar

43 In particular, Stravinsky's 1939–40 Harvard lectures, published as Poétique musicale (Cambridge, MA, 1942; repr. Paris, 1945), echo both Maritain's ideas and his rhetoric. See Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (Oxford, 1989), 86–96. Poétique musicale was ghost-written by Roland-Manuel and Pierre Souvtchinsky, from Stravinsky's notes.Google Scholar

44 Stravinsky, Poétique musicale, cited in Andriessen and Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork, 94–5.Google Scholar

45 Fry, Andy In addition to the texts already mentioned, see Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, forthcoming).Google Scholar