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Jazz Adventures in French Culture

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knl145

1468-2931

Peter Hawkins,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

This collection of articles, all papers from a colloquium held at Seysse, near Toulouse in July 2003, explores a neglected but significant thread in French culture of the twentieth century: the influence of jazz. The topics range widely in chronology, subject matter and approach: from the success of the Revue nègre and its star Josephine Baker in the 1920s to the self-conscious jazz aesthetic of the contemporary novelist Christian Gailly. Most of the obvious and emblematic figures are covered — Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, Boris Vian — as well as some memorable interactions of heroic American jazz figures with French culture: Duke Ellington's numerous French tours and Miles Davis's score for Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. Some much less well-known figures include the jazz critic and composer André Hodeir and the collector and record producer Charles Delaunay. The coverage is not encyclopaedic, however, as one might expect from a collection such as this: there is no mention of Claude Nougaro, the most jazz-inspired among French singer-songwriters and creator of the quintessential song ‘Le jazz et la java’, nor of the saxophonist Dexter Gordon's role in Bertrand Tavernier's film Autour de minuit. There is nothing about Sacha Distel, a noted jazz guitarist in his youth, nor about Michel Legrand, a famous jazz pianist and composer in the early part of his career. For such omissions the editors can surely be forgiven, as the intention was clearly to stimulate interest rather than exhaust the subject. Several of the articles explore the attempts to introduce the improvisational aesthetic of jazz into other art forms: poetry, for instance, in the work of Jacques Reda, or cinema, in the films of Louis Malle and in the critical journalism of Boris Vian. Others adopt a more thematic approach, looking at the ambiguities of the notion of ‘la voix nègre’, the role of the ‘tribute’ in French jazz recordings, or the Caribbean beginnings of the ‘biguine’. The overall impression is of the opening-up of a rich and significant field of cultural research, suggesting numerous avenues of future exploration, and yet jazz remains a cult activity, a marginal taste, a subterranean, nocturnal current in French musical life. Even so, it is probably a more significant subculture than in the UK, and deserves to be acknowledged as a very influential strand in contemporary research on Franco–American relations.