Jazz in France, 1934-75: contesting the politics of nation, art and world through music

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This book project traces the ways that French ideas and practices of jazz, originally an American import, were shaped according to the changing local concerns described in the title's key terms, and in each of 3 section headings: 1) NATION. This section focuses on Hugues Panassié - the leading critical authority on jazz in Europe before WWII - and the fan society the Hot-club de France, of which Panassié was president. In chapter 1 I explore the volatile French and European politics of the 1930s, and trace Panassié's intellectual and religious formation, to show how trends in nationalist, anti-modernist French Catholic thought informed the critic's highly influential conceptualisation of jazz as primitive folk expression. In chapter 2 I examine how, in creating a pedagogic canon of jazz recordings for Hot-club members - and demonstrating in prose and person how the recorded music should be felt - Panassié aimed via the phonograph to educate the 'alienated' modern French in the ways of 'groove' and an embodied black musical culture. Panassié's insights into jazz, though products of an obsession with racial exceptionalism, are often musically valuable; here I also ask what use we might make of such tainted knowledge, and how contemporary attitudes towards difference sometimes repeat historical follies. 2) ART. In trying to escape the primitivism that early writers had accorded jazz-as-folk expression, post-war French critics began to construct for the style a framework of value - based on ideas of historical progression and the individual genius - transferred, problematically, from the Western art tradition. Chapter 3 examines analytically the work of the jazz composer/critic André Hodeir, who sought to overcome worries of French 'inauthenticity' by assimilating the foreign (jazz improvisation) into the familiar (his own art music composition). This topic is examined from the reverse angle in chapter 4, which discusses the reception French critics, including Hodeir, accorded Thelonious Monk. In the 1950s Monk was revered for his innovative, 'authentic' improvisation, but in the early-60s French writers began to censure the pianist for having ceased to 'evolve', and, in 1964, for presenting 'composed' improvisations in several Paris performances; each representing and practising music traditions imagined not fully accessible to the other, Monk and Hodeir embodied anxieties around authenticity and synthesis which, as well as being identifiable in 60s French critical discourse, I show still to be current. 3) WORLD. This section tracks the ways that artists and critics made use of an 'American' music to critique US and global political issues in the 1960s. In chapter 5 I examine jazz in French cinema, specifically that of Jean-Luc Godard. For a post-war generation fascinated by American cultural genres, Martial Solal's soundtrack to 1960's À bout de souffle reinforced ideals of cosmopolitan modernity; but like jazz itself, this representation was gradually overwhelmed by radicalised images of African American cultural and political activity which, in films like 1968's One Plus One, were mobilised to attack US policy. This reception of US black liberation politics also became central to jazz media discourses; in chapter 6 I argue that in magazines like Jazz-hot, critics, musicians and letter-writing fans can be seen using 'musical' debates to explore France's place in the post-colonial world. This exploration is also the subject of a close reading of Barney Wilen's 1970s album Moshi, assembled from jazz improvisation, politicized song lyrics and field recordings taken by the saxophonist in the former French Africa. In conclusion the chapter examines the 1970s dissipation of both jazz and radical politics as forces in France, and the ways in which classic images of this French jazz history - like that of Josephine Baker, who, at the study's end, dies in Paris as a Knight of the Legion d'Honneur - have since been put to cultural use.