French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck by Deborah Mawer (review)

Over the past two decades, the reception of jazz in France has received considerable scholarly attention, with a number of academic monographs exploring its impact on French music and culture from the First World War onwards. The majority of these monographs has taken the form of exercises in cultural history, whose understanding of French cultural politics has not always been matched by an equivalent attention to the specificities of the music itself. As Deborah Mawer herself points out, there has thus far been ‘no dedicated book to test out the detailed musical interactions in respect of the seeming affinity between French “classical” music . . . and jazz’ (p. 1).

Mawer thus sets out to fill this lacuna by focusing on ‘two differentiated perspectives, geographical locations and time frames’ (p. 2). The first of these relates to the interactions of Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Milhaud with early jazz and ragtime between 1900 and 1935. The second shifts from France to Britain and the USA between 1925 and 1965. Here Mawer focuses on Jack Hylton’s ‘jazzed’ arrangements of Chopin, Bizet, Ravel, and Offenbach in the 1920s and 1930s, George Russell’s productive misreadings of Debussy and Ravel in his Lydian jazz theory, and Bill Evans’s debts to Ravel and Chopin in the 1950s, before concluding with an account of the close collaboration between Milhaud and Dave Brubeck in the 1950s and 1960s. These analyses, which constitute the main body of Mawer’s book, are prefaced by two chapters that seek to establish, first, some historical and cultural context and, second, a suitable analytical framework for the more detailed musicological readings that follow.

Not only is Mawer’s opening claim, lamenting the lack of specifically musical analyses of jazz in France, entirely justified, the detailed and perceptive musical readings she offers in the main body of her book make a very significant contribution to overcoming that lack. That said, there are places in her analysis where cultural historians and theorists may find themselves raising a slightly sceptical eyebrow and wishing that Mawer’s undoubted musicological skill was matched by an equivalent grasp of cultural theory. For example, early on in her book she remarks, in relation to the criticisms of ‘primitivism’ often levelled at Europeans’ reactions to early jazz, that ‘we should be careful not to assume an implicit superiority from our comfortable, time-shifted position in a wholly different cultural milieu’ (p. 48). This, however, is to misunderstand the bases on which critiques of primitivism rest. Far from assuming some complacent ‘implicit superiority’, these work from the recognition that we continue to live in a cultural and interpretative space shaped by earlier primitivisms and that our ‘cultural milieu’ is far from being ‘wholly different’ from that of the early twentieth century. It is thus only by tracing the roots and logics of earlier primitivisms that we can hope to avoid reproducing their ethnocentric assumptions in our own critical writings.

Early in her study, Mawer describes the appeal exerted by jazz on composers such as Ravel, Debussy, and Milhaud thus: ‘the appeal concerned emotional expressivity, timbre, rhythmic invention and the sense of spontaneity engendered by improvisation’ (p. 31). A critic better versed in the literature on primitivism would surely want to ask to what extent the key terms here—’emotional expressivity’, ‘invention’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘improvisation’—are neutral descriptions of the objective characteristics of jazz or profoundly overdetermined tropes reflecting deep-seated assumptions about the essential simplicity, spontaneity, and authenticity of people and musics of African heritage. When people of African heritage create and perform musical forms, from jazz to rap, their virtuosity is routinely attributed to so-called ‘black expressive culture’. When British MPs barrack, bluster, and shout at Prime Minister’s Questions this is, by contrast, never attributed to the intrinsically ‘expressive’ culture of the white British ruling class. The debates around primitivism that Mawer dismisses rather peremptorily...