Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (review)

This study traces in detail the reception of jazz in French culture, principally during the interwar years but going back as far as the earliest Parisian fashion for ‘le cakewalk’ in the first years of the twentieth century. It concludes with the triumphant acceptance of jazz in the Liberation years after the end of the Second World War, when the music was finally assimilated into the mainstream musical culture of France. In the intervening years this was by no means a foregone conclusion: debates raged between the passionate enthusiasts of the earliest New Orleans jazz orchestras that arrived in France after the First World War, such as Hugues Panassié, and the diverse proponents of aesthetic conservatism that condemned the music as foreign to the national spirit and an affront to ‘la clarté française’. In the 1930s the increasing commercialisation of jazz, following the runaway success of Josephine Baker and La Revue nègre in 1925, led to sectarian quarrels even among the partisans of the music: the purists, such as Panassié, nostalgic for the original ‘hot’ New Orleans style, and those prepared to accept the evolution of the form into the mostly white swing bands of the 1930s and their French imitators, such as Ray Ventura. In the repressive context of the German Occupation the music was predictably denounced as a foreign, Judeo-American influence; but to be ‘swing’ became a covert form of cultural resistance associated with the Zazous, and this connection probably ensured jazz’s final triumph in the postwar years. The cultural politics of this complex evolution are revealing: the early critical condemnation of the music regularly drew on predictable racial stereotypes, and even among its partisans its appreciation was often coloured by the exotic appeal of American Negro culture and a sense that its purest form was necessarily a black form of expression. Matthew Jordan’s thoroughgoing scholarship in tracing these developments is to be admired: he unearths many obscure journalistic examples of aesthetic conservatism that might otherwise have been forgotten, and even goes to the trouble of translating them systematically into English, which all too often serves to highlight their absurdity. His study documents the quarrels among the fans with similarly conscientious even-handedness, understanding the passionate admiration of a Panassié for the earliest forms of the music, but allowing due recognition for the broader church that would go on to embrace Duke Ellington and even bebop. He seems less at home with Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman, and their French imitators, but acknowledges the role of chanson figures like Charles Trenet and Johnny Hess in the integration of the style into mainstream French popular culture. This is a satisfying study of the complex strands that lead to the assimilation of a foreign cultural influence and the way that the contemporary received view of the significance of jazz in French culture is not one that can be taken for granted.