Dancing with DeBeauvoir: Jazz and the French

By Colin Nettelbeck.

Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2004. 240 pages.

ISBN 0 522 85113 4.

Reviewed by Bruce Johnson

This study in the jazz diaspora is informed by a deep and broad knowledge of French society which helps to remind us that jazz ‘away’ is not simply a record of a derivative music diluted by distance, but of a process of acculturation that produces a form that is profoundly expressive and ‘authentic’, on its own terms. The well-known example of Django Reinhardt and his colleagues represents an influential body of work distinguished in terms of its own formal character. But more broadly, as with every country that developed a jazz culture, French jazz became a distinctive milieu which played a decisive role in articulating the country’s transition into modernity. In a number of ways it contributed to the diasporic creation of an America which differed significantly from the ‘original’, in that it helped to actualize a democratic and emancipative modernity to which the US itself often paid only lip-service, as the colour and gender lines exemplify. Expatriate Americans themselves often experienced this in a range of ways from the intellectual to the corporeal, as in the anecdote about Hemingway meeting Josephine Baker in Le Jockey nightclub in Montparnasse (196). It was jazz-age France which ‘produced’ Baker and others, like Man Ray (194), in a way that their own country did not.

Although early witnesses talk of local musicians in the 1920s playing ‘American jazz very badly’ (194), as Nettelbeck documents, the diasporic dynamic is far more complex than is implied by a model of one way traffic moving away from a centre to a dissipation of ‘authenticity’ on the margins. For this reason, incidentally I would dispute the claim that the US ‘remains the undisputed source of major innovation and directional change’ in jazz (76), and I think that Nettlebeck’s own insightful study is at least in tension with it also, as when he talks about the polymorphism of the music (79), and argues that jazz was so fully appropriated by the French that is was ‘not perceived as foreign or exotic, and above all, its American roots are largely ignored’ (144). My argument, in brief – and in outline I think it accords with Nettelbeck’s - is that centre/margins models of cultural diaspora are seriously compromised by mass mediations (Cambridge Companion to Jazz, 33-54).

Part 1 of this book is primarily a history of the arrival and assimilation of jazz in France through the twentieth century. As such, its primary interest for me was factual. I have wondered in print if the first contact with jazz for large numbers of Australians was the James Reese Europe ‘Hellfighters’ military band; evidently it was for many French, and on a scale that provides an incentive for my going further down that research path. It was also fascinating to see a detailed study of the French (and largely French initiated) version of the debate about ‘the real jazz’ - to this day influential – from the late 1930s. The fact that it was conducted most aggressively outside the US, in itself tells us a great deal about cultural diaspora and modernist discourses of ‘authenticity’ in general. It was also instructive to learn that a formal jazz studies programme was not inaugurated at the Paris Conservatorium (was this the first in France?) until 1985. The fact that this is more than a decade after the same initiative in New South Wales, and in a more conspicuously jazz-imbued society, gives me pause to reconsider some of my own arguments about institutional resistance to jazz in Australia. I note also that a quote from La revue musicale which I had used in a book and dated at 1920 – but could never rediscover my source – was apparently from March 1931. I am thankful to be able to correct that. In rather meagre return for this information, I record that the spelling of the clarinettist’s name is Noone, not Noon (84). And I wonder if the claim that free jazz grew out of be-bop (77) might be usefully revisited given the invocation of New Orleans jazz by some of its practitioners as their model (see for example Valerie Wilmer’s interviews in As Serious as Your Life).

Part 2 is a study of the relationship with French intellectual culture and the arts. Inevitably, this becomes a pas de deux between the music and ways of articulating modernity, and a major contribution to the re-theorising of international modernism. As someone who has spent so much time in this exercise in relation to Australia, I found this wonderfully stimulating. The founding discussions on the subject (as for example those of Clement Greenberg) preferred to locate significance at the level of High Art and viewed mass or popular culture with acute distaste. The legacy of this survives in the absence of popular music from the general debate, and in the durable gravitas attached to what came to be called ‘modern jazz’, the adjective subliminally determining decisions in arts funding and educational policies. It is an obdurate historical myopia, since the music that was taken up by the emerging modernists was what we now call ‘traditional jazz’. Thus, as Nettelbeck documents, the most fertile encounter between French modernism and music was effected through figures like Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker, Claude Luter, and other musicians whose names have faded from the constellation in which Cocteau, and Céline still shine radiantly. That is, as I have also argued regarding Australia, where painters, writers and political thinkers sought a music suited to a radical Euro-modernist agenda, it was a style rarely thought of as ‘modernist’ by musicologists, and practised by performers now generally dismissed as culturally negligible. Ironically, I think there is an argument that its most enthusiastic proponents of the 1930s, like Panassié, bear some responsibility for this. That argument is for another place. In the meantime, if you any interest in all or any of jazz, modernism and French cultural history, you must buy this book.

Music Forum Vol 11 No 1