Making Jazz French

Download or read book Making Jazz French written by Jeffrey H. Jackson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA history of jazz in interwar France, concentrating on the ways this originally American music was integrated into French culture./div

Download or read book Making Jazz French written by Jeffrey H. Jackson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the world wars, Paris welcomed not only a number of glamorous American expatriates, including Josephine Baker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also a dynamic musical style emerging in the United States: jazz. Roaring through cabarets, music halls, and dance clubs, the upbeat, syncopated rhythms of jazz soon added to the allure of Paris as a center of international nightlife and cutting-edge modern culture. In Making Jazz French, Jeffrey H. Jackson examines not only how and why jazz became so widely performed in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s but also why it was so controversial. Drawing on memoirs, press accounts, and cultural criticism, Jackson uses the history of jazz in Paris to illuminate the challenges confounding French national identity during the interwar years. As he explains, many French people initially regarded jazz as alien because of its associations with America and Africa. Some reveled in its explosive energy and the exoticism of its racial connotations, while others saw it as a dangerous reversal of France’s most cherished notions of "civilization." At the same time, many French musicians, though not threatened by jazz as a musical style, feared their jobs would vanish with the arrival of American performers. By the 1930s, however, a core group of French fans, critics, and musicians had incorporated jazz into the French entertainment tradition. Today it is an integral part of Parisian musical performance. In showing how jazz became French, Jackson reveals some of the ways a musical form created in the United States became an international phenomenon and acquired new meanings unique to the places where it was heard and performed.

Download or read book Harlem in Montmartre written by William A. Shack and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-09-04 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates the expatriate African American community of jazz musicians that thrived in the Montmartre district of Paris in the '20s and '30s and helped turn the "city of lights" into the major jazz capital it remains today.

Download or read book Jazz and Postwar French Identity written by Elizabeth Vihlen McGregor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France’s postwar society. In the minds of many, jazz was connected to youth culture, but instead of challenging traditional gender expectations, the music tended to reinforce long-held stereotypes. French critics, musicians, and fans contended with the reality of American superpower strength and often strove to elevate their own country’s stature in relation to the United States by finding fault with American consumer society and foreign policy aims. Jazz audiences used this music to condemn American racism and to support the American civil rights movement, expressing strong reservations about the American way of life. French musicians lobbied to create professional opportunities for themselves, and some went so far as to create a union that endorsed preferential treatment for French nationals. As France became more ethnically and religiously diverse due immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, French jazz critics and fans noted the insidious appearance of racism in their own country and had to contend with how their own citizens would address the changing demographics of the nation, even if they continued to insist that racism was more prevalent in the United States. As independence movements brought an end to the French empire, jazz enthusiasts from both former colonies and France had to reenvision their relationship to jazz and to the music’s international audiences. In these postwar decades, the French were working to preserve a distinct national identity in the face of weakened global authority, most forcefully represented by decolonization and American hegemony. Through this originally African American music, French listeners, commentators, and musicians participated in a process that both challenged and reinforced ideas about their own culture and nation.

Download or read book French Music and Jazz in Conversation written by Deborah Mawer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French concert music and jazz often enjoyed a special creative exchange across the period 1900–65. French modernist composers were particularly receptive to early African-American jazz during the interwar years, and American jazz musicians, especially those concerned with modal jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibited a distinct affinity with French musical impressionism. However, despite a general, if contested, interest in the cultural interplay of classical music and jazz, few writers have probed the specific French music-jazz relationship in depth. In this book, Deborah Mawer sets such musical interplay within its historical-cultural and critical-analytical contexts, offering a detailed yet accessible account of both French and American perspectives. Blending intertextuality with more precise borrowing techniques, Mawer presents case studies on the musical interactions of a wide range of composers and performers, including Debussy, Satie, Milhaud, Ravel, Jack Hylton, George Russell, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.

Download or read book Django Generations written by Siv B. Lie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-22 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The distinctive sound of the swing-driven guitar style of Django Reinhardt has become almost synonymous with a carefree, bohemian Frenchness to fans all over the world. However, we in the US refer to his music using a telling designation: Django is known here as the father of gypsy jazz. In France, the cultural significance of the musical style--called jazz manouche in reference to his origins in the Manouche subgroup of Romanies (known pejoratively as "Gypsies")--is fraught both for the Manouche and for the white French men and women eager to claim Django as a native son. In Django Generations, ethnomusicologist Siv B. Lie explores the complicated ways in which Django's legacy and jazz manouche express competing notions of what it means to be French. Though jazz manouche is overwhelmingly popular in France, Manouche people are more often treated as outsiders. However, some Manouche people turn to their musical heritage to gain acceptance in mainstream French society. Considering all of the characteristics and roles attributed to Django--as a world-renowned jazz musician, as an artistic pioneer, as a representative of French heritage, and as a Manouche--jazz manouche becomes a potent means for performers and listeners to articulate their relationships with French society, actual or hoped-for. Weaving together a history of jazz manouche and ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the bars, festivals, family events, and cultural organizations where jazz manouche is performed and celebrated, Lie offers insight into how a musical genre can channel arguments about national and ethnoracial belonging. She argues that an uncomfortable cohabitation of Manouche identity and French identity lies at the heart of jazz manouche, which is what makes it so successful and powerful"--

Download or read book Jazz Diasporas written by Rashida Braggs and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the close of the Second World War, waves of African American musicians migrated to Paris, eager to thrive in its reinvigorated jazz scene. Jazz Diasporas challenges the notion that Paris was a color-blind paradise for African Americans. On the contrary, musicians--and African American artists based in Europe like writer and social critic James Baldwin--adopted a variety of strategies to cope with the cultural and social assumptions that greeted them throughout their careers in Paris, particularly in light of the cultural struggles over race and identity that gripped France as colonial conflicts like the Algerian War escalated. Through case studies of prominent musicians and thoughtful analysis of personal interviews, music, film, and literature, Rashida K. Braggs investigates the impact of this post-war musical migration. Examining a number of players in the jazz scene, including Sidney Bechet, Inez Cavanaugh, and Kenny Clarke, Braggs identifies how they performed both as musicians and as African Americans. The collaborations that they and other African Americans created with French musicians and critics complicated racial and cultural understandings of who could play and represent "authentic" jazz. Their role in French society challenged their American identity and illusions of France as a racial safe haven. In this post-war era of collapsing nations and empires, African American jazz players and their French counterparts destabilized set notions of identity. Sliding in and out of black and white and American and French identities, they created collaborative spaces for mobile and mobilized musical identities, what Braggs terms 'jazz diasporas.'"--Provided by publisher.