The French connection: Mythologies of La Nouvelle Orléans in French discourse on jazz

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2011 14: 507European Journal of Cultural StudiesMatthew F. Jordan

discourse on jazzThe French connection : Mythologies of La Nouvelle Orléans in French

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The French connection: Mythologies of La Nouvelle Orléans in French discourse on jazz

Matthew F. JordanPennsylvania State University, USA

AbstractIn the 20th century, jazz music spread throughout global culture like few other musical forms. Over the 40-year period in which jazz was assimilated into French culture, myths about the origin of jazz played an important role in the discourse surrounding the music. By examining both how these myths functioned in the discourse and examining how they changed over time depending on cultural circumstances, this article shows how writers increasingly used jazz etiologies and writing on the importance of New Orleans to the history of jazz to bridge the cultural gap and to make a French connection with jazz music, so that the enjoyment of it could be experienced as authentically French. From early abstract expressivist origins, to the latter strategic deployment of these myths as a feature of New Orleans revivalism, this discourse played an important role in the integration of jazz into French cultural identity.

KeywordsFrance, jazz, music, New Orleans revivalism, origin myths

Over the course of the 20th century, jazz music spread out to become a recognized part of global culture. Few other cultural forms have been woven so intricately into the struc-ture of feeling of so many cultures, and the stories of these immigrations and integrations are beginning to be told (Atkins, 2001; Jackson, 2003; Jones, 2001; Jordan, 2010; Ogren, 1989; Starr, 2004). In many cases, cultures made sense of jazz by using current changes in the music to think about continuity and discontinuity in the experience of everyday life. Yet narratives must have beginnings in order to make sense of the present. Any story of jazz needs an origin myth as its foundation if the narrative is to make sense, and

Corresponding author:Matthew F. Jordan, College of Communications, Pennsylvania State University, 115 Carnegie Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. Email: [email protected]

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examining the way in which such origin myths are constructed can tell us much about what matters to a culture.

Stuart Hall once told the story of cultural studies beginning with two seminal paradigms that the field has attempted to ‘think forwards’ (Hall, 1980: 72) to better understand cultures and the things that matter to them. He attributed these two para-digms, the ‘culturalist’ and the ‘structuralist’, to two important thinkers: Raymond Williams and Claude Lévi-Strauss. From Raymond Williams, Hall identified the cultur-alist urge to make sense of things by understanding what kinds of descriptions are available for a culture, at any given moment, to communicate a sense of its experience and to develop common meanings. By following this lead, one could make sense of how a particular culture structured its feelings and connected to the world. From Lévi-Strauss, most renowned for his work on myth, Hall took a concern for the structures that determine how we can think and act and an emphasis on the importance of thinking about ‘the whole’ in a way that moved beyond contingency and specificity. He praised Lévi-Strauss’s mode of relating the structure to the way that a people articulates it, and he commended the structuralist focus on the important idea of ideology. I would like to marshal both paradigms as heuristic guides to think through different French articula-tions of the story of where jazz music came from, and to examine the kinds of cultural work that using these changing myths afforded. In the end, although Lévi-Strauss is important for identifying myth and music as important sites for cultures to construct a relationship to the world, I find William’s emphasis on the contingency of meaning more compelling to explain how this discourse around jazz, these myths about its ori-gins, changed over time.

Of the many communicative forms that we use to make sense of the world, music is perhaps the most powerful in terms of its capacity to structure our affective connection to that world. Yet as long as people have been writing about music, it also has been elusive and problematic. It moves us and makes all kinds of symbolic forms matter to us, but sometimes we are not sure why this is the case. Ever since I have been thinking seriously about the importance of music as a rich source of cultural communication, Lévi-Strauss’s writing on the subject has moved me. Like the mythic systems of sym-bolic meaning that he studied so often, Lévi-Strauss thought that music had primal emotional and narrative power. Music and myth, he argued, were structured in similar ways, weaving motifs about life into symbolic forms that rang true for people on a deep level, right down there with the conflicting forces and ideas at the foundation of the self and society. What did it mean about an individual or culture’s relationship to both when he argued that ‘music has its being in me, and I listen to myself through it. Thus the myth and the musical work are like conductors of an orchestra, whose listeners are the silent performers?’ (Lévi–Strauss, 1983: 17). Of course, this sounds a lot like Stuart Hall’s description of ideology at work, but to understand how ideology functions in discursive fields during particular moments, one must contextualize. In this case, beyond stating that people seem to use discourse about music like they use myth to construct a relationship to the world, to understand how they make these discourses meaningful, one needs to privilege Williams’ culturalist heuristic over Lévi–Strauss’s structuralist observations. In what follows, I will examine how myths about jazz music told by a particular culture – France – functioned in particular ways during specific



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moments. Over time, the origin myths used by French writers to make sense of jazz went through a metamorphosis, and New Orleans became the primary location for sto-ries about its birth and for identifying the things in jazz that were ‘originally’ French.

Like nowhere else in the world, New Orleans is the haunting ground for mythologies about the origins of jazz music, spectral truths as elusive and mysterious as the sound of Orpheus’ lyre. No one really knows what happened during the long century of syncretic jamming at Congo Square from whence jazz sprang. There are no adequate records – written or aural – to answer heartfelt questions about the origins of jazz, yet they con-tinue to be asked and answered. What harmonic, rhythmic and technical spirits spawned the demi-gods of jazz who played in Storyville and spread their music up and down the Mississippi by riverboat? What did Buddy Bolden’s trumpet sound like, and just what did someone think they heard him say? When did the music stop being ragtime or blues and become jazz? Where did the word ‘jazz’ come from? Such are the questions from which our origin myths about jazz come. In the sense that Lévi-Strauss used the term, mythos means nothing more or less than ‘story’, and no doubt he would remind us that there is no one truth about any of these myths to be found. Rather, he would say that each of these stories contains important semantic chunks that are used and exchanged depend-ing on cultural circumstances to make jazz meaningful to the weavers of these myths. As such, their truths are relational, they depend on ‘the way those elements are combined (Lévi-Strauss, 1963: 210); their meanings, as Williams would say, depend on how they are used within particular circumstances to structure a narrative and affective relation-ship to the world.

Myths about jazz seem to be particularly rich sites for uncovering such usages. Music has primal communicative power, the ability to suggest and convey the conflict-ing forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society. Lévi-Strauss struggled to find the right words to explain why the listener feels the irresistible need to fill this gap between feeling and meaning, to add language when experiencing the emotional remainder of music, for words rarely suffice. He believed that the meaning and feelings conveyed through music could not be translated into any other form of communication, an idea that Elvis Costello later riffed on, saying that ‘writing about music is like danc-ing about architecture’. Similarly, Roland Barthes argued that music criticism was a kind of linguistic appliqué; when we listen to music and are moved by it, we project our affective relationship on to it by applying adjectives: ‘Music is, by a natural inclination, what immediately receives an adjective. The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, that execution is that’ (Barthes, 1985: 267; emphasis in original). When we talk about jazz music and its origins, the gaps created by the affective power of the music are filled with myths – or ‘available descriptions’ in Williams’ parlance – depending on the given cultural context. In the French context, you would expect the mythemes – the discursive components – to be the ones that have the most to do with what it means to be French, again depending on the contingencies of the day.

The repeated telling of French origin myths about jazz reflect the culture’s attempt to come to terms with a new music that moved it in profound ways. Over time, different parts of these myths were emphasized, depending on what issues were important – or as Barthes might say, apropos to modern pop cultural discourse, certain features of these myths were naturalized as discourses in a way that reflected France’s changing




perception of itself (Barthes, 1970). These shifts in the story helped the culture make sense of the complex interplay of continuity and discontinuity, and perform the ongoing work of constructing cultural identity.

Expressivist etiologies

I see three modes of mythologizing the origin of jazz, or rather varieties of the French uses of jazz etiologies corresponding roughly to moments in the story of France’s assimi-lation of jazz: the expressivist etiologies, myths of the prodigal return via the imaginary construction of a French connection, and their dialectical progeny which emerged with New Orleans revivalism. The first variety of origin myth for jazz was typically what James Carey might call ‘expressivist’ (2009: 55). Carey borrows the term from Charles Taylor, who in turn drew from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to characterize a way of thinking about culture and real-ity, whereby a culture’s sense of reality and its expressive forms are a product of human actions in and upon the world. Our cultural forms, our communicative action, ‘express at any historical moment the purposes and objectives, intentions and desires of humans’ (2009: 56). Like Carey, I think all communicative action is essentially expressivist, but music – especially folk music – has long been conceived this way. Thus jazz, like all folk arts or authentic cultural forms, was described in France as the expression of the ethnos and ethos of a people. It originated from a general need on the part of les nègres d’amérique to express their feeling of oppression. Borrowing tropes of explanation linked to Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont and other seminal thinkers on American race relations, jazz was characterized as having sprung from the need of the enslaved Africans and their descendents to communicate their suffering from having been kept in a subordinate position. The standard story was that the former slaves did so by appropriating available western musical instruments and forms, merging them with their own rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities, and retasking them according to their needs. Since this feeling and need was generalized, the origin of jazz – its birthplace – was not geographically located. The key to the etiology was the collective feeling that found a way to be expressed through the various musical modes across time.

These leitmotifs recur in French descriptions of African American music and quickly dominated in the discourse on jazz. Thus, from Ernst Ansermet in 1919 during the first wave of jazz criticism:

This genius of the race manifests itself in all the elements of the music. It will transfigure all the music it appropriates … pushing le nègre to search for pleasure outside the orthodox intervals [of western culture]. (Ansermet, 1971[1919]: 176)

One hears a similar return of this mytheme from the surrealist poet and later jazz critic, Robert Goffin, first in 1922 and after many times: ‘It is the expression of people oppressed without a country or a homeland. It is the cry for deliverance from … inescapable soli-tude and suffering’ (Goffin, 1932: 13). It is heard in the story told by Darius Milhaud, who argued that the ‘tragic and despairing’ conditions of blacks was the ‘source of jazz, its profoundly human value, which overwhelms one as completely as any universally



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recognized masterpiece of music’ (Milhaud, 1923: 164). Such etiologies dominated in this early moment, when French listeners were trying to explain the origin of jazz and make sense of its expressive and affective power.

Even a highly original thinker such as André Schaeffner ended up using this expres-sivist etiology in his story of the evolution of jazz. Having studied the history of western writing on African music, he knew that searching for the hybrid origins of jazz was dif-ficult at best: ‘The immediate origins of jazz remain troubled and are too covered with legends for us to find them’ (Coeuroy and Schaeffner, 1926: 101).1 Yet he used standard expressivist mythemes echoing de Tocqueville, arguing that jazz arose from a people who, although officially free, were kept on the outside of American culture. Their access to freedom and enjoyment, and hence the basis of their particular hybrid subjectivity, came from taking the western cultural forms that they found around them and making them their own. However, looking to be more historical, so as to understand jazz as dis-tinct from other forms like ragtime, he located its origin in the south of the USA, where the slave populations were greatest:

It is thus in regions like Louisiana and South Carolina (where Charleston is found) where the memory of African dances remain still very strong that seem to have created a crucible favorable for the elaboration of jazz. (Coeuroy and Schaeffner, 1926: 95)

Schaeffner’s analysis sought to emphasize how jazz as a new form expressed more than just ahistorical suffering and was more than just a derivative version of ‘musique nègre’: it was ‘musique afro-américaine’ which spoke to and from the cultural conditions of a particular form of modernity. Writing against centuries of music criticism that compared particular musical pieces to universal types or ideal forms, Schaeffner argued that jazz negated the idea of a pure music because it was, like all music, always in evolution. His collaborator André Coeuroy responded to critics of Schaeffner’s emphasis on hybridity in the press:

Schaeffner is perfectly grounded in saying [that the music expresses a state of the soul confined by melancholy], whether in the violent musics of Africa and the songs of the planters from the Antilles or from Louisiana, or the spirituals or jazz. (Coeuroy, 1926: 616)

Yet whether critics took a Kantian approach to jazz criticism or a more historically contingent view of hybrid culture like Schaeffner, the origins of jazz continued to be attributed to an affective ontology not specifically located in any one city.

Variations on this first kind of jazz etiology continued to be heard for decades. Importantly, although these expressivist myths helped to make sense of jazz, they did little to address the strange French fascination with a music with very different expres-sive tendencies than its own. Another question arose: why is our attraction to this music that is not our folk art – that expresses another ethnos and cultural ethos – so strong? It was for this reason, one could argue, that this first kind of myth began to be replaced by a new one that answered such a question in a more satisfying way by offering a better beginning to the cultural narrative.




Making the French connection

The second variety of origin myth emerged over the course of the 1920s and functioned to bridge the gap in the structure of feeling between jazz as the expression of another race and French people’s strange attraction to it. It provided a way to come to terms with the implications of enjoying such exoticism for French cultural identity. Put another way: if listeners heard something in jazz that moved them, they seemed compelled to search for something originally French in jazz. Probably the first example of this type of imagina-tive mythic work came from the ethnomusicologist Gabrielle Choubly: ‘As we learn jazz we relearn, painfully, something we – or at least our ancestors – knew long ago’ (Choubly, 1920: 30). Jazz had certain connections to a structure of feeling long-concealed by civi-lization, and the desire to play jazz in modern France was not a sign of French people being led astray by foreign music, as anti-jazz critics complained; rather, it expressed the return of an original French sensibility that had been concealed over time by civilization. She argued that modern archeological studies proved that there had once been black people in France who, based on the instruments found, had ‘a developed rhythmic sense’. In her story, as the Aryans and other northern peoples had spread into France, these ‘indigenous’ rhythmic peoples had been pushed south into Northern Africa and eventu-ally mixed into the tribes of central Africa. By the time that Africans were brought to America as slaves, their music combined indigenous hypnotic rhythms of these Africans and the music of pre-Aryan Mediterranean culture. Now, through jazz, this repressed ‘colored’ rhythmic sentiment in French culture had finally made its way back home through this unlikely prodigal son. Thus, the French public’s taste for the ‘black rhythms of jazz’ was perfectly natural because it was ‘originally French’ (Choubly, 1920: 31).

While Choubly linked the French enjoyment of jazz to the return of a repressed ata-vistic rhythmic sentiment to explain the affective attraction, another kind of etiological myth connecting the French to jazz began to develop through its imaginary terre natale in La Louisiane and La Nouvelle Orléans. In this variation, geographic and cultural con-text was emphasized to make the French connection. For example, critic Henry Prunières reviewed a series of Columbia recordings of black American spiritual music that evoked the expressivist origins of jazz, but tied it to French America:

In the churches of Louisiana, the musical preachers exalted them more and more. Encouraged by their exclamations, the faithful fell to their knees, crying and convulsing. Suddenly, taken by a kind of delirium, they began to sing together guided by a kind of collective hysteria … One could get the idea of these scenes by listening to these records [which] help us to penetrate the mystery of the origins of jazz. (Prunières, 1928: 222)

While many made this connection to the music through French American geographi-cally, others connected France to the origins of jazz linguistically through an increasingly popular etymology of the word ‘jazz’, which was said to have originated in the French verb jaser (to chat): a theory first introduced by the critic Irving Schwerke in the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. The critic Paul Le Flem used this theory (in print and on the radio) to argue that jazz was really not foreign and un-French, as its opponents insisted – so maybe the French passion for jazz was not unnatural at all:



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Jazz would be a simple deformation of the French word jasé, but written in English. Long ago, the black French slaves enjoyed reproducing the thousand noises of nature on their little self-made instruments. They chatted, ‘jasaient’, all the while making music. Thus would jazz be of French descent? (Le Flem, 1926: 4)

In his story, French plays the middle term between the three languages (the slaves’ musical language, French, and English); it is borrowed to describe the function of the original musical language that the slaves creolized and brought into English.

It would seem that from these geographical and linguistic connections came the need to emphasize something French in the musical origins of jazz. Again, Louisiana and New Orleans were crucial topoi in the cultural imaginary for spinning these myths. As this idea of an innate French connection between the origin of jazz and French culture became normalized and naturalized through repeated telling, this musical link surfaced in critical appraisals of the concerts, records and piano rolls of the great French piano duo of the 1920s, Jean Wiéner and Clement Doucet.

Riffing on standard descriptions of ‘innate’ French expression as measured and clear, critics repeatedly argued that Wiéner and Doucet’s music showed that their French jazz was not the result of republican assimilation (a discursive force at the heart of many myths about French culture), but rather conveyed the return of something original in the music that had been lost over time. For example, Maurice Délage described Wiéner and Doucet’s jazz as taking the music back to its French roots:

I believe that an unexpected circuit takes us back to Louisiana and the old foundation of the French romantic song, emphasized by its transition onto the strings of the plantation banjos, tinged minor in the touching dusk where the imported nègres sang from their childish and so-lively soul. The American takeover is nothing but a stage of evolution. (Délage, 1926: 19)

He noted that there was something ‘curiously Franckist in the interior chromatics that creates the atmosphere of jazz’ (1926: 20), and this French ‘source’ for jazz explained the curious French attraction to it. Délage’s story worked a lot like Choubly’s in its search for French origins in the music. However, rather than the detour through Africa, he argued that there were French harmonies and melodies that remained strong in Louisiana, even though they had been transformed by (again the expressivist riff) the nègre’s ‘infantile soul’. Indeed, the nègre’s repeated use of these French harmonies – les nègres’ famous resistance to cultural modernity as an established primitivist trope – had preserved them. As such, he argued that the ‘blues are the closest, even though deformed’ (1926: 20), variant of a French music barely alive in France. Having been kept alive in Louisiana, these old melodies had been revived in France by Wiéner and Doucet’s French blues piano, and this old French ‘source’ could help rejuvenate French music. Again, we see the origin myth providing the basis for a redemptive narrative about restoring French culture by returning it to its roots.

Roland Manuel rehearsed similar story in relation to the duo’s music, but in this case argued that the Frenchmen had ‘washed away the last traces of the anglo-saxon sensibil-ity’ in jazz and had ‘given us its essential beauty’ (Manuel, 1926: 12). In so doing, they had restored to the music its original and properly French character. Not only had Wiéner




and Doucet provided an acoustic return, but also offered a music that was more French than other jazz due to their ability to shed Anglo-Saxon influences. Importantly, these tellings of the myth of the French connection to an original jazz served to naturalize the enjoyment of jazz by Frenchmen. Jeremy Lane (2005) has argued that the ‘naturalness’ critics heard in jazz mirrored what Pierre Bourdieu has described as the ‘ease and facil-ity’ at the core of the bourgeois ethos. Here, one hears the attempt to link them explicitly together in the naturally French jazzmen. It was perfectly appropriate for French men and women to embrace their feelings for jazz because jazz was, at least partly, French.

Perhaps the most telling retelling of this kind of origin myth came years later during the Occupation, when the increasingly right-wing André Coeuroy – whose cultural con-servatism had flowered since the time of his early writing on jazz with Schaeffner – used this mythic French connection to argue that jazz expressed a sentiment that was even more atavistic than the original settlers of Louisiana, one that was much less English and even less black. He brought the origins of jazz back home to the pre-modern inhabitants of France, Les Gaulois:

For a long time, we believed that jazz was specifically nègre. The present thesis is exactly the opposite. Jazz was black only by chance. Its principal compositional elements come from whites, and whites from Europe. By its history and by its material, jazz is ours. Its future is in our hands. (Coeuroy, 1942: 24)

At first, his etiology seems to be an expressivist variation with a geographic connection: ‘Its cradle is in Mississippi, and its inventors were the nègres already enslaved by Frenchmen, and still today in the service of families who came from Poitou, Saintoge, Aunis, Normandie, and Picardie’ (1942: 26). However, rather than the nègre spirit of musical deformation being seminal, it was ‘the French genius, with the gallant, amiable, and gay spirit of our civilization, more than the puritanical and severe spirit of Old England, [that] was the creator’ (1942: 26). Coeuroy proved this by returning to the ety-mology of the word jazz in the French word jaser (to converse), but he went further back, linking the meaning of jazz to its root word in Gallic culture: ‘Africa dialect? Patois nègre? In reality, an old Celtic word, the Provençale form of which is jasar, the French form jaser (and gazouiller), the Italian gazza (which designates an itch), the Breton form geiz’ (1942: 29). New Orleans jazz, he argued, always evoked this ‘gaulois’ notion of a conversation. Although the rhythm of this musical conversation may have been nègre, the language it used, the melodies, the harmonies and its spirit, were European. ‘It reso-nates like it does in Europe, because it is from Europe’ (1942: 59). Jazz was not the expression of a race that was, as Joseph Arthur comte de Gobineau said of les nègres, ‘gripped and tortured by musical enjoyment’ (Coeuroy and Schaeffner, 1926: 22). Rather, jazz was ordered, measured and not to be feared as an un-French cultural force. By changing the terms of the jazz debate in the middle of the Occupation culture wars sur-rounding jazz and the swing youth movement, Coeuroy managed to accomplish two tasks. First, he made it possible to enjoy strette French jazz and be a ‘true’ racist European. Considering that Coeuroy had contributed articles to pernicious right-wing journals such as Je Suis Partout and La Gerbe, he may have wanted to make sure that enjoying jazz was compatible with collaboration. Second, his thesis legitimized the enjoyment that the



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swing youth movement found in its music by repressing the black and English sources and connecting jazz to European origins – sane, ethnically appropriate ones dating back to nos ancêtres, les gaulois.2

New Orleans revivalism

The third moment of myth making about the origin of jazz emerged after the Occupation in relation to New Orleans revivalism, and blended elements of the first two modes. From the first, it utilized expressivist description; from the second, it traced the evolu-tion of jazz to the streets of New Orleans and made the French connection. One could also say that from the second type, it strategically made this original link to jazz a source of commercial authenticity, but not through a kind of ‘folk discourse’ – as per expressiv-ist etiologies. Rather, it provides examples of what Simon Frith (1996) has called ‘pop discourse’, in that the generation of origin myths by the New Orleans revival movement was about trying to locate authenticity in the era of commercialized and mass-mediated popular music. This form of discourse on jazz – a ‘true jazz’ that separated itself from commercial expression – would come to dominate in the post-war era. In the mythologies of ‘true jazz’ that emerged from the revivalists, pop discourse blurred into art discourses3 linked to the expression of an uncultivated naturalness. It was a stridently anti-modern and anti-commercial vision of jazz, at least on the surface of things, but it was also a jazz mythology that aided the revivalists in constructing and branding a genre of music with its own market and symbolic economy, one that paid quite hand-somely in France.

Following the Second World War, with the explosion of festivals, events, institutions and recordings of jazz in France, the New Orleans style competed for market share in a public hungry for jazz of all kinds. Although there were similar revival movements exerting themselves in America and later in England, the French version was the brain-child of Hugues Panassié, one of the towering figures in the story of jazz criticism in France. Before the war, Panassié’s rhetoric became more heated as he condemned what he considered to be the commercial corruption of jazz during the swing era. Like his politics, his tastes in jazz had become increasingly more conservative. He and Charles Delaunay, the editors at Jazz Hot, were on the board of directors for the Hot Record Society, an international organization which increasingly concerned itself with generat-ing lists of ‘authentic’ early jazz recordings for ‘connoisseur’ vinyl collectors. By 1938, due to his unflappable faith and investment in all things Satchmo – Louis Armstrong, his jazz incarnate – he fixed on New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and promoted the idea with hagiographic dogma. Panassié was not only determined to push New Orleans records from the old days as examples of uncorrupted jazz, but also to record the New Orleans style music lacking in the marketplace. In 1938, he gathered his friend Milton Messrow around the microphone with Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier, and billed it on his Swing label as ‘authentic’ New Orleans style. These 1938 sessions (released in America on Victor’s Bluebird label) laid the groundwork for the international New Orleans revival movementm as it proved that this style of music could be commercially viable (Raeburn, 2009), especially with the help of critics such as Panassié who would promote it.




During the war, Panassié withdrew with his vast vinyl collection to his castle in the non-occupied zone and into his nostalgically anti-modern vision of jazz. He penned the book The Real Jazz (1942), which was smuggled out of France and published by Smith and Durell, the same outfit who had published Charles E. Smith, William Russell and Fred Ramsey’s The Jazz Record Book (1942), another seminal text in the New Orleans revivalist movement. Smith adapted the book for American publication, and both books pushed a new vision of jazz historiography where New Orleans was given primacy and New Orleans-style jazz was called the ‘parent style’ (Raeburn, 2009).4 In The Real Jazz, which was published in France after the war by Editions Robert Laffont as La Véritable musique de jazz (Panassié, 1946), Smith wrote the preface and used the space to plug Victor record re-releases and the sessions with Ladnier and Bechet as ‘real jazz’ – not too surprising, given that Victor underwrote much of Smith’s scholarship. Throughout The Real Jazz, Panassié pushed the same New Orleans centered dogma as Smith had in The Jazz Record Book. His jazz etiology was familiar, describing its primitivist expressivist origins and arguing that ‘jazz did not issue from the individual efforts of one composer but from the spontaneous urge of a whole people’ (Panassié, 1942: 7). He quoted Tocquevillian tropes that had long worked as mythemes in the discourse:

[A]s a consequence of the ostracism to which, in the USA, the whites had subjected the colored people, the negroes lived apart, among themselves, and did not participate in the prevailing cultural stream, but formed a primitive intellectual society of their own. (1942: 8)

However, now in The Real Jazz, Panassié’s new story of the specifically French side of influences came to bear on his rendering of the origin myth:

In order to vary their repertoire, jazz musicians were not satisfied with playing the blues; they drew from very diverse sources, notably from ragtime and from certain melodies recalling the French polkas and quadrille. This is interesting in view of the importance of French influences in New Orleans, the homeland of jazz. (1942: 11)

Again, by emphasizing the specifically French elements associated with French America and merging them with the expressivist racial tendencies long associated with jazz, Panassié provided an ideological space wherein French listeners both could appreciate jazz as an expression of an anti-modern racial music and identify with the music because of the imaginary French connection. This connection was extended further as the spirit of an authentic jazz anchored in the imaginary New Orleans diaspora:

New Orleans soon established itself as the most important center because of its many fine orchestras and the exceptional ability of its many musicians. Here jazz developed slowly from its embryonic beginnings to jazz as we know it today. The famous New Orleans style, of which so much has been said, is none other than the original and primitive jazz music – the style from which all others have sprung. (1942: 42)

All ‘authentic jazz’ from this point on was derived from New Orleans jazz, and even after the disappearance of the early New Orleans musicians, those who kept the spirit of ‘real



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jazz’ alive tapped into this authentic style. Anything that did not was corrupted and commercialized. Before providing a discography of examples of this ‘real jazz’ to con-noisseur vinyl collectors,5 the book ended with a benediction to musicians:

The new generation takes its inspiration from the great New Orleans musicians, it will, in its turn, produce great soloists whose simple and clear style may again predominate, and whose spirit of collective improvisation may yet have a rebirth. (1942: 235)

If not, he warned, jazz would become an

entirely different kind of music that will have none of the freshness, naturalness or spontaneity of the music born in New Orleans toward the end of the 19th Century. (1942: 236)

After the war, Panassié emerged from his Montalban estate and sought to return to his throne as the king of jazz criticism in France. Now, he heard the sound of musicians who had submitted to the ‘corruption of outrageous commercialism’ everywhere, especially in the newest jazz style, bebop. As a result, Panassié redoubled the efforts to promote the ‘New Orleans style’ as the original and most authentic form of jazz, inviting practitioners to record and perform all over France and churning out authoritative lists of the best records from the good old days. For Panassié and the many critics who followed his lead, jazz became a nostalgic and mythological object, an antidote to a corrupt modernity. In the words of Charles Delaunay from 1945 (still briefly Panassié’s loyal lieutenant in the Hot Club movement): ‘What has become of jazz since the heroic days of New Orleans?’ (1945: 5).

Indeed, as the origin myth of New Orleans as the berceau de jazz became hegemonic in France and America,6 many critics echoed Panassié. The critic Pierre Bonneau drama-tized this critical realignment perfectly in 1946:

The New Orleans style was the first style practiced by the black musicians of that city, and, maybe because of its ‘historicity’, its value has long been recognized by the mass of listeners. We know only by legend the names of Buddy Bolden or Picou, and the dominance of those like Armstrong have made us lose sight of the era of the pioneers of jazz and the style that they practiced … The value of the original New Orleans style is apparent. (1946: 13)

Such discursive acts were not accidental, as Panassié used his vast array of material, institutional and critical power to push this discourse. As he did in The Real Jazz, his critical writing after the war continued to echo his expressivist description of the origi-nal authentic cultural context mixed with the important French connection. In most cases, he was writing to promote the revival of ‘authentic’ New Orleans style through the reissue of old records and new recordings of old style music. Yet, as I have described elsewhere (see Jordan, 2010), many French listeners disagreed with Panassié’s tastes by the late 1940s, preferring bebop – with its more modern and forward-looking sensibility – to New Orleans style, with its sense of jazz firmly rooted in the past.

Faced with critics describing bebop as the more evolved stage of jazz, and with trumpeters such as Dizzy Gillespie winning Hot Club de France polls over Armstrong,




Panassié went all-in on framing New Orleans style jazz as the most authentic and New Orleans as the cradle of jazz. He underwrote and promoted the re-release of the early recordings of King Oliver, Kid Ory and other mythic jazz men of the New Orleans style, linking them through the French connection by always stressing that ‘the morsels played by the first jazz orchestras were the blues, spirituals and dances of European origins, most of them French due to the influence of the French in Louisiana’ (Panassié, 1952: 4). He also made toeing this critical line a prerequisite for publishing in journals such as La Casserole, Hebdo Latin, Le Bulletin de Hot Club du France, La Revue du Jazz, Jazz Panorama, Le Point or any of the other avenues for publication or radio programming that he controlled.

In many ways, the move to fix New Orleans as the undisputed primordial cradle of jazz was aided by the scarcity and relatively poor recording quality of the old records, as it provided a better screen for mythmaking. For example, César Rossini argued that these early recordings were essential for understanding the real origins of the ‘true jazz’, an object of ideology crucially important for New Orleans revivalism:

Despite the bad recording quality, the disks of King Oliver hold a primordial interest: they are typical of the archaic period of jazz … They consist of a series of collective improvisations in the New Orleans tradition, interrupted by clarinet or trumpet breaks. (Rossini, 1949: 1)

Despite indeed. The perception of sound fidelity, as Jonathan Sterne (2003) has shown, is always a social artefact. One could say that the aesthetic value of the recordings of the New Orleans masters, their hauntingly original quality, the thing that brings to mind primordial interest – their distance and difference from the current cultural context echoing from historically situated limitations on the recording technology – is actually semiotically coded by and through their recording imperfections. Walter Benjamin was on to something when he talked about the imaginative power of the ‘aura’ in early forms of technological reproduction: such records have that ‘Some of These Days’ quality to move you in the gut, à la Sartre and Roquentin, a capacity to be elogiacally haunting and ontologically present at the same time.7 In a sense, the taste for these old scratchy records was, to borrow a Bourdieusian riff, a mark of distinction that drove the connoisseur vinyl market (Plasketes, 1992). Indeed, Karl Hagstrom Miller (2010) has argued that record collecting, as a social practice aided by a growing field of cultural discourse, has largely determined the categories and forms of knowledge that we use to make sense of music.

In relation to the discursive formations employed by Rossini in his myth-making, there are two important features of note. The first is the act of communicating the spirit of what is thought to be ‘authentic’ primordial jazz; the second is the categorization of this kind of musical act as ‘collective improvisation’. These two component parts would play a crucial role in constructing the French connection during this third moment of origin myth-making. Francois Bouleau’s take on the importance and renaissance of ‘le Style New Orleans’ from 1948 weaves in both component parts:

Just as bop has taken its path in search of the essence of jazz, this path has moved in another direction, in search of the freshness and the roughness of the first sounds … We know that this search is partially in reaction against the epoch in which we live. (Bouleau, 1948: 20)



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By characterizing this heroic New Orleans era as ‘la belle époque’, Bouleau linked it to a similarly monumental time in French popular culture. He also linked New Orleans style to French culture by connecting to the European tradition of collective improvisation:

The musicians of la belle époque … weaved their themes in a perfectly logical fugue style that is never found outside the veterans from New Orleans … They make you envision irresistibly the music of J.S. Bach and his predecessor. Listening to a side of King Oliver is moving and one could say the same thing of a fugue of J.S. Bach. We can recognize the past but we cannot recreate it … If certain musicians like Mezzro [have done it,] it is by attaching to the spirit and not to the letter of that music, taking the best from it without being slaves to a style of interpretation … Only in this way does the Nouvelle Orleans renaissance have any sense. (1948: 21)

Thus, he acknowledged the question of a ‘rebirth’ of an authentic style as something of a paradox. Yet he also argued that if one showed a pious fidelity to the two points of contact (acknowledgement that New Orleans was the birthplace of real jazz, and a knowledge of the spirit of collective improvisation tied to both the New Orleans and the French past), one could understand the spirit or sense of this authentic music. So here, the French-identified etiology meant not only a cultural link to the music, but also a spiritual or analytic connection to a certain critical stance or perspective on the music.

When coming to terms with the shift in the discourse surrounding this third moment of origin myth usage, Panassié’s stance on collective improvisation is a crucial indicator of the changes in the cultural episteme. Although he had attacked critics in the 1930s for daring to link jazz to European traditions of collective improvisation,8 he allowed for this critical analogy now in the journals that he controlled. Frank Tenot, for example, argued that ‘collective improvisation was at the origins of jazz’: in ‘collective improvisation each musician should abdicate his personality to profit the unique spirit of the ensemble’ (Tenot, 1946: 11). Many Frenchmen heard this spirit in the music of Claude Luter, the bandleader at the Lorentais club. As had been done with Wiéner in the 1920s, Luter was analogically linked to the spirit of New Orleans in the jazz press. Gushed Panassié: ‘Never in the history of jazz has a white orchestra better seized the spirit of the New Orleans style in general and of the King Oliver Orchestra in particular’ (1949a: 20). André Doutart had stated explicitly many times that ‘it was in New Orleans where jazz was born, in the melting pot where four different civilizations fused’ (Doutart, 1948: 11). He now echoed Panassié idea of Luter’s spiritual connection to that ‘creuset’ in Hebdo Latin: ‘Claude Luter has come to perfectly and exactly assimilate the New Orleans style. Not by plagiarizing superficially, but by recreating it, letter and spirit, after having digested it’ (Doutart, 1949: 11).

Similarly, Georges Hermant puffed away in the Révue du Jazz that Luter had devel-oped a ‘La Nouvelle-Orléans Française’ style in a way that showed another analogic connection between Paris and jazz’s crucible:

It is not only in the U.S. that jazz has had its heroic epochs, but also in other countries and particularly in ours where it has returned as a more immediate and sonorous echo. And one could say, in this case, that for the last several years Paris has been La Nouvelle-Orléans Française. (Hermant, 1949: 121)




Yet there were dissenters in what came to be known as the Luter Affair, ‘Les Cornichons’ or modernists, as Panassié referred to them: those who believed that jazz had evolved and that the taste for New Orleans style jazz was essentially nostalgic. André Hodier, for example, argued that Panassié was responsible for the ‘curious renaissance of the New Orleans style’. He thought that Panassié’s support of the style was a ‘reaction against the tendencies in modern jazz, in the sense that it was not provoked by musicians, but by the public’ (Hodeir, 1948: 121), a public which followed Panassié. Similarly, Lucien Malson saw the promotion of New Orleans style by the ‘moldy figs’9 (that is, those who promoted New Orleans style and opposed music such as bebop which had evolved) as a strictly negative phenomenon: ‘Like all reactions, the enterprise of the moldy figs can only defend itself by negative arguments. It is by opposing modern music that the quali-ties of the old style are valorized’ (Malson, 1948: 12). Hodeir began to characterize Panassié as being fixated on ‘musique folklorique’, which he contrasted with a position on jazz that allowed for evolution. In Jacques B. Hess’s words, Panassié was now barring anything that ‘did not evoke the Blackman from Louisiana weighted by his bail of cotton’ (Hess, 1952: 6).

After the 1952 Louis Armstrong concert, again promoted by Panassié and his critical apparatus, Hodeir criticized the New Orleans fetishists for fixating on the style as the most authentic jazz for commercial reasons:

The presentation becomes a re-presentation. Unfortunately, it is not always in the best taste … Certain numbers, like the New Orleans burial number, are perfectly valuable, but can end up degenerating into a low quality circus … Jazz is forgotten in all that. (Hodeir, 1952b: 10)

Hodeir accused ‘the moldy figs’ of doing criticism in bad faith: ‘What do they say? Simply that the New Orleans musicians are the only ones who produce true jazz’ (Hodeir, 1952b: 11). In a sense, he had long believed that the reasons for these distinctions in taste were sociological. In 1949, he satirized the collectors of original New Orleans jazz recordings as quixotic vinyl fetishists in fictional ‘sotise’ that he published in Jazz Hot, in which the narrator of the story states:

I must tell you that my great uncle knows everything about jazz. His search for the best has taken him to the four corners of the world, the end of the last century, and into the neighborhoods of New Orleans to find the secret traces of nègre jazz before being corrupted by the awful white music. (Hodeir, 1949: 9)

Because his ‘uncle’ – who seems to suspiciously mimic Panassié’s dogmatic fetishiza-tion of primal jazz – made voyages from the Congo to America in search of the traces of authentic jazz records, only he ‘knows authentic New Orleans jazz … Touched by grace, I know now authentic jazz, the only one which is truly pure’. In a sense, Hodeir’s parody showed the extent to which such searches for ‘real jazz’ – for the return of something original and true – were themselves caricatures of a mode of jazz criticism that now served mostly to mark oneself as part of an elite group, to preserve critical authority and sell jazz-related commodities to likeminded collectors. Panassié’s position on jazz mat-ters, Hodeir argued, was simple: ‘if you don’t agree with him, you know nothing of jazz’ (Hodeir, 1952a: 9).



Jordan 521

Panassié, who by the 1950s was feuding with Hodeir and the editors of Jazz Hot (which he referred to as Zazotte, so as to link them to the ‘corrupted’ swing of the zazous of the Occupation) and anyone else who questioned his authority, merely called anyone who opposed his New Orleans-centred hagiography of authentic jazz ‘reactionaires’: ‘Les Cornichons laugh at the old game when they hear a good orchestra in the Nouvelle Orléans style. Collective improvisation has passed them by’ (Panassié, 1949b: 11). The proponents of the New Orleans style and its attending mythologies had become dogma-tists, resting their authority in their definitive discographies and their assertions that they alone knew the real jazz. Despite his anti-modern romantic origin myths supporting the very bourgeois notion of jazz as a ‘pure art’, one that needed to be protected from the hegemonic commercialism of swing jazz, Panassié’s dogmatic taste distinction was obviously designed to support the thriving niche-market for New Orleans revivalism in France.10

Although Boris Vian often lapsed into a polemic mode of argumentation in relation to Panassié, he usually had a pitch-perfect sense of where critical debates were moving in the post-war period due to his comprehensive reading of the international jazz press. He became increasingly fascinated by the divisiveness of the debates spurred on by Panassié’s followers. In 1948, he wrote:

[T]he movement to return to the New Orleans style, interesting in itself, has evolved in an unforeseen way, fossilizing the youth before their time. A 16 year old boy believes himself dishonored if he appreciates a music younger than he is. A tribe of braying children has invaded the jazz club [and] they swear off any jazz that doesn’t have a banjo and a tuba. (Vian, 1981: 279)

A year later, Vian reflected on the psychology and musical tastes of the typical New Orleans-style fan, who cited as articles of faith the genesis stories promoted by Panassié and his followers. The aesthetics of their music, Vian believed, spoke to their sense of cultural values. Describing it in a way reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History, Vian wrote that they lived in the shadows of a monumental past, making everything in the present seem pale by comparison:

The New Orleans style is an rather faithful demarcation of the military march so dear to the hearts of old Europeans nourished by centuries of battlefields … The New Orleans style is hardly practiced any more these days except by a handful of young whites who cannot shake off the power that the Great Napoleon’s shadow has over us … The results of this influence is constant: the spectators sit there excitedly clapping their hands on the first and third beat. (Vian, 1981: 367)

The New Orleans revivalists were nostalgics, fetishistic consumers of this monumental age of music who were old before their time. Just as they were trapped in the time sig-natures of the march, clapping on the front rather than the back of the measure, they were trapped spiritually in the time of Le Grand Siècle by their sense of cultural identity. Their attachment to the mythical authentic New Orleans and a more stable music than the ever-evolving bebop was, in this sense, a mark of distinction, an indicator of musical taste that showed one’s allegiance to a more mythical France which, ironically enough,




predated the influence of jazz in France. Whereas in Vian’s opinion, following the movement and evolution of jazz required one to have a ‘flexible and supple ear’ (1981: 574), the followers of the New Orleans style wanted neither object – true jazz and the true France – to change. Attacked by Claude Rousseau for adoring Jelly Roll Morton while scoffing at Mezzrow and Bechet’s revivalist records from 1938, he wrote that ‘I like all that is authentic’ (Vian, 1967: 138). Whether it be the old records of King Oliver or the music of Albinoni, what mattered to Vian was that an art was of its time. The problem with the New Orleans revivalism was that it ‘lacked sincerity’ because it ‘risked nothing’ (1967: 138).

Throughout the 1950s, Vian noted in his press reviews that releases of hagiographic biographies or box sets of classic vinyl from the ‘heroic age’ in New Orleans tended to coincide with concerts by Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet in an uncanny synergy.11 Although he never let this polemic promotion sour his love of New Orleans jazz – or push him to question the by-now hegemonic truth that New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz – Vian was increasingly convinced that critics such as Panassié were using jazz criticism to push their own musical tastes and vision of French culture rather than think-ing about the humanity of the players and the value of the music. It led him to give up on a certain kind of writing on the cultural origins of jazz in favour of a more ironic ‘jazzistique’ that would stick to evaluating the aesthetic value of records and concerts. However, most critics continued to use jazz as a mirror through which to describe their sense of self and society, marking their habitus and trying to locate themselves in a turbulent present.

Conclusion

Looking at the use and metamorphosis of these myths about the origins of jazz over the 40-year period in which the French came to terms with jazz allows us to see how French critics strategically employed a variety of stories and discursive formations to link the music to French cultural identity. At the beginning, the etiologies were used to describe racial and musical difference and convey a sense of culture in which the spirit of a peo-ple was expressed through its music. In the second moment, this latter conception of culture was kept intact, but critics sought to legitimate the enjoyment of jazz in France by way of establishing a French connection geographically, linguistically and musically. Finally, in reaction to cultural change, the New Orleans revivalists used a mix of the two to locate nostalgically a more ‘true’ or authentic jazz that related to a more ‘true’ and authentic France, both in the distant past. In the final moment, writing about jazz lost some of its centrality as a site for thinking about cultural ontologies and true identities in France as it became more commercial in its aim. As such, concerns about cultural truths seem to have ceded to a combination of commercially driven pop discourses, as Frith calls them, mixed with discursive acts aimed at constructing identity formations based on taste distinctions. Jazz etiologies, descriptions of its origins or birthplace, were still used and exchanged; their iterations just served different needs for the tellers. In each case, how these myths were used tells us great deal about what was important to French listeners at certain points in time, and about how regimes of knowledge and taste were constructed by deploying such stories in order to make jazz meaningful.



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Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Jeremy F. Lane for bringing to my attention an error of misrecognition that I made in my book Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity. Unwittingly dramatizing Charles S. Peirce’s insight into our capacity to be – in his neologism – ‘sign creatories’ (blending sign repository with sign creator), in my archival notes on Schaeffner’s Le jazz, I miscopied the French adjectival form of the Greek word ‘amphiboly’, ‘amphibologique’ as ‘amphibiologique’. As such, I attributed a neologism to Schaeffner, one which I thought per-fectly conveyed his characterization of jazz’s ambiguous hybrid cultural evolution as being analogous to biological evolution that was, in fact, my own.

2. On the swing movement during the Occupation, see Jordan (2010). 3. On the creation of an international romantic ‘art jazz world’ among the well-travelled

bourgeoisie, see Lopes (2002). 4. Russell argued that it was only in New Orleans that all the necessary elements specifically

combined. This view, which quickly spread through jazz scholarship, has now come to dominate jazz historiography. Smith and Ramsey’s book was translated and published in France as Jazzmen by Flammarion in 1949.

5. Lopes argues that the international record market for affluent connoisseurs was already established by the early 1940s, with the major record companies producing expensive boxed sets of old and new jazz recordings to meet the demand created by the many aficionado discographies (see Lopes, 2002).

6. Raeburn likens the critical wars between the New Orleans and moderns to the schism during the religious Great Awakening between the proponents of sensibility and rationality (old light versus new light). Purists reacted against modern jazz because of its intellectualism, because it did not invite participation. This was analogous to the way that the religious movements reacted against rationality in theology because it limited religious experience and barred the sensual and charismatic. Raeburn astutely argues that the kind of New Orleans-centred jazz scholarship that drove the revival movement can be attributed to the growth of vinyl collector groups and a kind of old record commodity fetishism.

7. For a reading of the power of recorded music in relation to Benjamin’s aura and Sartre’s Nausea, see Jordan (2004).

8. Panassié excoriated both Henry Malherbe and Blaise Pesquinne in the 1930s for daring to make this analogy (see Jordan, 2010).

9. On the increasingly international and murky feud between the ‘moldy figs’ and the modern-ists, which actually had several groups formed around the taste distinctions between New Orleans-style jazz, commercial swing jazz and bebop, see Bernard Gendron, ‘”Moldy Figs” and Modernists: Jazz at War (1942–1946)’ in Gabbard (1995).

10. Panassié’s jazz incarnate, Satchmo himself, voiced this cynical commercial wisdom best in an interview published in France in Vie Catholique Illustrée: ‘Maybe the young people don’t appreciate what we have done. Good! We will play for the old people. After all, they have all the money’ (Vian, 1967: 131).

11. Vian’s review of Armstrong’s 1956 concert at the Olympia Theater described how the concert was ‘accompanied by a flotilla of discs’ from the ‘glorious years’ (Vian, 1981: 525) and the release of the French translation of Armstrong’s second biography, Ma Nouvelle-Orléans: ‘That publication coinciding with his appearance on the scene risks to create an autograph hunt more severe than any before it’ (Vian, 1981: 709).




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Biographical note

Matthew F. Jordan is an assistant professor of film/video and media studies in the College of Communications, Pennsylvania State University. He has written on a wide variety of topics across cultural studies, film studies, popular music studies and critical theory. His first book is Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (University of Illinois, 2010).



Documents

The French connection: Mythologies of La Nouvelle Orléans in French discourse on jazz