After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France

How did French musicians and critics interpret jazz - that quintessentially American music - in the mid-twentieth century? How far did players reshape what they learned from records and visitors into more local jazz forms, and how did the music figure in those angry debates that so often suffused French cultural and political life? After Django begins with the famous interwar triumphs of Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt, but, for the first time, the focus here falls on the French jazz practices ofthe postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians like Andre Hodeir and Barney Wilen is examined in depth, as are native responses to Americans like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The book provides an original intertwining of musical and historical narrative, supported by extensive archival work. In clear and involving prose, it describes both the music that was made and the arguments to which jazz was recruited, from debates on national identity in the 1930s to the street battles of 1968, following decolonization. By examining musical practices as well as critical discourses, this book seeks to understand those problematic efforts towards aesthetic assimilation and transformation, made by those concerned with jazz in fact and in idea, even after anti-jazz diatribes disappeared from the press.