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1. Introduction
2. Wiéner, Cocteau and Milhaud
3. Wiéner and Doucet: Jazz à deux pianos
4. Panassié and 'authentic' jazz
5. Conclusions
As one of the earliest proponents of French jazz, the pianist Jean Wiéner helped an American-based phenomenon become a cultural force in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. Wiéner's jazz raised issues of both exclusivity and populism, and for these reasons he gained notice among both the French avant-garde, represented here by Jean Cocteau, and jazz aficionados, as represented by Hugues Panassié. In contrast to the positions these two figures embody, Wiéner hoped to break, not erect, cultural barriers in merging the American style with French musical culture.
Born in Paris at the turn of the century, Jean Wiéner was a conservatory-trained musician. He had known the composer Darius Milhaud since his childhood, and this friendship introduced Wiéner to elite artistic circles. Wiéner was the pianist at the Bar Gaya after the Great War, performing jazz with the African-American banjoist and saxophonist Vance Lowry. The Gaya gained particular notoriety when Jean Cocteau and the group of composers known as Les Six (including Milhaud) came to the bar. Within a year of their arrival, the Gaya moved to a larger building and became Le Boeuf sur le toit, one of the most popular cafés of the 1920s. As meeting places, these bars fostered and symbolized Cocteau's aesthetic of everyday art, which touted the virtues of music-hall and jazz and advocated a uniquely French music based on popular sources.
Milhaud and Cocteau's 1920 ballet Le Boeuf sur le toit (after which the bar was named) illustrates one way in which everyday elements were stylized in the service of the avant-garde aesthetic. Cocteau defied expectations associated with a purported work of "art". In his words, "Nothing happens, or what does happen is so crude, so ridiculous, that it is as though nothing happens."(1) : thus the ballet's subtitle "the nothing doing bar."
Cocteau's stylized version of American culture bore little resemblance to the original. He proudly admitted that he was making no attempt at re-creation, calling the ballet "an American farce, written by a Parisian who has never been to America."(2) Milhaud's score had more roots in Brazil than in the United States, and a mandolin trio played jazz during the intermission. These observers of American culture had no intention to emulate American models, even though many examples were readily available on French soil. The Parisian composers who were inspired by jazz immediately following the Great War valued jazz less for what it was than for what it could inspire on the European scene. Cocteau even declared that a source such as jazz was not art per se but served to "inspire an artist" much "the same way life does."(3) From his perspective, jazz represented freedom from pre-war European values, but the iconoclastic agenda it served only emphasized those values.
Once jazz became a method for these composers, the very artists who promoted it began to denounce its potential as a musical force, purportedly for nationalistic reasons. If jazz initially fulfilled Cocteau's goal to break from a Germanic-based Impressionism, the paradox that a foreign music could become the basis for a new nationalist music was quickly apparent. Milhaud noted that "the influence of jazz. . . had disappeared" by 1924.(4)
The behaviour of these composers illustrates the inconsistencies that aesthetic dogmas can entail. The official rejection of jazz contradicted their actual music practices, for even after having condemned it, they enjoyed the jazz played by Jean Wiéner at the Boeuf sur le toit in their leisure time. Thus the purportedly "everyday" inspiration did not even reflect the daily experiences of the group itself. We might understand such a contradiction by considering that the motivation to frequent Le Boeuf sur le toit had little to do with jazz. The patrons at the Boeuf formed a community outside socially dominant groups. As Harold Segel has discussed, artists who met in a bar or cabaret belonged to an exclusive group contemptuous of "cultural monuments" and a "hopelessly bourgeois and philistine" society.(5) The exclusivity in the bars parallels to some extent the distinctive community established by Hugues Panassié, as I will discuss shortly.
Because of his role at Le Boeuf sur le toit, Jean Wiéner was initially linked to this avant-garde group, though his admiration for jazz far outlasted theirs. By 1925, his growing dissatisfaction with an avant-garde ideology led Wiéner to disassociate himself from Cocteau and Les Six and to form a duo-piano partnership with the Belgian pianist Clément Doucet. The new team adopted the nickname jazz à deux pianos and played repertoire involving many American styles from ragtime and blues to Broadway showtunes. In pursuit of a large audience, the Wiéner and Doucet team broke into the highly competitive arena of Parisian music-hall, performing alongside ponies, comic jugglers, athletes, and acrobats. They collaborated with some of the biggest names in French popular music, appearing with Josephine Baker at the height of her renown and recording ten songs with Maurice Chevalier. They gave an estimated 2000 performances in thirteen years throughout France, Europe, South America, and the United States.
The team kept their distance from the aesthetic and ideological debates surrounding musique nègre. Performing American music unencumbered by modernist stylizations, they indicated that the music deserved to be heard on its own merits. Wiéner and Doucet's recording of Duke Ellington's "Jig Walk", for instance, shows a desire to emulate rather than change American styles.
Wiéner and Doucet produced highly polished renditions and refrained from promoting images of exotic, elementary, or unsophisticated black music, unlike many colleagues and critics who took a highly stereotyped view of Africa.(6) They presented jazz as a sophisticated and exciting complement to French culture, thereby achieving the iconoclastic modernists' goals of jazz as alternative to (and symbolic liberation from) European traditions that reeked of the establishment and tired aesthetic discourse. The majority of their repertoire was by Tin Pan Alley songwriters, and they followed American musicians as models for their improvisation. Therefore, the team's playing approximates George Gershwin's distinctive style as recorded on piano rolls or as published in his Song-book of 1931. Such a conception of jazz involves melodic decoration(7) ; after presenting a familiar tune, Wiéner and Doucet dress it up in a variety of ways so that the melody sounds constantly renewed. Occasionally, Wiéner and Doucet blossom into uninhibited virtuosity, an aural indication of the freedom jazz represented to them.
In spite of following American examples, Wiéner and Doucet's playing nonetheless retained a French flavour, which French critics praised and Americans mocked. One critic praised the team for "acclimatiz(ing) the blues to Paris."(8) Ira Gershwin ridiculed the team's unidiomatic rendition of Rhapsody in Blue, although he admitted that Parisian audiences loved the performance and demanded an encore.(9) That Wiéner and Doucet were accepted in France as jazz experts also indicates that audiences in the 1920s assumed a far more flexible definition of the term "jazz" than do many of today's historians.
In the 1930s, critics began to attempt an authoritative definition of jazz. The roots of this project lie partly in the work of the Frenchman Hugues Panassié and the Belgian Robert Goffin. They established parameters of authenticity and authority, promoting the concept of "true" jazz as that directly related to certain African-American musicians. In their search for the stylistic and cultural origins of jazz, they attempted to clarify the variety and inconsistencies of the preceding decade. Ultimately their descriptions of selected "great" recordings served as the beginning of the jazz canon.
Panassié's and Goffin's arguments were in part a reaction against the transformation the music underwent upon entering French culture. The "jazz-inspired" compositions of the 1920s belonged to a realm of European musical discourse which had little to do with jazz's origins; such works implied that the original could be improved upon. When Wiéner and Doucet brought polished American songs to the concert hall, they avoided modernist stylizations but tailored the music to local tastes, just as Parisian dancemasters modified the shimmy to fit the taste of a Parisian soirée. Even expatriate African-American musicians, such as Louis Mitchell and the Jazz Kings, incorporated French tunes into their repertoire to please Parisian audiences.
In contrast, Panassié was deeply interested in notions of authenticity and objected to evaluating jazz on European terms at all. Yet his cerebral attempt to endow it with artistic respect and recognition effectively removed the genre from the physical arena of its origins and positioned it in the realm of European aesthetics. In spite of privileging the black perspective, he virtually ignored the role this music played in black vernacular culture. Panassié indulged in a different form of cultural superiority, one of the intellect. He appointed himself the delineator of aesthetic criteria necessary for what he called authentic jazz. By imposing a critique, Panassié went against what many musicians and most audiences sought in early jazz. As Ron Welburn has stated, "what seems to distinguish the [early] jazz musician... , black or white, from his counterparts in classical music is an impatience with the practice of criticism."(10)
The shortcomings of Panassié's standpoint are no more apparent than in his reaction to Louis Armstrong, whose move into a popular realm Panassié found problematic. Panassié pronounced Armstrong "the greatest of all hot soloists" until the lure of commercialism encouraged him to become a showman, an actor, and "a performer as interesting to see as to hear."(11) Only when Armstrong played hot, improvised jazz, was he "sincere," whereas most examples in his popular style were meant "to astonish the listener" with "deplorable virtuoso playing" of "nothing important." Panassié infused much of his writing with a vocabulary of exoticism, which is apparent in his discussion of Armstrong, whose playing the critic admired because of its "natural, savage simplicity," and a vibrato with "harsh" and "vicious" inflections.
Panassié's categorical judgments seem at odds with many of the roles jazz played in French culture. He virtually ignored any connection jazz had with dancing, in spite of the immense popularity of the shimmy, charleston, and black bottom. Furthermore, Panassié denigrated many performers besides Armstrong for playing to uncritical audiences who rarely listened carefully to the music. Panassié had had ample opportunity to hone his listening skills since he learned jazz from imported recordings played in his home, having found a dearth of what he considered to be authentic musicians in French nightclubs. All in all, Panassié's ideology of exclusion and authenticity contradicted the transformation the music had undergone upon entering French culture.
Wiéner had rejected the notion of rigid cultural barriers years before Panassié's first writings appeared. Having abandoned the Cocteau scene in 1925, Wiéner had cultivated an appreciation for the forces behind popular music. Wiéner sought to include as many listeners as he could, while Panassié's ideology excluded audiences and musicians resistant to his views. Wiéner was motivated by the current cultural milieu, while Panassié favoured music originating outside his own country. Wiéner tailored his jazz to suit French tastes; Panassié tried to tailor French tastes to his jazz. Panassié argued for a critical perspective of jazz commensurate with aesthetic discussions of "classical" genres, but Wiéner went beyond his classical upbringing by freeing himself of the burdens imposed by aestheticians.
Indeed, the polemical critic explicitly attacked Wiéner. According to Panassié, Wiéner possessed too little critical acumen, like most of his audience. Thus, Wiéner was chastised for considering the white bandleader Ted Lewis in the same category as Louis Armstrong. Ted Lewis was a jazz imposter who belonged nowhere near Panassié's pantheon of greats, and Panassié was baffled that Wiéner condoned Ted Lewis's "false originality."(12) Panassié objected to any approach that pleased broad audiences and was commercially successful, whether it be Wiéner and Doucet, Ted Lewis, or Louis Armstrong.
Wiéner's approach to jazz reflected the same anti-elitism that led him to the Communist Party, of which he was a member for more than forty years. His reading of Marxism led him to believe in the musician's responsibility to remain accessible to people of all social classes and educational backgrounds. This availability was of capital importance in what he termed the "socialization of culture," a principle that required rejecting the elite.(13) Thus, he deliberately tailored his music to suit audiences, not critics. He was reluctant to intellectualize jazz and embraced its corporeality, calling it music of the heart, legs, and blood circulation.(14) Moreover, he credited jazz with the power of communicating even to those who were not listening carefully. In a 1928 lecture, Wiéner argued for the abolition of rigid categories such as "serious music," "inferior genres," and "light music" and proposed jazz as the model of universal music, la musique pour tout le monde.(15)
The debates about jazz that raged in France between the wars illustrate the complex issues that arise when one nation embraces another's music. Of the various perspectives presented here - Cocteau's, Panassié's, Wiéner's - all represent different processes of acculturation, all interpret racial issues in distinct ways, yet all three were motivated by admiration. The French response to jazz represents more than shallow infatuation; jazz helped re-define French musical identity. That an American product could exert so profound an effect illustrates the degree to which cultures intertwine. Societies borrow freely from each other, and the transformed material can become a vital cultural force in the foster country.
1. Quoted in Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A
Biography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), 241-42. [
]
3. Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l'arlequin (Paris:
Éditions de la Sirène, 1918). Reprinted in Oeuvres
complètes de Jean Cocteau, vol. 9 (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1946-51),
28. []
4. Darius Milhaud, "Les Resources nouvelles de la
musique," L'Esprit nouveau 25 (1924), n.p. []
5. Harold B. Segel, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris,
Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), xiv. []
6. For example, in their 1926 monograph Le Jazz, historian André Coeuroy and ethnographer André Schaeffner analyzed jazz in terms of "pure" and"elementary" characteristics and repeatedly made facile connections between the nature of "blacks" (whom the authors interpret as a unified group including African, African-American, and Caribbean peoples) and their shared, monolithic music, of which jazz was a subset. André Coeuroy and André Schaeffner, Le Jazz(Paris: Editions Claude Aveline, 1926), 10, 14.
A review of drummer Buddy Gilmore's music-hall performance in Paris
characterized his talents as simultaneously refined and full of barbarous
charm. The critic described jazz counterpoint as "a collective
frenzy" and found that when the Orchestra's members joined together, they
enjoyed a "sort of sacred delirium" provoked by the leader's
"incantations [that were] akin to those of a whirling dervish."
Montboron, "The Synco-Synco Orchestra," Comoedia (16
February 1922): 1. []
7. See Richard Crawford, "George Gershwin,"
The New Grove Dictionary of American Music vol. 2, ed. H. Wiley
Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, (New York: Grove's Dictionaries of Music Inc.),
204-05. []
8. Roland-Manuel, "Wiéner et Doucet, ou les
Plaisirs du Jazz," Revue Pleyel 34 (Jul 1926): 11. []
9. The performance and the Gershwins' reactions are
discussed in Edward Jablonski, Gershwin: A Biography (New York:
Doubleday, 1987), 163-64. []
10. Ron Welburn, "James Reese Europe and the Infancy
of Jazz Criticism," Black Music Research Journal (1987): 41. []
11. Hugues Panassié, Le Jazz Hot (Paris:
Éditions R.A. Corrêa, 1934), 83, 93; also 95, 89, 93 in the
following passage, respectively. []
12. Hugues Panassié, "Autour d'un article de
M. Wiéner," Jazz-Tango Dancing (March 1932): 6. []
13. Jean Wiéner, Allegro
Appassionato(Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1978), 205. []
14. Jean Wiéner, "Le Jazz et la musique,"
Conferencia 22, no.12 (5 Jun 1928): 626-67. []