If you go to Paris looking for the very soul of American freedom, you will find a parallel world that you can’t ever forget. Old and new, the spirit of jazz resides in Paris as in no other European capital city, and its strength needs to be rediscovered by music lovers. The Jazz is alive and well, and is grooving in Paris.

Jazz music enters the Parisian culture for the first time during the 1920s, after the end of World War I. This is the period where the French were more permeable to the influence of outside cultures, namely American. On the one hand, the Americans who had served in the armed forces during the war had brought their habits and music, and many of them decided to stay in the City of Light; on the other hand, cultural and musical personalities from the “Lost Generation”, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ezra Pound, saw Paris as the perfect place for an artist to live and create.

Indeed, the city was a haven for bohemian tourists and cultural minds, having all the ingredients for a good time: music, sex, welcoming people, and a desire for new things to happen. Jazz music hit Paris like a bomb, representing freedom in all aspects, and appealing to the French as a sign of modernity brought by the people they most admired: the American. The fact that African American musicians and writers were taken seriously in Paris, and that new forms of cultural expression were widely accepted, also played an important part in the acculturation of the French into the American culture. Josephine Baker, or Django Reinhardt are examples of artists who found their niche in this period in Paris.

By the time of the Great Depression, this cultural scene began to wane. There were fewer tourists, and other needs became more important than music and partying. But the seed had been planted, and the growing influence of the American Jazz musicians led French musicians to start playing their own jazz songs, and implemented the genre for good in the French society.

When France was liberated by the American Army at the end of World War II, again the troops brought with them their particular influence of new forms of jazz music and more mass culture from the United States. The French, eager for freedom and tired of wars, welcomed the American influence. This second wave of acculturation came with more elements than jazz alone: the American soldiers brought with them items such as Coca Cola and chewing gums, little things that became fashionable among the Parisian crowd. During the war, the Vichy Regime had backed itself on the propagandistic nature of the movies, and the French already had the habit of going to theatres to see them.

The French received the arrival of American productions with enthusiasm; the novelty of the themes portrayed by the movies of those times led the French to imitate and recreate, according to their culture. This opened the door not only to an new explosion of Jazz, even more massified and with props, but also to a whole wave of French culture, supported by the prefix “new”: nouvelle vague, nouvelle cuisine, nouveau theatre, and so on.

The 1950s are also the period where the French high culture flourishes, inspired by the same need for new things and freedom that jazz had instilled in society. This time, it’s not just the Americans who bring a fresh approach to mass culture. The French fascinate and attract the Americans with their own creativity. The writer Boris Vian, self-proclaimed pacifist and revolutionary artist, was known to hang out night after night in jazz clubs; Simone de Beauvoir was a jazz fan, and it can be argued that most of her philosophical ideas were inspired by the influence all things American had in the Parisian throughout those years. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were treated as kings when they visited Paris to play and these are just a few examples.

From the 1960s onwards, the jazz scene wanes. The clubs begin to close, as the intellectuals and American expatriates recoil and move on. However, the influence of jazz music remains, even if in a lesser expression. The first 50 years of the 20th century are decisive to mold the way Paris and its inhabitants feel and live. Moreover, the jazz scene doesn’t disappear. French musicians keep on playing and the American musicians still look fondly at Paris as a second home to their art.

Then, in the 1990s, artists, such as Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, who come from the traditional Jazz roots, begin to experiment with electronic music, in order to reinvent a genre that seems stagnant. This will open the door to a revival of jazz music in ways that not even Coleman or Hancock might have anticipated

Jazz music also makes a comeback to the main clubs and venues with new clothes. Artists such as Ludovic Navarre (Saint Germain), Gabin, Herbalizer, and Cinematic Orchestra fuse jazz with electronica, creating what becomes Nu Jazz. Paying a tribute to old recordings from the golden years of Parisian Jazz, and sampling them into electronic music, jazz becomes once again a music genre of the bohemian and the intellectuals. This revival is not exclusive to French musicians. Throughout Europe and the United States, Nu Jazz spreads and takes on many forms. The common denominator of these electronic artists is the reverence they pay to that specific period in Paris. And the city pays them back, by turning into the epicenter of Nu Jazz.

Jazz in Paris is everywhere, but in a discreet way. The ordinary tourist may go to Paris and feel the echoes of jazz music in cafés, in the streets and in the old neighborhoods. The main street where the jazz joints are is the Rue des Lombards. In this street, you’ll find the Duc des Lombards, the Sunset – Sunside, and the Autour de Midi. In the neighborhood of Montparnasse, there is the Swan Bar, dedicated to female singers and tango. The New Morning bar is in Rue des Petites Ecuries and offers jazz music, and curiously, world music. If you want to look for more places, and learn about the history of jazz in Paris, starting here is a good option. The Parisians’ eyes glow when people want to start conversations about jazz, a reaction which answers the question as to where the jazz in Paris is: in the heart of any true Parisian.

>Written by d/visible contributor Mariana Passos e Sousa.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 10:54 am and is filed under Culture, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.