Django Reinhardt. He owed his distinctive fretting to a deformed left hand, burned in an accident.
A few days of intensive holiday cooking means I’ve listened to lots of jazz, since the kitchen radio is permanently tuned to Paris’s only all-jazz station, TSF 89.9.
TSF began in 1981 as a national network run by the Communist Party, offering sports, news and talk under the briskly egalitarian slogan Votre Radio – Your Radio. As television grew, it shrank to a Paris-only broadcaster of exclusively jazz. The only vestige of its socialist roots is the hourly news breaks. These give precedence to events of jazz interest, so a typical report will begin with the obituary of a recently-deceased trumpet player, only to continue “In other news, Notre Dame is still smouldering…”
I’ve written elsewhere about my adolescent discovery of jazz via the Voice of America’s nightly Music USA broadcasts and the emolient voice of presenter Willis Conover. TSF isn’t much different. A typical hour includes something by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, a vintage Miles Davis track, some Stan Getz, usually a samba from his bossa nova period, and, absurdly, Cab Calloway’s version of Minnie the Moocher, for which someone at the station has a bizarre beguin.
Absent is any sign of what used to be thought of as “Paris jazz”. I remember particularly the vocal sextet Le Double Six de Paris who specialised in transposing jazz standards, and the Modern Jazz Quartet, four African Americans in sober suits and narrow ties who evoked, in such pieces as Django and Vendome, the Paris of the nouvelle vague : urbane, intellectual, discreet. They provided the score for Roger Vadim’s film Sait-on Jamais/No Sun in Venice, while Miles Davis improvised the music for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l'échafaud/Lift to the Scaffold.
This may be why TSF doesn’t play the former. Ella and Louis are sufficiently old to be classic, the Double Six and MJQ merely old-fashioned - vieux jeux.
Jazz has an odd history in France. After James Reese Europe’s sixty-person troupe stormed through the country during World War I, local musicians struggled to understand jazz and so play it for themselves.
James Reese Europe and some of his Harlem Hellfighters band.
Europe’s sidemen played without scores. American audiences scoffed at the very idea that African Americans could read music so, though all were accomplished sight readers, they memorised the arrangements. Not realising this, French musicians, faced with what looked like inspired collective improvisation, became convinced that Europeans lacked some essential Afro gene, and looked to other ethnic music for inspiration.
Darius Milhaud obligingly fabricated a sort of tango pastiche from a Brazilian song called Le Boeuf sur le Toit/The Ox on the Roof, while Francis Poulenc’s 1917 Rapsodie Nègre used words supposedly written by a fictitious Liberian poet called Makoko Kangourou.
None of these worked, so entrepreneurs gave up and just imported American shows, even after the government ruled that, for each foreign musician, they had to employ two Frenchmen. When the Blackbirds Revue opened at the Moulin Rouge in 1929, Lew Leslie’s band accompanied Adelaide Hall in Digga Digga Doo while, backstage, the equivalent of two French bands phegmatically smoked Gitanes and played bezique.
All this time, quietly, on the fringes, Django Reinhardt, jazz violinist Stephane Grapelli and the Quintette of the Hot Club of France were creating a truly national music based on the gypsy style of guitar playing known as manouche. Poulenc and Milhaud had looked in the wrong place. Le jazz hot had no French incarnation. In its place was le jazz cool.
Paris jazz of the ‘sixties may be out of fashion but fortunately the Modern Jazz Quartet recorded extensively. The Double Six made only four records during its brief incarnation from 1959 to 1966. A few video clips preserve their performances. Some feature Janine “Mimi” Perrin, founder and driving force of the group. A short, dynamic woman in a Louise Brooks haircut and shades, she seems to embody that music, and the Paris of the time.
Mimi Perrin.
Tuberculosis cut short her singing career. She made a living thereafter, with her daughter, as a translator. Reading this jogged my memory and I took out the French edition of my biography of Steven Spielberg. “Traduit de l’Anglais par Mimi et Isabelle Perrin.” There’s that six degrees of separation again.
So, coco…any work where you are?