After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France [Hardcover]

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 of the postwar era. The work of important but neglected French musicians such as André Hodeir and Barney Wilen is examined in depth, as are native responses to Americans such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The book provides an original intertwining of musical and historical narrative, supported by extensive archival work; in clear and compelling prose, Perchard describes the problematic efforts towards aesthetic assimilation and transformation made by those concerned with jazz in fact and in idea, listening to the music as it sounded in discourses around local identity, art, 1968 radicalism, social democracy, and post colonial politics.

The first study to focus on jazz in postwar France, this book explores the ways that French musicians and critics received and remade an American music according to their own cultural concerns

Tom Perchardteaches in the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.

"The ambiguity of France’s attraction to Afro-America was surely what James Baldwin had in mind when, in 1960, he suggested that 'someone, some day, should do a study in depth of the role of the American Negro in the mind and life of Europe, and the extraordinary perils, different from those of America but not less grave, which the American Negro encounters in the Old World.' Baldwin’s challenge has been taken up in recent years by a group of jazz historians workingl)