Amphibiologie: ethnographic surrealism in French discourse on jazz

Jordan, Matthew

doi:10.1177/004724410103112202

Cited by 15 publications

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“…During the 1920s, argues Matthew F. Jordan (2001), French newspaper and music journal commentary on jazz both positive and negative tended to be shaped by one of two vocabularies, each representing a strand of this local African/ American fantasy. Here, jazz was either another harbinger of modernity, that vortex of speed, mechanisation, production and consumption that had swept in from America to transform traditional French society, and which was the subject of much popular debate; or else it was an indulgence of the primitive, a celebration of the voodoo essential to jazz rhythm that animated music made even by French initiates.…”

Section: Jazz Primitivism Before Panassiémentioning

confidence: 99%

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Tradition, modernity and the supernatural swing: re-reading ‘primitivism’ in Hugues Panassié's writing on jazz

Perchard¹

2011

Pop. Mus.

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Before WWII, Hugues Panassié (1912–1974) was Europe's leading critical authority on jazz, and by the time of his death he had published a dozen books on jazz music and been President of the Hot-club de France for over 40 years. Yet despite this life's worth of efforts made in jazz's name, Panassié's reputation is no longer a good one: pointing to the fantasies of black exceptionalism and Noble Savagery present in his work, historians have tended to dismiss the critic as a racist primitivist, one in thrall to that contemporarynegrophiliemost familiar today from early-century Parisian visual art. Indeed Panassié used the term ‘primitive’ himself, and positively. But this article traces the ultra-conservative writer's intellectual and religious formation to show that, rather than contemporarynegrophilie, it was a religious and cultural heritage quite distant from the modern European encounter with blackness that first informed Panassié's primitivism. Although this re-reading does not aim to ‘rehabilitate’ someone who remains a troublesome and reactionary figure, the article nevertheless goes on to explore how, in his primitivist rejection of European modernism, Panassié sometimes pre-empts important arguments made by the postmodern jazz scholarship that would seem to marginalise the critic's historical contributions.

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Section: Jazz Primitivism Before Panassiémentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Robert Goffin, who had been writing considered pieces on jazz in the journal Le Disque vert since the early 1920s, was also a surrealist poet. For more on the early French reception of jazz, see Blake (1999), Tournès (1999), Archer-Straw (2000), Gumplowicz (2000), Jordan (2001), Gendron (2002), Martin and Roueff (2002), Jackson (2003) and Lane (2007). 6.…”

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confidence: 99%