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

Abstract

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.

Feeling to Learn: Ideologies of Race, Aurality, and Manouche Music Pedagogy in France

“…Its Blackness represented at once a promise of national invigoration and a threat to “true French culture” (Jordan 2010: 58; see also Jackson 2003). In the decades to follow, influential jazz critics drew hard lines between supposed Black and White expressive tendencies in jazz performance and favored the former over the latter for its authenticity (Delaunay 1954; Goffin 1932; Panassié 1942; Panassié and Casalta 1975; see also Gioia 1989; Perchard 2011).…”

Swedish Stories? Culturally Dependent Perspectives on Jazz Improvisation as Storytelling

“…In part, it may be the result of jazz critic Hugues Panassié's notion that it was indeed possible for the jazz musician to express his true self, regardless of the loss of meaning associated with modernism. 27 For instance, it might be argued that such a romantic, anti-modernist view informs Gunnar Lindgren's statement that acting rather than playing oneself poses a threat to jazz performers. Notably, however, perspectives of signifyin(g) and notions such as cultural memory or double-voiced discourse appear to be absent in the musicians' perspectives on their craft.…”

Traditional jazz and the mainstreaming of authenticity

“…Hadlock is writing with hindsight and the benefit of jazz criticism extending some forty-five years since Curran (1947). He refers to critics such as Hugues Panassié (1942) and Rudi Blesh (1943, 1946 who privileged the jazz of African-American musicians as being more 'real' and 'authentic' than that of the white musicians, but does not follow their approachthis approach for several decades being re-defined as erroneously 'racist', 'essentialist' and 'primitivist' (Perchard 2011). Hadlock (2000) is able to trace the development of the Bunk Johnson-George Lewis stream of revivalist jazz (the stream that privileged place-the New Orleans 'stay-at-home' [Godbolt 1989: 13] musicians) that Curran (1947) had not considered at all, calling this latter stream 'naturalist'.…”