Jazz in France: Why Paris Was the World Capital of Jazz (1920–1960)

The history of jazz in France is largely the history of a paradox: that the most specifically American music in existence — born in New Orleans from the confluence of African slaves, Louisiana Creoles, Mississippi riverboat sailors, and military band musicians — found in Europe, and especially in Paris, an audience that loved it with the seriousness of classical music enthusiasts. While in the United States jazz was in many contexts the music of Black people — suspect, marginal, an object of racial segregation — in Paris it was the sound of modernity, the sonic avant-garde of Western civilization.

That paradox had immense consequences for the history of music: some of the finest American jazz musicians spent crucial years of their artistic development in Paris, and the contact between the American jazz tradition and European musical culture produced some of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the genre.

Why Paris Loved Jazz

The answer has several components. The first is historical: France and the United States share a special relationship dating back to the American Revolution, which World War I — when American soldiers arrived in Europe and French soldiers discovered jazz in their ranks — intensified into something resembling an emotional debt. Black American soldiers who served in France discovered they could live there with a freedom they did not have in their own country, and many chose not to return.

The second component is cultural: Paris in the nineteen-twenties was the world capital of avant-garde art — Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, the Surrealists — and jazz fit perfectly into that context of unrestricted experimentation. It was new music, music that broke the rules, music that did things with rhythm and harmony that classical music had never attempted. French intellectuals and artists received it with the same fascination with which they had received Javanese gamelan music twenty years earlier.

The third is political: the Hot Club de France — founded in 1932 by critic and producer Hughes Panassié and other jazz enthusiasts — was the first jazz club in the world outside the United States dedicated specifically to documenting, preserving, and promoting the genre. The French took jazz seriously as an art form before almost anyone else did.

Django Reinhardt: The Romani Who Invented European Jazz

Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt was born on January 23, 1910, in Liberchies, Belgium, in a caravan, into a family of manouche Romani — the branch of Romani people from France and Belgium of Central European descent. He did not live in a house until he was twenty years old. He was illiterate and could not read musical scores.

When he was eight years old, his family settled on the outskirts of Paris. By the age of twelve he was already playing the banjo in a dance hall alongside accordionist Guerino — he learned by imitating the fingering of other musicians, with the speed of someone who knows that his only instrument is his ear. At seventeen he discovered the guitar, and with it he discovered American jazz arriving through records.

On the night of November 2, 1928, a fire broke out in the caravan where he lived. Django managed to escape but with severe burns to his left hand: the ring finger and little finger were permanently contracted and rendered useless for playing. Doctors told him he would never play the guitar again. He spent more than a year recovering, and during that time, bedridden and unable to move, he completely rewrote his guitar technique: he learned to play with two fingers what most guitarists play with four.

What emerged from that recovery was something no one had done before: a completely original guitar technique, adapted to his physical limitation, which instead of reproducing what American guitarists did produced something new — a more percussive sound, faster in scales, with ornamentations that came from the Romani musical tradition of Eastern Europe. Jazz filtered through the manouche, American improvisation fused with the music of the caravans.

In 1934, at the Club Hot de France, he met violinist Stéphane Grappelli and together they formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France: two guitars (Django and his brother Joseph), a violin (Grappelli), an additional rhythm guitar and a double bass — no wind instruments, no percussion. It was the first entirely string jazz ensemble, something that did not exist in American jazz.

What they recorded between 1934 and 1940 — more than one hundred and thirty titles — is the foundation of jazz manouche or gypsy jazz: a completely European, completely original style that combined American swing with the melodic phrasing of the Romani tradition, with Django's speed and Grappelli's elegance. "Daphné", "Minor Swing", "Nuages", "J'attendrai": songs that tens of thousands of guitarists around the world still study today as if they had been recorded yesterday.

When the war broke out in 1939 Grappelli was in London and did not return. Django continued playing in Paris during the German occupation — a complex period: the Nazis had exterminated hundreds of thousands of Romani people in concentration camps, and Django was Romani, although his fame protected him to some extent. He played for audiences that included German officers and for French audiences who found in his music a space of normality in the abnormality of the occupation.

In 1946 he was invited by Duke Ellington on a tour of the United States. The reception was disappointing — the American public did not fully understand what he was doing, and jazz had evolved toward bebop in his absence. He returned to France. In the last years of his life he explored bebop with an electric guitar, without finding the fluency he had with the acoustic. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 16, 1953, at forty-three years old, upon returning home after a concert in Paris.

Mark Knopfler, Jimi Hendrix and Andrés Segovia are among the guitarists who cited his influence. His recordings do not age because what he did cannot be dated: he invented his own musical language and that language remains completely his own.

Sidney Bechet: The God of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Sidney Bechet was born in New Orleans on May 14, 1897, into a Creole family of African, French, and Native American descent. He was a prodigy: he played the clarinet from childhood and was already a recognized figure in New Orleans jazz by the time he was twenty. In 1919 he arrived in Europe for the first time as part of an orchestra of Black American soldiers who performed in London and Paris, and during that visit he found in London a soprano saxophone — an instrument that barely existed in jazz — and made it completely his own. He was the first to give the soprano saxophone its own voice in jazz.

He returned to Europe several times in the 1920s and 1930s, always finding in Paris a warmer reception than in the United States. In 1950, after a performance at the Paris Jazz Festival that drew an extraordinary ovation, he decided to settle permanently in France. The existentialists of postwar Saint-Germain-des-Prés — Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian — adopted him as their musician of reference. The press called him "le dieu" — the god.

"Petite Fleur" (1952) — "little flower" — was the song that completed his conquest of Europe: a melodic theme of absolute simplicity, with the soprano saxophone melody floating over a light accompaniment, which became an international hit when clarinetist Monty Sunshine covered it in 1959 and reached the Top 5 in the United States and the Top 3 in the United Kingdom. Woody Allen used it as background music in Midnight in Paris (2011) — the most perfect image of what Paris means to the Anglo-Saxon cultural imagination.

Bechet died on May 14, 1959, in Paris, on his sixty-second birthday. Duke Ellington described him as "the embodiment of jazz": "Everything he played throughout his life was completely original. I honestly believe he was unique in the history of this music."

Jazz Paris: The Musicians Who Found Freedom in France

Bechet and Django were not alone. The list of American musicians who found in Paris the space of artistic and personal freedom that the United States denied them is long and extraordinary.

Coleman Hawkins — the inventor of the tenor saxophone as a jazz instrument — recorded in Paris in 1937 the first tenor solos in the genre. Benny Carter — one of the great swing arrangers — spent three years in Europe. Art Tatum played in the cafés of Montmartre. And in the fifties and sixties, Saint-Germain-des-Prés became the second home of a generation of bebop and hard bop musicians: Miles Davis — who had in Paris one of the great loves of his life, actress Juliette Gréco — recorded there some of his most important works. Chet Baker lived in Europe for years. Dexter Gordon settled in Copenhagen but played regularly in Paris.

What they all found there was the same thing Bechet had found thirty years earlier: an audience that listened with the attention of musicologists and without the racial filters that in the United States determined which venues they could perform in and which hotels they could use.

Contemporary French Jazz

The legacy of that encounter between American jazz and French musical culture did not end in the fifties. France today has one of the most active jazz scenes in Europe: the Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival (where Bechet married in 1951) and the Montreux Jazz Festival (on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva but with deep roots in the French tradition) are two of the most important festivals in the world.

And the jazz manouche that Django invented is still alive: every year thousands of guitarists from all over the world travel to Samois-sur-Seine — the village on the outskirts of Paris where Django spent his final years — for the Django Reinhardt Festival, held since 1968. The music of a Roma man from the caravans played by musicians from around the world in the village where he died. Jazz has that capacity to return to its origins without growing old.

Editorial note: Django Reinhardt played until the end of his life with two fingers on his left hand. The first two notes of each phrase — those requiring the most natural movement — he played with his index and middle fingers. For the higher notes on the fretboard he sometimes used his ring finger bent in ways doctors had declared impossible. No guitarist has been able to replicate his technique exactly because no one else has his specific physical limitations. That means his sound is literally unique: it cannot be reproduced because it was born from an accident that no other musician has had in exactly the same way. Genius, in this case, was inseparable from the scar.