AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

40 Thursday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
REMEMBRANCE OF JAZZ PAST: SIDNEY BECHET IN 1950S FRANCE
Andy Fry
King’s College London
Among émigré African American musicians in France, New Orleans reedman Sidney
Bechet occupies a special position. In 1919, he—and jazz—were famously acclaimed by conductor
Ernest Ansermet; in 1925, he helped to launch Josephine Baker to stardom. Yet these
iconic early moments hide an unlikely fact: Bechet’s true rise to fame came not until a Gallic
version of the New Orleans revival movement in the forties and fifties—“Bechetmania” as it
has been called. In this paper, I examine this story in terms both of jazz historiography and
French post-war identity, bridging the two by considering music’s active role in shaping and
re-shaping historical memory.
I begin by clearing some historical ground. Ernest Ansermet’s “Sur un orchestre nègre”
(1919) is not, I show, as trusty symbol of European critical prescience about jazz as historians
have long assumed. While astute and generous, its praise of Bechet conforms to a critical tendency
to view jazz musicians as “primitives.” And its evolutionistic underpinnings turn out to
be early signs of ideas Ansermet would later expound at great length in his Les Fondements de
la Musique dans la Conscience Humaine of 1961, with the aid of racial theorists such as Arthur
de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. More is the point, the celebrated text was
wholly forgotten for twenty years following publication. It re-emerged just prior to the war,
at which point French critics happily adopted Ansermet as their forerunner. Thus not only is
Ansermet absent from the celebrated pre-war French histories of jazz by Robert Goffin and
Hugues Panassié, but so, more tellingly, is Bechet.
The rediscovery of Ansermet’s text did, though, help to pave the way to France for Bechet
after the war. In France, New Orleans Revival and bebop effectively arrived alongside one
another following the liberation as competing small-group alternatives to swing. Playing “hot
jazz” in the New Orleans tradition, Bechet should, by rights, have been the poster child for
France’s first great jazz critic, Hugues Panassié. This writer’s ultra-conservatism (political as
well as musical) had led him to denounce “progressive” be-bop and its supporters as “antijazz”
and even “anti-black”—a position that Bechet often seemed to share. But Bechet’s very
popularity (including a one-million best seller, “Les Oignons”) rankled Panassié, a man of
complexly elitist and aristocratic beliefs; and his additions to the standard—and invented—
repertory of the New Orleans revival eventually led him to doubt Bechet’s “authenticity.”
No straightforward revivalist, Bechet’s versions of old Creole folk songs—or their ur-type—
may have been regarded with suspicion by the critics. But they struck a chord with French
audiences, generating nostalgia for a common past that may never have been. Debates that
had long raged around issues of race and nation were now glossed over in a lasting myth that
the French had always loved jazz. In this paper, then, musical and historical processes mirror
one another, as I explore the generative as well as the regenerative aspects of memory. Bechet’s
creative sense of authenticity not only reimagined history, I suggest, but “played (back) into
being” a Creole identity that was especially resonant in post-war France.