As the train glided out of the Metro station at the Louvre, there was no mistaking the sweet sounds of an alto saxophone, bass and drums riffing on W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”
But the horn’s tone was too hot to be coming from a boom box, and, sure enough, a young alto saxophonist soon emerged from the rear of the car. While the train sped from one subway stop to the next, the saxist unreeled one American jazz tune after another, playing karaoke style to a tape-loop on a portable player nearby.
In Paris, jazz is everywhere — in the Metro cars, on the radio and deep inside cavernous clubs every night of the week. This European cultural capital may be famous for its art, food and opera, but on Paris’ streets, life sways to the unmistakable beat of bona fide jazz.
Moreover, none of America’s predominant jazz cities — including Chicago, New York and New Orleans — can rival the sheer number of jazz joints that make this city swing. There are at least a few jazz rooms in virtually every Paris arrondissement (or “district”), and they’re as crowded on weeknights as they are on weekends.
“There are so many clubs, even I haven’t been to some of them,” said the otherwise omniscient concierge at Hotel le Loiret, near the Louvre. “It has been this way for as long as I can remember.”
Even this feast of venues is not enough to slake Paris’ thirst for jazz. Clubs continue to proliferate, with sleek new rooms opening alongside slightly dank gold ones. Meanwhile, young musicians from across Europe flock to Paris the way their American counterparts gravitate toward New York and Chicago.
Emerging Parisian musicians, though far from household names on either side of the Atlantic, attract a comparably youthful audience. An American scanning the crowd in a Paris jazz room might think he was in a rock club, judging by the predominance of young faces, spiky hairdos and piercings of all kinds.
“Jazz gets a lot more attention and care in France than it does in the United States,” says Dee Dee Bridgewater, the accomplished American jazz singer who has lived outside Paris for more than a decade. “You can feel it wherever you go, and I’m reminded of it whenever I come to the States.”
Yet, at first glance, France’s embrace of America’s most distinctly autobiographical music might seem puzzling. This is the same country, after all, that has passed laws banning foreign words in advertisements and official documents while decreeing that a certain percentage of radio airtime must be devoted to French music. Though the legislation hasn’t been particularly effective in keeping out American slang and Hollywood films, the French remain famously protective of their indigenous art.
Nevertheless, American jazz has become practically a second language to the French. In part, say Parisians, that’s because of the American troops who liberated Paris during World War II and brought with them their passion for big-band and hot-swing music. Once the war was over, jazz exploded in Paris.
“The first records we received in France after the liberation were those Dizzy [Gillespie] made with Charlie Parker for Guild,” remembered French jazz critic Charles Delaunay in Gillespie’s memoirs, “To Be or Not to Bop” (with Al Fraser).
“And when these records arrived they were the talk of the city the very same day. So the news spread in 24 hours over all the music circles in Paris.”
At the time, jazz clubs such as Caveau de la Huchette (in the Latin Quarter) and the Slow Club (near the Louvre) already were thriving, as they do to this day.
But there’s a more profound reason that French musicians and audiences adore jazz: The French played an integral, if barely credited, role in the creation of the music in the United States roughly a century ago.
Though no American metropolis can claim exclusive rights to the authorship of jazz, New Orleans — once governed by the French — provided the ideal setting for the eventual flowering of nascent American music. More racially tolerant than perhaps any other city in the States as the 19th Century segued into the 20th, New Orleans brought French, Creole, Spanish and black cultures into unprecedented proximity.
Thus jazz pioneers such as Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Alphonse Picou and George Baquet grew up hearing the Gallic arias that drew throngs to the French Opera House in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter since 1850. The sublimely lyrical and melodically ornate quality of opera scores by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau deeply influenced the first generation of Creole jazz artists and helped define the sound of the new music.
Little wonder that jazz began surfacing in Paris by at least the 1920s, when Darius Milhaud unveiled his jazz-tinged ballet “La Creation du monde” and Jean Wiener and Clement Doucet played two-piano jazz at the famous club Le Boeuf sur le Toit. By mid-century, American jazz players such as Sidney Bechet, Don Byas, Mezz Mezzrow, Kenny Clarke and Bud Powell were celebrated in Paris, the city serving as a magnet for generations of expatriate black musicians escaping racism in the U.S.
“I guess every Negro performer dreams of going to Europe,” wrote Billie Holiday in her autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues” (with William Dufty). “Some of them have gone over and never come back.”
Even those who just visited were struck by what they saw and heard in a faraway culture.
“This was my first trip out of the country, and it changed the way I looked at things forever,” wrote Miles Davis, recalling his Parisian outing of 1949, in “Miles Davis: The Autobiography.” “I loved being in Paris and loved the way I was treated.”
Today, American jazz stars such as Bridgewater and saxophonist Johnny Griffin still call France home. Though each spends time in the U.S., neither has returned to America the Amerrican side of the Atlantic permanently — their bond with the French seems destined to last a lifetime.
But not all of France’s jazz stars are imported. Artists such as the late violinist Stephane Grappelli, the venerable pianist Martial Solal and the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty long ago gave France its own jazz icons. Today, the Belmondo Big Band is the talk of Paris nightlife.
French films, too, long have celebrated jazz, most notably Bertrand Tavernier’s “‘Round Midnight” (1986), starring American tenor saxophone giant Dexter Gordon and still the greatest jazz film ever made. Jazz aficionados also treasure Roger Vadim’s “No Sun in Venice” (with a score by Modern Jazz Quartet founder John Lewis) and Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” (with a famous soundtrack by Miles Davis).
Not surprisingly, then, Parisians improvise jazz with utter naturalness and ease, though with an unmistakably French cadence. Like much of the culture’s classical music, its jazz leans toward refinement of expression, subtlety of color and elegance of melody.
Even more striking, the French don’t look down on earlier periods of jazz history as many American listeners and critics mistakenly do. Go to a Parisian jam session and you’re likely to hear music of bebop revolutionaries Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk sharing the spotlight with vintage tunes by Morton and Louis Armstrong. All are considered equally important, at least judging by a recent sojourn through several of Paris’ best clubs.
Most Parisian jazz lovers probably would concur that the top room — the equivalent of the Jazz Showcase in Chicago or the Village Vanguard in New York — is Duc des Lombards. Its facade, featuring images of jazz immortals such as John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, makes American visitors feel at home before they even walk inside.
Like virtually any Paris jazz club worthy of the name, Duc des Lombards is located below street level, its view of the stage interrupted by several pillars. But despite the somewhat cramped and funky quarters, the club earns respect as a serious listening room, with visitors barely breathing when the music is under way.
Recently, the French pianist Jean-Marie Machado led a superlative quartet in standards such as “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” Machado unabashedly merged classical and jazz techniques, and the enthusiastic response of the audience illustrated the French openness toward both traditions. Indeed, American musicians long have been seduced by the open-mindedness of French audiences. Gillespie, deemed a radical in the U.S. United States for championing complex bebop music in the ’40s, was astonished by his reception in France in 1948.
“The audiences were composed of a younger, wilder crowd, but they were ready for us,” he later wrote. “And, of course, I hardly knew the place, it had changed so much since I’d been there with Teddy Hill almost 11 years before. But the music had changed too, and the French loved it.”
To this day, the French savor adventurous music-making, as guitarist Philip Catherine proved one evening at Sunset, a club just a couple of doors away from Duc des Lombards. Catherine, an esteemed guitarist who grew up in Belgium but long has been associated with Parisian jazz, played harmonically daring, structurally complex music.that never became loud, aggressive or ugly.
Even at its most daring, Catherine’s trio refused to sacrifice gentility or grace. There was a lesson here for many American and German avant-gardists, who often mistake mere volume for energy and predictably grating dissonance for experimentation.
The toniest jazz room in Paris remains Le Bilboquet, a three-tiered restaurant-cabaret that has flourished in various guises, since 1947. The club looks and feels as glamorous today as it must have during its post-war heyday, when “jazz mania invaded” France, as the club’s fliers proclaim.
But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. Caveau de la Huchette, an underground club in the Latin Quarter, attracts young French swing dancers and American tourists; and the tiny, aptly named Petit Opportun features experimenters such as Blue Sphere, with pianist Alex Tcholakian and tenor saxophonist Jean-Pierre Thirault reinterpreting American standards in arcane and fascinating ways.
Yet the miracle of jazz in Paris is not in any one club but in the sheer wealth of them, as well as in the way French musicians address this music. Uninterested in merely mimicking American giants, they typically filter the techniques of jazz improvisation through their own European sensibility.
For listeners who revere French Impressionists Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as much as American innovators Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, French jazz epitomizes an alluring synthesis of both schools.
And you can hardly get on the Metro without encountering it.
