Paris Between the Wars

After the First World War, Paris was one of the places where musicians from everywhere wanted to be. Composers, painters, writers and dancers shared cafés and studios, and a new generation of French composers reacted against the hazy colour of Debussy with something brisker. At the same time, American jazz arrived and found an eager audience, and in a few years a French jazz tradition appeared with a guitarist who had a hand damaged in a fire and a violinist who played beside him. This chapter follows three strands: the young composers known as Les Six, the teacher Nadia Boulanger, and the Quintette du Hot Club de France. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Les Six

In 1920 a critic grouped six young composers under a single name, "Les Six", partly as a journalistic convenience (check the details). The group is usually listed as Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre. They were not a school with one style, and they did not stay together for long. What they shared was a mood: a taste for wit, clarity, the music hall, the circus and everyday sounds, and a dislike of grandeur.

Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger (1887 to 1979) was a composer, conductor and, above all, a teacher (check the dates). She taught a remarkably long list of students from around the world, many of them American, including Aaron Copland and, later, Quincy Jones and Philip Glass (check the names). A good deal of her teaching took place in Paris and at a summer school at Fontainebleau (check the details). She did not teach a single style. What she is remembered for is a demanding method and a belief that good technique frees a composer to find a personal voice. She stopped composing herself relatively early and devoted her life to teaching, which is a reminder that influence in music is not only measured in compositions.

Jazz Comes to Paris

American jazz reached Paris after the First World War, partly through black American soldiers and musicians who stayed or toured (check the details). The city's music halls and nightclubs took to it quickly. The dancer and singer Josephine Baker arrived in the mid-1920s and became a major star (check the date). French composers like Milhaud were interested, but so were ordinary audiences, and French musicians began to play it themselves. Many Americans found Paris more welcoming to black artists than their own country, though that welcome had limits and its own stereotypes, and the picture is more complicated than it is sometimes told.

Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club

The Occupation

After Germany occupied France in 1940, jazz was officially discouraged but continued in practice, and in Paris young people known as zazous adopted swing music and an extravagant style of dress as a quiet form of defiance (check the details). Reinhardt continued to play during the war (check). These are subjects that are easy to simplify, and good histories separate what is documented from the stories told afterwards.

Exercises

Next chapter: La Chanson Française, which covers the café-concert, Piaf and the great singer-songwriters.