Les mots du jazz
Abstracts
Words of Jazz: A Look Back on Le Jazz by André Schaeffner and André Coeuroy (1926). – Le Jazz by André Schaeffner and André Coeuroy (1926), the first learned analysis of jazz, signaled an important phase in the reinvention of this music in France, since, through the debates it sparked at the time, it helped change jazz’s identity from an “American” to a “Black American” music with African “roots”. Coeuroy and Schaeffner referred to sorts of music that jazz criticism would have throw out of its pantheon, but their analyses would form the major grids for interpreting jazz in France: the improvisation-personalized sound-“swing” threesome; and the relation between a “logic of essence” and a “logic of progress” through a kind of dialectical evolutionism (Black, African or Afro-American, vs. White, European; simple vs. complex; popular vs. learned). By analyzing this book and the reception given to it, we see how, throughout the history of jazz in France, other important authors adopted and adapted these grids.
Index terms
Top of pageReferences
Bibliographical reference
Olivier Roueff, “Les mots du jazz”, L’Homme, 158-159 | 2001, 239-260.
Electronic reference
Olivier Roueff, “Les mots du jazz”, L’Homme [Online], 158-159 | avril-septembre 2001, Online since 25 May 2007, connection on 29 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/111; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.111
Top of pageCopyright
The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
Top of page