Paris

Despite the favorable environment for jazz in France, African-American musicians’ turn toward using intellectual and formal techniques of European art music during the 1970s met with a cool reception in the French jazz press. Lehman suggests that a genuine fascination with this new music was tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom, which viewed through-notated forms and intellectualism as uniquely French or European.

This essay documents the absorption of jazz by the European artistic vanguard between 1910 and 1930. Because of jazz' perceived spontaneous and libidinous qualities, avant-garde artists exploited it as a symbol of modernism "like a decal on a traveler's bag," in turn preparing jazz' appropriation by the world of fashion of that time.