The Latest Word From the French

The other day, at the Ministry of Culture, a group of American musicians gathered to be honored by the Department of Arts and Letters for their services to music over the years. Individual medals went to Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Stan Getz, Phil Woods, Jackie McLean, Hank Jones, Milt Jackson, Percy Heath and the singer Billy Eckstine. That evening all the instrumentalists took part in a widely praised concert in the Grande Halle at the suburb of La Villette.

Honors for U.S. jazz musicians, first unofficially and later on a more formal level, have been a tradition in France since the 1930s. Those were the days when visitors from the States, invariably accorded more respect in Europe than on home turf, joined forces with the best France had to offer. In a series of sessions for the French company Swing Records (one of the world’s first jazz labels), Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins shared solos and souls with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli in a Paris studio, creating classic performances that have been reissued time and again.

Today in Paris, the scene is vastly different. Most of the American jazzmen in town have already made their names back home; jazz is no longer a private, esoteric preserve but a high-priced commodity.

The bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution seemed to have very little impact on the jazz community, and much of that was negative. “I’m getting out of town just in time,” said Mike Zwerin as he cleaned up his apartment here before taking off for a jazz-free vacation in Yugoslavia. The influx of tourists and consequent traffic jams sent many Parisians fleeing.

Zwerin is one of a kind: The only American jazz artist in Europe who makes his living primarily as a journalist. New York-born, he earned early success as a trombonist, playing with Miles Davis’ “Birth of the Cool” band before it began its recording career. By 1960 he was leading a triple life: Businessman (he was president of the Capitol Steel Co.), musician (with Claude Thornhill and Maynard Ferguson), and writer for the Village Voice. After touring the U.S.S.R. in 1966 with Earl Hines, he settled in Paris, where he has been a regular, witty and respected columnist for the International Herald Tribune. Stateside readers can find him in Spin magazine.

“I’m still playing too,” he added. “In fact, June was a good month; I worked half a dozen gigs, and most of them were in small clubs where all we had to do was remember the changes to songs like “I’ll Remember April’ and “All the Things You Are”--no rehearsal needed. There’s still a fair amount of that kind of work around. But my best assignment recently has been writing a piece, for the German edition of Esquire, about this fabulous German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff.”

Asked about the current club and concert scene in town, Zwerin said: “There’s plenty going on, but I can’t take you to hear anything of consequence that you haven’t caught in New York or L.A. I mean, why come to Paris to listen to Miles Davis?”

True, though for the typical French fan these are exciting times. A weeklong festival sponsored by a beer company got under way 10 days before the bicentennial, at the Tuileries. The line-up included Chick Corea, Michael Franks, Michel Camilo, Stanley Clarke with George Duke, Cab Calloway, the Yellowjackets and Lionel Hampton. (Ironically, while Hampton made his Tuileries appearance, another big band, led by the French pianist and composer Claude Bolling, was on the bandstand at Le Club Lionel Hampton, in the Meridien Hotel.)

One of the most popular jazz rooms here is the New Morning. A recent week’s schedule began with a night by the McCoy Tyner Trio, followed by Eddie Harris, Joe Williams, Astrud Gilberto and Stanley Jordan for a night each--a sequence most American clubs might envy. Around the same time there were concerts at the Grand Rex by Michael Brecker and Larry Carlton among others.

Most of the French jazzmen are spread far and wide. France’s most famous living jazz artist, the octogenarian violinist Stephane Grappelli, had left before my arrival, to take part in a Jour de Gloire celebration in Washington. (While he was headed for the States, the soprano Jessye Norman was en route to Paris for the Bastille Day extravaganza, following President Mitterrand’s speech with her noble version of “La Marseillaise.” It seemed like a fair enough exchange.)

Only two Frenchmen have earned any true measure of jazz distinction during the 1980s. They are the diminutive pianist Michel Petrucciani and the Gypsy guitarist Bireli Lagrene, who emerged a few years ago amid critical plaudits, hailed as a sort of reincarnated Reinhardt. Both men are now well enough established to spend much of their time on the international concert and festival circuit.

Frank Tenot, who helped launch Jazz magazine 35 years ago and is now its owner, summed up the impressive domestic situation: “This summer there are at least 60 jazz festivals all over France. We’ve had the Grande Parade du Jazz at Nice, which has been going on annually since 1974--an open-air affair at the Jardins des Arenes de Carmiez (check spellings). This week they have so many big names that one wonders whether anyone is left to play the jobs in America.”

Talking to French critics, musicians and fans, you get the feeling that they have a proprietary, if vicarious, interest in jazz, having given it serious attention since 1930, when a magazine called Jazz Tango Dancing offered regular monthly reviews of U.S. records, several years before any ongoing coverage appeared in an American publication. In 1934 the magazine Jazz Hot began publication (it’s still around, though the founder, Charles Delaunay, died a couple of years ago); a gathering of cognoscenti was organized, known as the Hot Club of France, and the quintet named after the club, with Grappelli and Reinhardt as the world’s first non-American jazz virtuosos, soon achieved global renown.

“Le Jazz Hot,” Hugues Panassie’s book, was the first authentic and scholarly work of its kind and was duly translated into English. The various writings and promotions of Panassie and Delauney ultimately enjoyed a worldwide impact.

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Despite these developments, France over the decades has produced fewer seminal jazz artists than Japan or England. On the level of the printed word, however, the French continue to maintain their lead. This has become obvious yet again with the publication of “Dictionnaire du Jazz,” co-edited by Philippe Carles, best known as the editor of Jazz magazine.

“It took two or three years to put the book together,” said Carles, “and we had 54 writers contributing the biographies. I think we included a lot of useful information.”

That is an understatement. It is fascinating to compare the “Dictionnaire” with another recent work, the “Grove Dictionary of Jazz,” which appeared a few months ago in England and the United States. The Grove work contains a great deal of valuable information, but its price ($295) is prohibitive and its errors of omission are appalling. American critics such as Gene Lees, editor of the Jazzletter, termed it “a disaster” and listed 94 important musicians who were omitted from Grove.

Whether one looks for information about blues pioneers such as T-Bone Walker, major jazz/pop artists like Peggy Lee, figures of the 1980s including Jane Ira Bloom, or the critic/musicians Mike Zwerin and Don Heckman, one finds none of them in Grove, yet all, along with many others similarly missing, can be looked up in the “Dictionnaire,” which seems to have crammed as much useful material into its succinct 1,200-page paperback edition as Grove did in its bulky hard-cover two-volume set.

Since names and dates and song titles require no translation, the “Dictionnaire” can be helpful even if one’s knowledge of French is limited. It can be obtained for $20 from the publisher, Robert Laffont, 31 Rue Falguierre, 75015, Paris.

It’s a supreme irony. Almost 55 years after Hugues Panassie launched the first valuable chapter in the literature of our American art form, the French once again seem to be showing us all how to document the music in significant words.