How do we write about jazz? The rise of ‘New Jazz Studies’ (NJS) is a rallying point for an alternative to US-canon-based historiography, increasing interest in the jazz diaspora. Both these studies take as a premise that ‘Jazz was not “invented” and then exported. It was invented in the process of being disseminated’ (Johnson Reference Johnson, Cooke and Horn2002, p. 39). France presents distinctive cultural features which explain the proliferating literature on its jazz. Its modernist movements were conspicuously negrophiliac, and it was one of the seminal centres of serious jazz discourse. It claimed its own major jazz stylists, most notably Django Reinhardt. From the 1950s ‘there were sporadic efforts to locate and promote a national jazz. In 1955, a number of leading critics established the Académie du Jazz to this end’, and Hodeir declared that Paris was now the ‘real jazz center in Europe’ (Perchard, p. 191). Michel Portal's work of the 1970s was acclaimed for its art music–jazz crossover, liberating the music from its ‘American masters’ (Perchard, p. 214). The authors also posit reverse creative flow. Perchard argues that Coleman Hawkins's ‘new approach’ was given impetus through exposure to Django Reinhardt (pp. 58, 59). Similarly, Mawer assembles case studies of US musicians deriving inspiration from 20th century French ‘classical’ sources. Perchard focuses on discourses surrounding jazz, while Mawer explores ‘detailed musical interactions' between jazz and French ‘classical’ music (p. 1). Further detail on contents can be googled. Both studies are extremely rich in information and provide a welcome array of (often ephemeral) French sources in translation.

While each is informed by the ‘contextual’ turn of NJS, Mawer's ‘textual’ focus raises provocative issues on the convergence of the two. The musicological analysis is highly technical, and as a cultural historian rather than a musicologist, my comments on those matters are tentative. There is great potential in this close analytical approach in challenging assumptions of US-canon-centred narratives. For example, in her study of Dave Brubeck, she wants ‘to investigate and test Ted Gioia's claim that “Even the classical influences from Milhaud and others … were only marginal influences”’ (p. 243). Her conclusion is that ‘Milhaud's impact on Brubeck … is greater than that acknowledged by Gioia’ (p. 269). This echoes the book's more general conclusion ‘that the relationships revealed between French music and jazz are deeper, more varied and more extensive than has hitherto been realized and … to mutual artistic enrichment’ (p. 10).

Both books make their cases with conviction, but Mawer does not always leap plausibly across the gap between formal resemblances and mutual influence. In the case of Brubeck/Milhaud her consciousness of the dangers of arguing ‘cause–effect’ from resemblances (p. 253) fortifies the argument. However, as she points out in relation to another writer, ‘in writing any book, an author is susceptible to any temptation to overstate his or her case slightly’ (p. 202). Resemblances are often in the over-eager eye of the beholder. On Bill Evans and Messiaen, noting that Catalogue d'oiseax was not published until 1964, six years after Evans's ‘Peace Piece’, she suggests that Evans ‘may well have heard earlier works … that presaged the sounds of birdsong. It is hard to imagine he would be unfamiliar with the Quatuor pour le fin du temps (1940–1). … He might conceivably have known of later works' referring to birds and birdsong’. She concedes that ‘It is unlikely that we will find firm evidence’ one way or another (p. 239, emphases mine). Such tentativeness might also be appropriate when the ‘resemblances' are likely to be to more proximate phenomena: Bix Beiderbecke's composition ‘In a Mist, immediately invites association via its title with the first of Debussy's Pr éludes called “Brouillards” (Mists)‘ (p. 25). Yes, we know of his interest in Debussy, but the title also ‘invites association’ with other crepuscular compositions by this musician who spent so much of his short life ‘in a mist’: ‘Candlelights', ‘Flashes', ‘In the Dark’. French influence on Ellington is articulated as ‘suggest[ing] at least an affinity between’ ‘significant classical affinities' (p. 27), and his voicing in ‘Mood Indigo’ is ‘not so dissimilar to the unworldly sotto voce stacking of fifths over the bass that opens Ravel's Daphnis. The idea of indigo also creates an attractive association of languid, melancholic mood with the blue-violet-mauve, water lily impressionist canvases of late Monet’ (p. 27). Yes, we do know that Ellington listed Daphnis among his classical music preferences – in 1952, 32 years after the title ‘Mood Indigo’ was attached to the song. Mawer also notes Ellington's ‘later reservations about his work being compared with classical music’ (p. 25), a caveat whose force is rather undermined in this context in the same way as Antony's assertions that Brutus was ‘an honourable man’. The ‘associations' should be seen against the fact that Ellington's experiments with voicing were ‘associated’ with his deep interest in sonic terracing and recording technology (see Johnson Reference Johnson2000, pp. 85–6), and that the word ‘indigo’ also has a close ‘affinity’ with the ‘blues', especially given his inclination to lush rhapsoding.

These exemplify a not always convincing pattern underpinning the argument about influences as opposed to resemblances – see similarly Ravel/Grappelli (p. 160), Ravel and Jolivet/Bill Evans (pp. 226, 236). These are to varying degrees subjective, as the careful qualifications imply. ‘Even more speculatively, … might there be any connection between his [Evans's] first main solo in the peaceful, relaxed “Blue in Green” and “La Fille aux cheveux de lin”, from the first book of Préludes? [Debussy's]. There are certainly strong parallels, with specific intersections from an esthetic or hermeneutic stance’, and these include ‘slow tempo and spacious feel’ (pp. 228–9). Two compositions in slow tempos do not a mutual influence make. ‘Spacious feel’? We ‘might even propose’ (p. 231) mutual influences between Evans and French composers through musical gestures that ‘may set up intertextual associations’ (p. 232), and another that ‘is hard to hear other than as a reference … to Chopin’ (p. 232). While she concedes that it ‘would be foolish to force any argument for direct influence’ of Messiaen on Evans, the undercurrent of the whole argument, based on ‘affinities’, ‘parities’, ‘parallels’ and various maybes, is carrying the discussion towards the argument for ‘influence’. What incorporated a high level of speculation becomes in the conclusion ‘little doubt about the relevance of French music to Evans … evidenced by a brief survey of biographical literature, supported by Evans's own views and coupled with explorations in the analyses’ (pp. 236–7). The first two are strong evidence for ‘relevance’; the last is tenuous. As she notes, in the absence of testimony, there is a limit to how far you can argue conscious influence (p. 239). By the most painstaking analysis, she has probably taken it as far as you can, indeed a bit further. Similarity is not necessarily a sign of influence, especially in the generalised flood of music that characterises the modern mediatised world (as noted by Evans himself, p. 238). These are problems inherent in the project and its methodology, and if Mawer sometimes stumbles over them, she is to be admired for running the hazard.

However, the stumbles are exacerbated by what becomes another problem. Compared with Perchard, Mawer's centre of gravity lies more towards ‘art music’. Like Perchard, she recognises the protean face of jazz (pp. 2–3), yet she still draws from a conservative high art discourse with terms like ‘true’ and ‘genuine’ jazz as discriminators (p. 133). The methodology suggests an academic position somewhere above ‘popular’ culture and a corollary is jazz blind spots. The jazz data are often unconvincing. To illustrate, a chapter called ‘Hylton's “jazzed” arrangements of French classics’ provides wonderful material on a now overlooked bandleader once considered the UK/continental equivalent of Paul Whiteman (p. 166). Mawer recognises that the ‘identification of Hylton's material as loosely jazz-based is itself problematic’ (p. 166). Hylton certainly led an orchestra whose repertoire included what today might be called a ‘hot dance’ style that often relied on jazz approaches. However, like many orchestras of the period, including Whiteman's, he included material in which the sound of jazz was barely audible. He was, after all, a commercially oriented professional dance musician, so concerned, as Mawer (foot)notes, ‘to give an audience what it wanted’ (p. 161 fn. 15) that he initially distanced himself from the term lest it alienate his audiences, eager to highlight his ‘British touch’ (p. 167). Mawer is as sensitive to this ‘problematic’ as one could wish for, and in prosecuting her argument about Hylton's ‘jazzing’ of the classics, is constrained by sources, some of which exist only in the form of scored arrangements, some recorded, and a few, both (p. 175).

These circumstances make something of a challenge. Among the cases she chooses is ‘So Deep is the Night’, based on Chopin's piano Étude in E major, Op. 10, No. 3, recorded by Hylton's band in December 1939. Mawer's analysis is based on a close ‘reading’ of the recording, in conjunction with a scored version, seven bars of which are reproduced (Fig. 6.1, p. 179). Jazz influence is argued in ‘a sense of being slightly swung’, occasionally being ‘faster than expected’, the singing of a ‘crooner’ and a ‘postlude’ that includes ‘notable syncopation (a forced levity?)’ (p. 180). Primarily on the basis of the lyric, ‘new meanings have been drawn and developed from the original’. She insightfully discusses how those new meanings might be related to Britain's situation in the immediate aftermath of the declaration of war, for example its themes of darkness (the blackout), ‘sacrifice, loss’ (p. 180). These observations show a fine sense of the relationship between musical text and social context.

As a case study of ‘jazzed arrangements of French classics’, however, it discloses the problems that arise from the (subjective) inference of meaning and affect that accompanies a critical approach based ultimately on the ‘Practical Criticism’ literary model. For example, she notes that one change from the scored version is the substitution of a violin for a trumpet in the opening statement; to me this ‘de-brassing’ suggests a movement away from a ‘jazzing up’ of the piece, more towards the ‘British touch’, especially given the wartime context. The tempo and the use of a crooner are pervasive in white dance music of the 1930s, part of the modernisation of popular music that accompanied rather than emerged from the jazz movement; the accent of this crooner, Sam Browne, is neutral-to-English (which he was). There are no intimations of scalar or harmonic effects associated with jazz, and the only timbral suggestions would be the use of brass mutes, but the effect just that – genteel muting. There is one very brief possible suggestion of trombone glissando, but which might equally be thought of simply as legato. And I have listened many times to the ‘postlude’, and the only suggestions of syncopation audible to me are a couple of rather declamatory climaxes – ‘levity’ I cannot hear. I come to this as one who is always eager to identify jazz influences in interwar dance music. Yet even on the most catholic understanding of the term, I cannot hear in this track anything that would warrant the term ‘jazzing’. Likewise with Hylton's version of Ravel's Bolero (pp. 187–90). If these two tracks are examples of ‘jazzing’, then to me the term has no power as a discriminator. Mawer concludes the chapter by saying that the ‘jazzifying’ has, in the cases she explores, been ‘relatively circumscribed’ (p. 190), yet on the same page she refers without reservation to Hylton's ‘jazzifying of French music’, which ‘functions as a transition through to the definitive, serious pursuit of (modal) jazz following World War II’ (p. 190). While I found the information fascinating, this chapter does not convince me, no matter how much I want to be persuaded.

At worst, the indistinctness of the jazz knowledge simply falls into errors. She gives the dates for the Hot Club of France as 1932 to ‘about 1948’ (p. 33). Perchard refers to its activities well into the 1950s; New Grove (Kernfeld Reference Kernfeld1988, Vol. 1, p. 540) refers to it in the present tense, and I was under the impression – which I can only document through Wikipedia at the moment – that it was still running at least to the end of the 20th century. She declares that jazz was ‘banned’ in Germany (p. 33). No (see e.g. Kater Reference Kater1992, p. 33). She refers to ‘highly successful versions’ of ‘St Louis Blues’ by Louis Armstrong's famous Hot Fives/Hot Sevens (p. 23). In jazz history this is akin to the announcement of the discovery of a new play by Shakespeare. Yet they are not listed among the Five/Seven sessions in Rust (Reference Rust1970), nor Harker (Reference Harker2011), nor are they on my set of the ‘complete’ sessions reissued on Columbia, nor listed on the CD reissue catalogues. Far from ‘highly successful’, they don't appear to exist. She asserts that ‘Oliver's seven-piece Creole Jazz Band in Chicago of 1923 included one young Louis Armstrong on cornet, and the Creole pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton’ (pp. 22–3). An exciting revelation, again, on a par with discovering a play co-written by Shakespeare and Marlowe. However, now beginning to doubt my memory, I checked with jazz historian Bill Haesler whose specialist knowledge is on a par with the late Brian Rust's. He confirms that this is simply not the case, and in fact that Armstrong is on record as declaring that he never played with Morton, nor does it seem possible that Morton was involved with Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1923 (personal communication, 13 September 2016).

Allowing for the possibility of recent (but uncited) documentation new to me, I don't want to be too strident about this, but it does seem to be a problem, which a reviewer cannot ignore. Noting a ‘veritable tradition of ragtime, blues and jazz quotations from Chopin's “Funeral March”, often used as a piece's concluding gesture’, she cites Felix Arndt's ‘Desecration Rag’ (1914), Armstrong's 1928 ‘West End Blues’ and Ellington's ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ (p. 83). I am puzzled, to the extent of doubting my own ear. It is famously the conclusion of the Ellington piece, but while the quotation is present in Arndt, it is not the ‘concluding gesture’. Although as a trumpeter I have listened to and played note-for-note Armstrong's ‘West End’ more times than I can remember, I cannot find in this major key blues anything that sounds like a quote from Chopin. The ‘concluding gesture’ is a pretty standard cadence – A♭, A♭m, E♭. I can't relate that to Chopin's minor key piece. What am I missing here?

All these undermine confidence in other assertions. I spend some time on this because Mawer's analysis is in fact so very valuable. I want to emphasise that one of the strengths of this study is its precision and detail. Mawer's surgical diligence brings us into close engagement with the difficulties that lurk beneath some of the entrenched assumptions in jazz historiography. She provides a discursive space in which to test models that have become ossified, and is to be congratulated for taking us so ‘up close and personal’. Together with Perchard's book and other recent studies of the jazz diaspora such as Heffley (Reference Heffley2005), so fully informed with a sense of (New) Cultural History as well as NJS, they make me wonder why there is little or nothing of such scope coming out of the US, and I suspect the reason might be simply that there it is so hard to emerge from under the politics of the US-centred and US-perpetuated narratives. These tend to prioritise subject matter in direct ratio to proximity to the ‘fountainhead’, stylistically as well as geographically. Yet if we are interested in seeing jazz ‘in the making’, its early diasporic forms are richly instructive in ways that the more placeless facsimiles of the two postwar decades are not. Kenneth Prouty (Reference Prouty2010) raised the question of what an alternative jazz history to the still dominant US-centred canonical model might look like. These two studies open up such possibilities, and require us to ask again: what is the most effective discourse for jazz? (See Johnson Reference Johnson and Whyton1993/2011.) Apart from shifting our attention to non-US jazz developments, a shift away from the canonical texts would open up new methodologies. In Perchard's immensely illuminating chapter on Hugues Panassié he reports on how the French writer tried to encourage listeners to respond to the music ‘somatically rather than intellectually’ (p. 30). This resonates with recent developments in cognitive research involving mirror neurons and extended mind theory. I suggest that the experience of jazz implicates a distinctive epistemology, by which the incommensurable tensions between jazz and an aesthetics that relies on such positivist and mutually exclusive models as ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ might be resolved. Without abandoning such models, I don't see how we can make sense of the jazz aesthetic.