Introduction
In an effort to wean his student off the unworthy dance bands of Paul Whiteman and Jack Hylton, Hugues Panassié's saxophone teacher lent the boy some real jazz – 78s by Bix, Trumbauer and Fletcher Henderson, gold dust in 1920s Paris. It wasn't long after this, and after a few lessons in the music of Louis Armstrong taken in front of the gramophone with trumpeter Philippe Brun, that the young man gave up on commercial orchestras for ever. Along with those bands went the saxophone; the mediocre musician had been eclipsed by an increasingly expert discophile. When in 1929 Panassié began approaching American jazzmen visiting Paris to request discographical information – ‘isn't that such-and-such playing clarinet’, he would ask musicians of imported discs, those semi-anonymous novelties for which almost no artistic or historical labelling had yet been thought necessary – the visitors would be taken aback by the accuracy of the young Frenchman's ear. ‘I recognised them’, Panassié would reminisce, ‘as a connoisseur of painting distinguishes at the first glance, and without risk of confusion, a Marie Laurencin from a Chagall. It was as easy as that’ (Panassié Reference Panassié1975, passim, p. 74). In 1930, at the age of 18, Panassié began contributing to French dance band magazines, and this was his first of a career's worth of critical, organisational and entrepreneurial efforts made in the name of jazz. In 1932 he helped form the Hot-club de France, creating the post of Président in 1934 and occupying it until the end of his life; spin-offs from this project, made in the company of Charles Delaunay, were the review Jazz Hot (1935) and the record label Swing (1937). Panassié's first book, Le Jazz Hot – one of the earliest on jazz – was published in 1934, and before his death in 1974 he was to devote a dozen more to the music.
Panassié was a principal actor in what is commonly acknowledged as a specifically European achievement, the establishment and development of specialist jazz criticism. Yet despite this, and despite his efforts to promote the music's performance and what he saw as its cause across his country, Panassié's personal reputation is no longer good. Faced in the 1940s with a music changing in ways he despised, the critic came to proselytise for a simple and pure black jazz style played by simple and pure black musicians, and charges of racist primitivism now follow rare mentions of Panassié's name across the Anglophone historical literature.Footnote 1 Some scattered examples: Andrew Wright Hurley (Reference Wright Hurley2009, p. 66) identifies the critic as a devotee of the ‘black mystique’ that often functioned as the supposedly non-racist inversion of contemporary European master-race myths; writing about the American New Orleans revival of the late 1940s, Richard Hadlock (Reference Hadlock and Kirchner2000, p. 310) notes Panassié's adherence to an idea of the black American jazz musician as a ‘Noble Savage’. Standing for Panassié's primitivism tout court, that epithet appears not uncommonly when the critic is invoked, but this association's fullest development appears in Ted Gioia's 1989 article ‘Jazz and the primitivist myth’. Gioia identifies early jazz criticism as an inheritor of the dubious primitivist legacy of Picasso and his ilk, accusing Panassié, along with his early colleagues Delaunay and the Belgian Robert Goffin, of transposing the Noble Savage into black American jazz as part of an effort to process the sheer, affective excitement the music had introduced to interwar Europe – and which contrasted with the supposedly waning health of that continent's own music. Gioia (Reference Gioia1989, p. 137) cites Panassié's assertion (made in 1942's The Real Jazz) that ‘[i]nspiration without culture can produce beautiful works; culture without inspiration is incapable of doing so’.
If it is not the Noble Savage trope that is attached to Panassié in historical evaluations of his work, it is, as in his entry into The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, the observation that
Panassié's reputation as an articulate advocate of jazz has to some extent been tarnished by his extreme conservatism: from the mid-1940s he expressed the opinion that bop was not jazz, thus denying the evolution of the genre. (Clergeat Reference Clergeat and Kernfield2002, p. 222)
Indeed, through the last 30 years of his life Panassié devoted much of his writing to polemics against such evolution, and what jazz had become, along with bebop, once black musicians had been contaminated by white ideas about art. Evidently, the fact that Panassié remained an unmatched champion of older African American musicians cannot, for contemporary historians, mitigate the extraordinary condescension and arrogance of a critic who would sit in moral judgement on a distant cultural activity, finding it wanting when it could no longer be put in the service of his own primitivist ideal.
Indeed, if they were better known, the details of Panassié's story would only excite more condemnation of the writer's work. As a youth Panassié began an association with the political right that would, in 1937, see him writing the jazz column for L'Insurgé, a militant weekly founded by young Catholic intellectuals with ties to the anti-Semitic nationalist organisation Action française. This journal campaigned for the installation of an authoritarian regime, its first editorial proclaiming that ‘the new state must be founded upon the natural realities of soil, blood and history’. During and after WWII Panassié would remain close to a number of Vichyistes, some of whom would sit with him on the board of the post-war Hot-club de France (Tournès Reference Tournès1999, pp. 36, 55). But if Panassié's surprising dual loyalty to black America and European fascism would make a ‘rehabilitation’ of the critic rather difficult, it is nevertheless too easy for contemporary readers simply to dismiss him as someone lacking the required – which is to say, the contemporary – sensibilities and vocabularies to be admitted into a pantheon of important figures in jazz history.
In fact it is a slippage of vocabulary that poses much of the problem. Whereas in the 21st century ‘primitivism’ generally signifies some downwards glance, a judgement condescending to a supposed evolutionary inferior, for Panassié all these terms were reversed. Where ‘primitivism’ today immediately implies an encounter fraught with racial ideology – this implication the result of all those downward glances made during the ignominious modern development of European colonialism, racism and accompanying pseudo-sciences – for Panassié the term was not always racially loaded, the pure primitive not necessarily Other, or even human; looking through the skin of the American Noirs, Panassié's primitivism found its real origin in God. The critic's conceptualisation of jazz and black American culture was shaped by French Catholic thinkers and writers grappling in the early 20th century with what they saw as the troubles of the epoch; one of the aims of this piece is, pace Gioia, to elucidate the ways in which Panassié employed primitivist tropes derived not so much from contemporary secular sources as from historical theological readings. Panassié's primitivism was part of an attempt to portray jazz as a thing of sacralised tradition rather than, as was common among his critic colleagues, of technicised modernity.
That portrayal relied upon representations and interpretations of black American cultural activity which always betrayed particular historical European concerns. James Clifford has shown how 20th century Western attempts to treat ‘the primitive’ – the art of Picasso or Gaugin, Levi-Strauss' pensée sauvage or Lévy-Bruhl's mentalité primitive – have often professed an interest in a universal humanity while masking their enabling colonial realities, and what Clifford calls ‘the restless desire and power of the modern West to collect the world’ (Clifford Reference Clifford1988b, pp. 195–6). Panassié's work is without doubt due similar criticism. Yet I will come to argue that Panassié's race fantasies and repellent politics somehow led him towards an insightful cultural relativism never imagined by his anti-primitivist opponents. That being the case, it is probably important to state again that, in re-examining Panassié's work, I am not trying to overturn the contemporary understanding of the critic's primitivism so much as to deepen it, newly situating the writing in its intellectual contexts so that it seems less like the passing but rejected aberration usually described by jazz historians, and more like a particular response to anxieties which, essential to the Post-Enlightenment period, remain very much unsoothed – anxieties over the decline of the spiritual and the attendant triumph of capital, over the stability and authority of tradition, over the encounter between races and cultures.
Jazz primitivism before Panassié
A number of writers have shown how, at the turn of the 20th century, a now familiar Parisian fascination with African art was both pre-empted by and confused with widely circulating images of African American cultural life and practice, principally that of the cakewalk. The conflation of new- and old-world blackness would create an atmosphere in which both ‘American’ ragtime rhythms and ‘African’ line and form could be assimilated into local media as varied as the piano music of Debussy, the paintings of Picasso or the textiles of Sonia Delaunay (mother of Panassié's colleague Charles). In adventurous Parisian circles of the early century it was as interesting and modern to be what was called a negrophile as it was to dance in the new nightclubs of Montmartre and Montparnasse, in which for the first time social classes and races mixed in public, American cocktails in hand. With the US entry into WWI, something closer to jazz proper arrived, suddenly and, with regiments full of black American soldier-musicians like James Reese Europe's Harlem Hellfighters, en masse. The fad continued, and by the 1920s the poetry and chanson of the old Parisian cabaret was largely replaced by the ‘jazz band’, even if that term could signify nothing more than the presence of a drum, or a black face.Footnote 2 As Gioia suggests, at that time jazz sat easily alongside L'art nègre and the African phantasmagoria that decorated fashionable Parisian galleries and living rooms, signalling to its amateurs almost as much as its detractors a perverse interest in the debased and the cultish.
During the 1920s, argues Matthew F. Jordan (Reference Jordan2001), French newspaper and music journal commentary on jazz both positive and negative tended to be shaped by one of two vocabularies, each representing a strand of this local African/American fantasy. Here, jazz was either another harbinger of modernity, that vortex of speed, mechanisation, production and consumption that had swept in from America to transform traditional French society, and which was the subject of much popular debate; or else it was an indulgence of the primitive, a celebration of the voodoo essential to jazz rhythm that animated music made even by French initiates.Footnote 3 Those available vocabularies – primitivist and modernist – helped writers make do with the paucity of actual experience they had of the black American music.
Some of this writing was provided by musicians, as in Ernest Ansermet's 1919 Revue romande appraisal of Sidney Bechet, which became famous when the piece was rediscovered and republished in Jazz hot in the late 1930s. However, the early explorations into jazz that advanced beyond the standard headlines – ‘this frenzy is contagious’ – often constructed for the style a deeper rooted ethnological profile, and were conducted by surrealist hommes de lettres as well as music critics and ethnographers, the artistic and the scientific surreal momentarily converging through Maussian, Freudian bifocals.Footnote 4 The journal articles and 1926 book Le Jazz by music critic André Cœuroy and musicologist-ethnologist André Schaeffner posited a historical and pan-continental musique nègre, of which jazz was merely the latest expression. Georges Bataille's surrealist magazine Documents made frequent reference to the music, most often in pieces signed by Michel Leiris, the poet who later became an African specialist at the Musée de l'Homme.Footnote 5
Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, many of these writers imagined a corps of black American jazz players bringing with them a happy delirium that would enliven a morbid post-war Europe. But there were others who looked at the approaching, primitive black bodies with a pained squint. The critic André Levinson located in jazz's ‘bad blood’ a ‘virus noir’ that would contaminate rather than revivify Europeans (cited in Archer-Straw Reference Archer-Straw2000, pp. 113–4).Footnote 6 Writing on jazz in a 1935 issue of the respected journal La Revue Musicale, André Suarès could only see
[t]he monkey drunk on himself, without morals, without discipline, fallen into the undergrowth of instinct, revealing his naked flesh with every bound, together with a piece of flesh even more obscene, his heart. These slaves must be brought to submission … Jazz is, cynically speaking, an orchestra-full of brutes with non-opposable thumbs. (Cited in Gumplowicz Reference Gumplowicz and Pistone2000, p. 397)
Whether positively or negatively conceived, tropes of primitivism and the ancient were ubiquitous: black musicians, glimpsed in performance or in the imagination, were transformed into savages, sometimes noble, sometimes not. Even without Suarès' invocation of slavery, Hegel's dialectic would be evident throughout early French writing on jazz whether for or against, the Other continually defined primitive in order to facilitate the definition of the civilised – even when the opposition is made in order to critique post-war European fantasies of its own civilisation.
As much as it was their subject, for many of these early writers, jazz – America, dark skin, machine – was an object of reflection, in which could be seen the future of Europe and, specifically, of France.Footnote 7
Panassié's readings of tradition and decline
These jazz-inspired redefinitions of national selves and foreign Others were playing a small part in a long and much more general contest of national status and identity, one which had, since La Guerre des bouffons in the 1750s, often spilled over into the arena of the arts. Panassié grew up in a country riven by disputes over laicisation and, in the wake of Dreyfus, anti-Semitic nationalism; even before his teenage encounter with jazz, Panassié had autodidactically arranged rightist notions of God, nation, monarchy and tradition – and those ideas' opposites, all embodied by the secular, democratic modern state – as the fundamentals of his intellectual make-up. In what follows I will trace the ways in which the young man's reading of contemporary religious writings shaped his later conception of jazz as an arbiter of pre-humanist tradition starkly contrasting with a modern European culture in decline.
In his late memoir, Panassié recalls that this thinking was first inspired by a reading of Léon Bloy. Aged 14, recuperating from the polio that left him half-crippled, Panassié – then only lazily observant – began to read the works of this author whose polemical, prophetic tone made him the extremist counterpart to the group of late 19th century French Catholic writers headed by Peguy (Panassié Reference Panassié1975, p. 29). Bloy, Panassié recalled, ‘spent his time knocking heads’, smearing his attacks on the clergy, the modern state and the bourgeoisie with images of shit and vomit, symbols of decadent self-deception, the secret unmentionable he wanted dumped at the doorstep of modernity (see Bloy Reference Bloy and Maritain1947). This railing against a modern world and its corrupt institutions (including a weakened and reforming Catholic church), the continually professed faith in the ancient order of God and monarchy, the tone of condemnation, all of Bloy's concerns and tactics would be mirrored in Panassié's writing, whether overtly or through the cipher of black American jazz; Bloy's self-righteous crusade against self-appointed authority, one made in the name of God and those forsaken by power, is a pre-echo of Panassié's own campaigns, made against what he saw as empty or corrupt commercial or critical powers in the name of les Noirs.Footnote 8
But more than providing the outline of a critical project, Bloy also informed Panassié's understanding of France and its history. For Bloy, the meaning of the fall into modernity was intertwined with the meaning of France: with its increasing secularism, the nation had neglected its historical role as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and so-called ‘eldest daughter of the church’. France's modern upheavals – lost wars, lost faith – were its punishment for the dereliction of a divine duty, the country's decline ‘like a vast parable omitted by the Four Evangelists’, as one of Bloy's interpreters has written (Béguin Reference Béguin and Riley1947, p. 211).
Panassié credited Bloy with bringing about his return to active religious observance, as well as inspiring his ‘furious study’ of the Church fathers and ‘the entire history of Catholicism’ (Panassié Reference Panassié1975, p. 30). Located eventually was the work of René Guénon, a scholar of ‘traditionalism’ and the occult whose writing would give shape to the jazz critic's religiously conceived concept of historical process. In Orient et occident (1924), Guénon – one of many writers of the period influenced by Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918) – portrayed a moribund Western civilisation whose only hope of cultural and spiritual renewal lay in its potential assimilation of eastern metaphysics (see Gumplowicz Reference Gumplowicz2004; Sedgwick Reference Sedgwick2004, pp. 23–6). In one of many articles exploring black America's cultural corruption by what he called ‘le cancer blanc’, Panassié would recommend Orient et occident to his readers, and would in his late memoir quote liberally from 1927's La Crise du monde moderne (Panassié Reference Panassié1958; Reference Panassié1975, p. 131).
In that highly popular book, Guénon recapitulates his central ideas, railing against the notion of progress – a notion upon which, as I will show, Panassié would also come to be focused. That the world progresses for the better is an inversion of reality, Guénon writes, as truth lies at the beginning, with God and pure spirituality, and the longer truth inhabits the human world the more it is corrupted (Guénon Reference Guénon1999 [1927], pp. 15–16); the passage from the proto-capitalist disruption of the feudal system, through Renaissance humanism and the Reformation, showed the West beginning ‘to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth’.
Humanism was already the first form of what has subsequently become contemporary laicism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilisation has gone downwards step by step until it has ended by sinking to the level of the lowest elements in man and aiming at little more than satisfaction of the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim which is, in any case, quite illusory, as it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy. (Guénon Reference Guénon1999 [1927], p. 27)
Mark Sedgwick writes that this Platonic ladder, on which a godly ideal, once issued, descends a worldly order of increasingly inferior instantiations, was the cornerstone of 19th century ‘perennial philosophy’, the conflation (and what was perceived as the mutual confirmation) of pagan philosophy and Christian belief (Sedgwick Reference Sedgwick2004, pp. 23–5). Indeed, though fashionable at the time, decline narratives such as Guénon's and Spengler's had been a fixture of philosophy and theology since antiquity.Footnote 9 The stoics held that man had an original kinship with the laws of nature, and that these were debased by those of human society.Footnote 10 And man himself had been corrupted when the sensual (aisthesis) was preferred to the intellectual or moral (nous). Later transposed into Christian tradition – Eve taking the place of aisthesis, and Adam, nous – this narrative, in which every generation away from creation and every movement away from nature would further corrupt, constituted what George Boas identifies as a continuous tradition of anti-decadent primitivism spanning several millennia (see Boas, Reference Boas1997 [1948], p. 5).
A mapping of Panassié's early readings in tradition and decline onto his later critical work begins to show how the writer's primitivism was influenced by more than early-century negrophilie. Unlike that of the Paris negrophiles, after all, Panassié's primitive was not necessarily exotic: at first, Panassié imagined that contact with this incoming black American musical tradition would spur Europeans to revisit the original primitivism of their own art and culture.
In The Real Jazz, published in 1942 (the book appeared in the US in English translation three years before the publication of La Véritable musique du jazz, French presses having been otherwise occupied), Panassié argues that Western art music had become too complex, too elaborate in musical conception and performance: ‘[a]n excess of culture atrophies inspiration’, he writes, ‘and men crammed with culture tend too much to play tricks, to replace inspiration by lush technique under which one finds music stripped of real vitality’ (Panassié Reference Panassié and Williams1942, p. 6).Footnote 11 But it had not always been this way: inverting the commentary of earlier jazz-age sensationalists, Panassié contends that jazz had been something strangely intriguing not because it belonged to an unknown future, but to a forgotten past:
Far from representing ‘the nerve-wracking life of our century’, ‘the noise of the machine’ and other foolish theories which have been brought forth from time to time, jazz represents the reappearance of such a primitive musical conception as had arisen many centuries ago among the people of Europe and elsewhere. (Panassié Reference Panassié and Williams1942, pp. 7–8)
This thinking is indebted to Guénon, who had written that, before the humanist decline, the Western mentality had been something like that which could still in the 20th century be discovered in ‘oriental’ cultures – after all, the traditional outlook, in which higher truth issued downwards to man and through historical cycles, was universal, though it took regional forms. And though the traditional attitude had become dormant in the West, Guénon writes, ‘vestiges’ of it remained in the Western mind, and ‘by establishing contact with still living traditions’ within those cultures,
what is capable of being revived can be made to live again; and this, as we have so often pointed out, is one of the greatest services that the East can render the West. (Guénon Reference Guénon1999 [1927], pp. 33, 41, 36–7)
If, in the 1930s, Panassié had believed that a sleeping Western primitivism, musical and perhaps otherwise, could be awoken by a Louis Armstrong 78 – music not of Guénon's ‘East’, but supposedly born of a non-Euro-American primitive tradition nonetheless – then he hadn't been alone. Describing the electric hopes of that early contact with jazz in his first memoir, written in 1946, Panassié quotes with wistful approval an article of twelve years before, written by A. Ysaÿe, son of the violinist, in which the author had written that Armstrong's music was ‘a new point of departure, and art, our art, beautiful but worn out, must incline itself towards this power and this sincerity’ (cited in Panassié Reference Panassié1946, p. 123). In the 1946 book, Panassié recalls that at that time he had imagined it possible to convert the French public to the cause of this musico-traditional practice through his writing, but that soon it became clear that this project was ‘chimerical’; familiarity with jazz had not caused a culture-wide revelation (Panassié Reference Panassié1946, p. 182).
The opportunity for cultural renewal according to primitivist practice was missed. And by 1942, Panassié could see that the jazz he deemed ‘real’ was likely in permanent decline. ‘To be astonished would be naïve’, he writes, following the anciently ordained narrative, ‘for all primitive music is destined to lose its character little by little as it comes into contact with the civilised world’. Jazz's fall from innocence mirrored classical music's own, owed as it was to the same pernicious modernism: the music was ravaged by the modern forces of commercialism, giving rise to swing, and by the technical excesses inherent in any autonomously conceived art (Panassié Reference Panassié and Williams1942, pp. 228, 55). Even though it was written before the arrival of what Panassié would dismiss as the artified ‘pseudo-jazz’ bebop, The Real Jazz is a eulogy for the music it pretends to herald:
when jazz orchestras began to appear in theatres as ‘an attraction’, when the magazines and reviews began to speak of jazz as an art, and when white musicians, conscious of artistic theories, began long discussions on the nature of jazz seeking to establish its relationship to other musics, the Negro musician became increasingly aware of his own importance, or at least of the importance of his music. That music which had been up to then an amusement took on the aspect of a fine art. And the inevitable occurred. These musicians who had infallibly played in a perfect manner, and had never digressed for an instant from the pure tradition of their art as long as they blindly followed their instincts, now rejected their tradition and began to reason and to ‘improve’ their music. Of course they fell into innumerable errors. (Panassié Reference Panassié and Williams1942, p. 54)
To the now familiar decline narrative Panassié here adds a different idea, one of artistic tradition and its violation by ‘theory’. And this strand in Panassié's thinking is owed to another writer Panassié came to in his Bloy-inspired reading, arguably the most important: the philosopher Jacques Maritain.Footnote 12
Maritain, who himself credited Bloy for his religious conversion (and later recommended Guénon's first book for publication), had at the turn of the 20th century been a student socialist with a keen interest in Bergson. But, having been baptised, his philosophy became increasingly indebted to St Thomas Aquinas, his politics increasingly conservative; Maritain became a leading figure of neo-Scholasticism and, until the group's papal proscription in 1926, a marginal one in Action française. Andy Fry (Reference Fry2003) points out that Maritain's work was popular in interwar Parisian artistic circles, Cocteau and Stravinsky both acknowledging its influence, and it is that Catholic philosopher whom Panassié cites to give his judgements on artistic practice a primitivist historical grounding.Footnote 13
The work to which Panassié repeatedly turns is Art et scolastique (1920): he alludes to it repeatedly in Le Jazz hot (1934), quotes it a number of times in Douze années de jazz (1946) and mentions it in passing elsewhere (Panassié's long-term ‘collaborator’ Madeleine Gautier also submitted a partial crib of the work as a 1957 Bulletin du Hot-club article). In his book, Maritain lays out an aesthetic system shaped by Aquinas. Any valid, humanly created thing, the philosopher writes, imitates and honours the essential truth of God but, unlike God, is ultimately perishable, destined to be burned on the last day though the spirit that created it will be everlasting. Art practices are not ends in themselves, but devotional (Maritain Reference Maritain and Scanlan1949 [1920], p. 29).
Maritain writes that pre-Renaissance artistic creation was centred on ‘habit’, the tradition of the craftsman – its own kind of devotional practice as well as one directed towards God – passed down from generation to generation, temporarily embodied by one though the tradition was beyond body. This form of ‘practical intellect’ was carried out without conscious consultation of rules, construction of projects or self-designed aesthetic systems; the artist was nevertheless no ‘slave’ to his rules or tools, but made use of them to his own ends (Maritain Reference Maritain and Scanlan1949 [1920], pp. 11, 31). Here Maritain alludes to Marx's industrial worker, operated by his own machine, because in the modern world, ‘[f]ounded upon the two unnatural principles of the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful … imposing on man its puffing machinery and its speeding up of matter’, the artist is unmoored in purpose and thus technique (Maritain Reference Maritain and Scanlan1949 [1920], p. 30, emphasis in original). Maritain argues that since art had become an end in itself rather than an activity devoted to God, that purpose had been replaced by method, ‘a collection of self-adjusting formulae and processes’, which inevitably had led to mediocrity, such systems being open to all while that artistic ‘habit’, validated by both spiritual inspiration and traditional training, was achievable only by the gifted (Maritain Reference Maritain and Scanlan1949 [1920], pp. 32–3).
It was the reading of Maritain that enabled Panassié to conclude that ‘in music primitive man generally has greater talent than civilised man’ (Panassié Reference Panassié and Williams1942, p. 6). Yet, as far as jazz was concerned, such musical talent was neither the property of nor reliant upon individual geniuses (like those European composers represented by their marble busts): Panassié saw jazz's Maritanian artistic tradition as guaranteed by the oral instruction and jam session practicality that characterised its pedagogy (and in which, echoing Maritain's own artistic case study, Panassié saw analogies to ‘the guild apprenticeship which existed long ago in France’ (Panassié Reference Panassié, Dowling and Dowling1936 [1934], p. 280). ‘What characterised the extraordinary creative flow produced by the Negroes at the beginning of the twentieth century’, Panassié asserts in The Real Jazz, was that, ‘untarnished by the slightest design’, it represented ‘the spontaneous urge of a whole people’ (Panassié Reference Panassié and Williams1942, pp. 6–7). Before its inevitable fall, jazz had been the product of a Herderian folk applying a Maritainian artistic habit, a music formed not of artist-contrived rules but of an authorless tradition maintained and perpetuated by all concerned.Footnote 14
The Noble Savage
The uncultured but sublime black musician, only corrupted when brought into contact with white society, artistic ‘theories’ and ideas of ‘progress’: it is unsurprising that Panassié's critics have accused him of grounding his idea of jazz history in the Noble Savage myth. But unsurprising too is Panassié's adoption of the figure, as something similar can be found in use by numerous mediaeval commentators wishing to damn their own West European society's impurity by way of comparison with unexpectedly virtuous Others – sometimes Goths, sometimes the Brahmins of India (Boas Reference Boas1997 [1948], pp. 129–53). Ter Ellingson has traced the modern progress of the trope of the Noble Savage in European thought. In the 17th century the French Baron de Lahontan, exiled in the Americas having been stripped of his estate by dint of political corruption, would employ the figure in his writings on the New World: ‘in denouncing the corruption of his own society’, Ellingson writes, ‘Lahontan seizes on the character of the Indians as a rhetorical counterfoil’ (Ellingson Reference Ellingson2001, p. 66). A century later, Rousseau – generally, though incorrectly, credited as the idea's inventor – invoked the Noble Savage in order to denormalise and critique the inequalities of the philosophe's own, supposedly ‘civilised’ French society.Footnote 15 Although he would never have employed the term, Panassié was only the latest European – indeed, only the latest Frenchman looking towards the Americas – to use the idea of the Noble Savage to help define a political project at home.
And the role to be played by Panassié's imaginary, uncorrupted black jazz musician was one constructed in opposition to and, as the historian of early French jazz Denis-Constant Martin has observed, ‘outside modernity’. For Panassié, Martin writes, le Noir ‘incarnates a model of natural purity and spontaneity’ (Martin Reference Martin2001, p. 269), the condition of childhood. Martin lists the infantilising adjectives that Panassié is apt to attach, by way of praise, to black musicians he has encountered: where whites are tense, worried and boring, blacks are cordial, stimulated, natural, candid, gay, nonchalant, light-hearted, happy-go-lucky, pure, gifted with vitality, at ease, full of joie de vivre … are childlike [enfants], pleasant [bons enfants] (Martin Reference Martin2001, p. 268). In Panassié's late memoir, readers are assured that Louis Armstrong could act excitedly ‘like a child’, and then, a few pages later, that Django Reinhardt – not black, but a ‘natural’ musician nevertheless – ‘loved games like a kid’. ‘He was a primitive, in the good sense of the word. He was a gypsy, he had their characteristics’ (Panassié Reference Panassié1975, pp. 199, 210–11).
The infantilising of Others, whether to praise or to ridicule, is a familiar kind of racism. But it is not to excuse this racism to note that, once more, Panassié's childlike primitive is born of old philosophy as much as contemporary condescension. For mediaeval Christian ‘primitivists’ (as for Panassié), moral and cultural purity always came from a closer proximity to God and godliness, that is, to man in his original condition before the fall; the nature of this original condition had been a perennial subject of Christian theological dispute, religious theorists needing to explain the pre-fall presence of temptation in Adam, who had been created in God's image and had therefore, supposedly, been wholly good. In this debate – one which clearly pre-figures the Enlightenment's Noble Savage discourse – the Christian primitivists commonly argued that Adam's lust for knowledge was no sin, his godliness not contradicted, since before the fall he had been childlike, innocent, therefore beyond reproach. George Boas writes that for a theologian like Father Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215), this innocent Adam remained the ideal of godly man, and in representing him as such, Clement
emphasise[d] any biblical passages which compare the ideal man with a child. John, xxi, 4, 5; Matthew, xix, 14; vii, 3; xxi, 16; Psalms, vii, 3 and the like, all seem to play upon the innocence and wisdom of infancy. (Boas Reference Boas1997 [1948], p. 25)Footnote 16
Boas suggests that the pre-mediaeval assertion that childlike innocence was man's ideal paves the way for Christian anti-intellectualism, ‘the docta ignorantia’, which phrase could well title Panassié's collected works (Boas Reference Boas1997 [1948], p. 25). According to this primitivism, Boas continues,
The true Christian … in becoming like a child, returns to the state of Adam before the Fall. This state is ‘communion’ with Heaven, which may be interpreted as ‘direct knowledge’ of Heaven, the kind of knowledge which a child in the Platonic myth of reminiscence might be supposed to have. (Boas Reference Boas1997 [1948], p. 25)
A 1936 Jazz hot piece by Panassié's friend Georges Herment, ‘Hot – sixième sense’, makes extended use of this Platonic idea (and, elsewhere, of the ancient Greek image of the body as cosmos). ‘Hot jazz gives us yet another proof of the existence of the Unknown’, he writes.
How can we acquire and strengthen this feeling for Hot music? It is certain that everyone has it within him, more or less atrophied by the ideas of Art, Beauty and Culture which people force themselves to inculcate us with from our birth onwards. Once purified of all these atavisms, of all these bad habits, this lost sense, however little of it remains, however meagre it may be, will reappear. Hot music is childhood. (Herment Reference Herment1936, p. 12)
Ethnography and the supernatural swing
Before anything, it was this direct and non-intellectual knowledge of and communion with heaven that the profoundly committed Catholic Panassié sought. Of course, such contact was not a thing privy to les Noirs alone, but for Panassié black American jazz could certainly give one access to such a state of being: as much was demonstrated by an experience the critic describes in writing about the five-month trip he made to New York in 1938–1939. Panassié's work was already saturated with religious language and thinking prior to this visit, and even before his career had got under way the Documents writers had interpreted jazz as holy in light of the ethnographic; ‘jazz today represents the only sacred music’, wrote Leiris (cited in Lane Reference Lane2007, p. 107). But Panassié's was a personal revelation rather than an academic observation, one that joined jazz and the Godly by way of an original innocence.
At half-past midnight on January 10, 1939, Panassié and his party sat in the Savoy Ballroom, watching as Chick Webb and his band took the stage. Panassié observed the drummer-bandleader closely as the music began.
During the first chorus – the exposition of the theme – he stayed inside himself. But from the moment the orchestra attacked the second chorus, he set about playing with an incredible power, establishing a tempo that exploded from the cymbal. My breathing stopped. Hardly had he started to play in this way than enthusiastic ‘oohs’ escaped the mouths of Milton [Mezz Mezzrow] and les Noirs sitting around me. It wasn't a banal cry of satisfaction. It was a cry literally snatched from them by the intensity of Chick Webb's swing. The reaction of these people instantaneously augmented the force of my own. By the way they shouted, by the moments at which they shouted, I glimpsed that Webb's playing gripped me exactly as it did them, and the simultaneity of these reactions made them grow in intensity without cease. Here we were no longer concerned with the ‘refined artistic emotion’ such as conceived by more or less degenerate intellectuals, no more than by the ‘sensual music’ babbled on about by other cretins even more degenerate, it was a question of an inexplicable joy, an empty joy that left room for no image, no reflection of the spirit; it was a question of a jouissance as simple as that of a plant in front of the sun. I felt that I was about to reach for the first time the heart of this music and, neglecting at last every secondary element (colour, style, sonority, etc.), to meet the essential, the essential that could never be expressed, explained: one lives it or one doesn't live it, and that's it. I suddenly understood, with extraordinary acuity, the irremediable imperfection of intellectual knowledge … intellectual arguments are powerless to give faith to those who haven't received the grace. The love of God, the only way by which to know Him, is the supernatural equivalent of that which I had just experienced in front of Chick Webb. And I understood at the same time that I could never again take pleasure in listening to musicians, or to discs that I placed very highly, that had everything except the essential, just as a saint possessed by the love of God is dead to the joys of the world. Love, the loving knowledge that leaves room for nothing else, this is where man goes to the end of himself; nothing else counts besides this. (Panassié Reference Panassié1947, p. 133)
‘An empty joy that left room for no image’, a swung ascent up the Platonic ladder to pure knowledge and pure godliness, non-intellectual knowledge recovered – and all this by the grace of a black, ‘hunchbacked’ drummer, a double outsider whose supposed wretchedness would in biblical tradition almost guarantee his proximity to the sacred.Footnote 17
The Savoy revelation allowed Panassié to conceptualise a social swing that had been unknown to him in Paris, listening to records or fish-out-of-water visiting players. This swing, Panassié writes now, is a current of energy, a perfect equilibrium that is achieved through a communal microadjustment of tempo between musicians – this community not excluding listeners and dancers – and as such is a ‘mysterious quality’ contingent upon the coincidence of numerous factors: skill, luck, environment.Footnote 18
An excellent orchestra can play for an hour, two hours, even a whole evening without establishing this current. Then, suddenly, one of the musicians in a blow of inspiration might put himself to play in a really enthusiastic manner so that the rest of the group will feel whipped along, and will start playing without constraint, with ease, an abandon such that the music seems to pour itself, filling the listener with total satisfaction, giving wings to dancers. (Panassié Reference Panassié1944, p. 47)
This is what it means, the critic writes, to be (according to the ‘American argot’) ‘in the groove’ (Panassié Reference Panassié1944, p. 46). Groove is of primary importance in music as in life, because ‘this ideal tempo is no different from the interior and exterior rhythm upon which depends the harmony of the world itself’; a healthy heart beats in time, an untrammelled mind understands everything it studies with ease. So when jazz musicians attain this transcendental swing, they achieve ‘participation in the rhythm and the order of the universe’ (Panassié Reference Panassié1944, p. 48).Footnote 19 Once more Panassié could consolidate his religious and music-theoretical ideas, cementing the cosmic order, linking Harlem to the heavens, swing time to eternity.
This would in itself be unremarkable if, by positioning jazz in the terms of an old, origin-seeking religious primitivism – as distinct from a racialist-cultural primitivism – Panassié hadn't also begun to arrive at a conceptualisation of swing that corresponded with the testimonies, written or gestural, given by many of his black American subjects. But to an extent he had: in the passage cited above, Panassié notes how he was checking his responses to Chick Webb's swing against the ‘authentic’, intra-group responses of black audience members; even if the Godliness is finally an embellishment of Panassié's own, the affective, socially realised description he had given of swing certainly chimes with practitioners' verbalisations – though not always those of critics or scholars – made throughout jazz's history.Footnote 20
Four years earlier, in Le Jazz hot, Panassié had warned against the ‘common error’ of judging jazz according to the principles of classical music (Panassié Reference Panassié, Dowling and Dowling1936 [1934], p. 284). But now in New York – even if he'd been led there by a primitivist fantasy – the critic had begun to enter into something like the contemporary anthropological ‘native's point of view’, had begun to clarify for himself (and his European readers) an understanding of swing that had until that point been clouded by formalist approximation or adjectival mess. ‘I realised how poor my work had been up to that time’, Panassié admits while reflecting on the experience in 1947.
When writing in my book or my articles that, for example, such a musician didn't have the defects of another who overloaded his solos with notes, I had tried to form people's taste, but that which we can call ‘external taste’ … [However], what is important, before everything else, is that the musician is in the groove, and a musician that makes a few rapid strokes in his solos and is in the groove is worth more than one who constructs his phrases in a manner more perfect – apparently – but is not in the groove. This is what most jazz fans, except those who are black, only come to understand with difficulty and which I myself took long to learn. And yet all of jazz is in this. (Panassié Reference Panassié1947, pp. 135–6)
Born in the field was a new understanding of the limits of the taxonomic critical project, as part of which Panassié – despite his readiness to identify and to validate what he perceived as inherently black playing styles – had necessarily assessed the music according to the rather European, rather earth-bound and rather anti-social aesthetic criteria of refinement, balance and control.Footnote 21 The political impulse behind it was still foreign; the religious language in which it was swaddled was still primitivist. Yet Panassié's attempt to strip his responses to jazz of the last vestiges of an aesthetics he now saw as European, Romantic–modernist, corrupt yet still normative, had given rise to an undeveloped but identifiably ‘anthropological’ explanation of the music's phenomenological power, the likes of which would not be attempted by music scholars for several decades (see Keil Reference Keil1966; also Berliner Reference Berliner1994 and Monson Reference Monson1996, discussed below).
To be sure, Panassié would henceforth rely upon this supposed access to local knowledge in his attempts to refute critical opponents; although the critic would continually protest that he was only retransmitting what he had learnt ‘à l’école des Noirs', a constant feature of the critic's later work lies in its revoicing of Panassié's own ideological preoccupations through the words of leadingly questioned and selectively quoted black musicians.Footnote 22
But however problematic its application, the theoretical transferral of critical authority – from a ‘European’ to a ‘black’ aesthetic – still formed an important moment, one not recognised as such in jazz historiography. In his piece on French reports of music-inspired trips to pre-WWII America (made by Darius Milhaud and Jean Wiener as well as Panassié), Denis-Constant Martin writes that ‘the voyage to America … doesn't radically modify either the conception of jazz, or the perception of les Noirs. On the contrary, it seems the voyage is relied upon to legitimate and reinforce these conceptions’ (Martin Reference Martin2001, p. 265). Panassié's account of his experience in front of Chick Webb shows how incomplete an assessment this is, but it is the waywardness of another of Martin's charges that tears open the fissure between a confused historical encounter and its rather too certain contemporary assessment – and between historical jazz journalism and contemporary jazz scholarship. Martin condemns Panassié and his European colleagues who, fascinated by jazz, were constructing a historical, critical, discographical and even ethnographic literature around what was otherwise so much culture industry detritus; their efforts, he writes, were ‘pedantic’ attempts to ‘define and classify’. The method of tedious bureaucrats or sinister taxonomists, this ‘jazzologie’
[a]lways worked at a distance. It didn't envisage, unlike anthropology or ethnomusicology, the surveying of the terrain, it didn't reflect on its means and methods, and in consequence it was forever stuck in a rut. (Martin Reference Martin2001, p. 264)Footnote 23
The charge of ethnocentricity is made in ahistorical terms, and as such is entirely disingenuous: the reflexive ethnomusicology that Martin identifies as proper practice hardly existed when Panassié made his trip, and would anyway long ignore jazz and many other African American forms; likewise anthropology, which before Melville Herskovits' 1940s work (and often after it) paid little attention to African America.Footnote 24 Perhaps figures like the Lomaxes suggest that scattered scholars were beginning to take an ethnographic interest in African American music, but none of these were European. And perhaps Martin is right to suggest that, when transatlantic voyages were finally taken, it was in search of an idealised African American form. But so did contemporary black writers on black culture like Zora Neale Hurston, informed by the same originary myths, often set out to locate and record an authentic black voice uncontaminated by contact with ‘white’ society (see Hamilton Reference Hamilton2007b, pp. 10–15).
Searching for a fantasy blackness or not, it was not until the late 1960s that a few European ethnographers and anthropologists would begin to be drawn to study African American lives; if previous generations of scholars had not made the trip (literal or figurative) to study the cultural forms of black America, to his great credit Panassié the jazz journalist did.Footnote 25 In this piece's final section I will explore the uses to which Panassié put his ‘ethnographic’ insights.
Anti- and postmodernism
In 1947 Panassié's Hot-club de France was beset by a schism, its chapters divided over attitudes towards the new bebop. Led by Panassié's old friend Charles Delaunay, the pro-bebop faction reorganised as the Fédération des Hot clubs français, retaining publication of Jazz hot, while Panassié retired to the provinces, leading the Hot Club loyalists from Montauban. As Panassié's ‘real jazz’ fell out of widespread popularity and critical favour, through the 1950s and 1960s the writer – occasional books aside, his work now generally confined to the Bulletin du Hot-club de France, a monthly periodical he authored largely himself – was reduced to the unending restatement of ideas outlined in the period following the 1938 New York trip, and to the continual rebutting of those critics, almost all of whom were of the left, writing in support of a detested but now-hegemonic modern jazz.
In the wake of bebop, and jazz's ongoing rise in ‘artistic’ prestige, a number of the young generation of French jazz critics – writers often university educated, some in the arts, some in social sciences – had begun to adopt the kinds of critical vocabularies then in use throughout European modernist art worlds. Yet, as we have seen, Panassié's attempt to inhabit the kind of primitivist, pre-intellectual interpretive world in which he supposed jazz musicians worked meant that he had long before announced his eagerness to resign European-style critical terms of reference. Panassié's contact with jazz in situ had allowed him a glimpse of an entirely different musical-cultural ontology, one that he felt, evidently with some justification, reflected an outlook more Noir than modernist European. Indeed, no matter how partial, delusional or subsequently misused this knowledge was, the critic's self-advertised willingness to devolve his own methods of musical judgement and being to those of les Noirs, and his refusal of the modernist project in general and in jazz writing specifically, means that some of his anti-modernist positions can now seem surprisingly – perhaps disturbingly – like anticipations of postmodern doxa: Panassié's racialist obsession with black particularism modulates into what could be called a foregrounded cultural difference; his primitivist rejection of progress can read hardly any differently from, say, a problematising of Enlightenment teleology. In closing, then, I want to examine how Panassié's journalistic work often not only anticipates issues that would be absent from more academic jazz discourse for some years, but also how his methods, despite being born of a primitivism and racialism that many readers would today find highly distasteful, nevertheless sometimes better anticipate contemporary ‘liberal’ scholarly concerns than do those of his left-leaning, mid-century jazz critic successors.
Attempts to describe jazz by way of a traditional Western musical vocabulary litter pre-war, Panassié-supervised issues of Jazz hot. However, the increasing technical complexity and ‘serious’ status of jazz after bebop meant that a new generation of critics both European and American were, in the 1950s, about to subject the music to ever more rigorous analysis in the contemporary formalist manner (as John Gennari [2006] has shown, before jazz's late-century entry to the academy much of the scholarly work in jazz, in Europe and America, was by necessity done in journalistic contexts).Footnote 26 André Hodeir's analysis of swing, collected in his 1954 Hommes et problèmes du jazz (translated as Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence) is built, seemingly intentionally, from a language that would not have been out of place on the pages of the serialist journal Die Reihe: ‘[t]he rhythmic phenomenon’, Hodeir argues, ‘is not simply a question of time values; the succession of attacks and intensities is also an important part of it’; the critic writes of swing's reliance upon, among other things, conjunctions of ‘infrastructure’ (‘tempo and accentuation’) and ‘superstructure’ (‘the rhythmic construction of the phrase conceived in terms of the infrastructure’). And when Hodeir introduces to this theoretical edifice swing's characteristic ‘relaxation’, his quasi-scientific vocabulary is joined by quasi-scientific racialism:
It is the American Negroes who created jazz; and the number of them who are capable of complete neuro-muscular relaxation is very remarkable. This characteristic has been demonstrated in track and field events, where colored sprinters' and jumpers' ability to relax is regarded as the principle reason for their speed and agility. (Hodeir, Reference Hodeir and Noakes1956 [1954], p. 207)
Hodeir's medium was journalism, his projected audience the same interested amateurs to whom Panassié had appealed and yet, racial particularism aside, differences in the two critics' framing of swing could hardly be more marked.Footnote 27 The ‘review of the press’ pages of each edition of the Bulletin du Hot-club de France carried Panassié's sneering responses to scattered instances of modernist vocabulary in use by those he termed the ‘conformist’ modern jazz critics. But his fullest expression against modernist, formalist modes of jazz analysis, much of it recycled from his Bulletin articles, was made in La Bataille du jazz (1965), in which Panassié, while citing a number of critics writing for journals like Jazz hot and Jazz magazine, shows particular distaste for Hodeir's modernist vocabulary of ‘disjunction’, ‘conjunction’, ‘discontinuity’. This language he counterposes to the
Entire metaphorical language [langage imagé] [which] has been created among jazzmen so they may speak about their music in an adequate fashion. Thus, they say of a pianist, a drummer, a rhythm section that accompanies well a soloist, in an inspiring way, that they ‘feed’ the soloist. In listening to a musician ‘swing’ some notes in an expressive way, they cry ‘talkin’ talkin'!' … Jazzmen talk about a good interpretation (because in jazz what is appreciated above all else is the way that it is played), of an arranger of talent (because he composes excellent music in arranging a piece in his style) … The conformist critics, for their part, express themselves on jazz in the same manner as on European music. Writing record reviews, they speak of a remarkable ‘work’, an original ‘author’, and go as far as to rave over the most beautiful pages of a piece! (Panassié Reference Panassié1965, pp. 103–4)
The amateur ethnographer was quick to embrace what was in the mid-century becoming known as the emic description of local concepts: Panassié was ahead of his time in recognising that a textualist, Romantic–modernist analytical and descriptive vocabulary could also obscure that which it described, and that access to the world of experience would be shaped by the observer's linguistic points of entry.
Whether made in journalistic or academic contexts, a development of Panassié's acknowledgement that ‘Western’ music descriptors often could not fully represent the production and experience of African American music would have to wait (though art music-style formalist investigations continued unabated). It was not until the 1990s that concentrated scholarly critiques of the problem began to appear in earnest, authored especially by Paul Berliner and Ingrid Monson, whose ethnomusicological investigations privilege jazz performers' emic analyses and descriptions centring on exactly the kinds of intra-ensemble cohesion that Panassié championed fifty years before; such work in part announced the discipline's ‘post-modern turn’, and these ethnographically informed approaches are now common in all areas of jazz scholarship.Footnote 28
By the mid-1960s Panassié was calling those critics and promoters of modern jazz who now controlled discourse and activities around the music the ‘progressivist jazz mafia’, and he made explicit associations between these and the progressives then involved with the Vatican II reforms of the Catholic Church.Footnote 29 (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Panassié became a vocal campaigner against those reforms and a delegate to Una Voce, an organisation campaigning for the reinstitution of the Latin mass).Footnote 30 In a chapter of La Bataille du jazz titled ‘Les Noirs, the racists and the progressivists’, Panassié hints at equivalences between ‘progressivism’, evolutionary theory and racism – Europe had only recently seen the consequences of those spurious sciences that claimed Darwin for their racist purposes – and between progressive, evolutionary theories of art and an attendant racism therein.
It is true that in contemporary ‘modernist’ French jazz criticism, evolution, renewal and progress were constant watchwords. (I have explored this in detail elsewhere.)Footnote 31 And Panassié was right to identify among contemporary French critics a tendency to regard jazz after bebop as a music more worthy of their attention simply because it was more sophisticated according to the art music-derived terms they understood as legitimate.Footnote 32 The primitivist Panassié had written critically on black musicians he believed corrupted by classical training, and Charles Delaunay published a response: ‘[i]t's evidently strongly damnable’, Delaunay wrote, ‘that a musician would look for instruction: the Noir should be content with his own incultivation’. Panassié seized upon Delaunay's faux pas.
All the progressivists are here. In professing their anti-racism, they show the same prejudice that the racists declare: in taking white culture as the universal standard of all civilisation they pretend to bring the entire world in line with the white man's mode of living, to render people of colour slaves of ‘continual progress’ according to the white conception. (Panassié Reference Panassié1965, p. 23)Footnote 33
Following the same reasoning, Panassié likened the modernist French critical obsession with the evolution of jazz style – from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ – to what he would later call an ‘intellectual colonialism’ (Panassié Reference Panassié1975, p. 231).
The arguments Panassié marshalled against the modernists were not necessarily unique to French jazz discourse; Bernard Gendron (Reference Gendron and Gabbard1995) has shown how similar lines of ideological demarcation were being drawn, and discursive tropes being drawn upon, in the confrontation between ‘moldy fig’ revivalists (Rudi Blesh) and modernists (Leonard Feather) in the 1940s US jazz press. But while each side in that American debate allocated the other some epithetic relationship with the contemporary political left or right, neither traditionalist nor modernist cliques were simply aligned with one or the other ideology (when they were, Panassié's favoured style was often championed by the Marxists). And all lacked the religious impulse from which Panassié's dismissal of evolution and progress drew its very singular strength.Footnote 34
It is this dismissal which, despite the unfashionable politics, can seem to lend Panassié's writing a surprisingly contemporary air: here is a rejection of European cultural forms as the ‘universal standard’; here is an identification of hidden racist assumptions in an apparently liberal discourse; here, of course, is a rejection of the grand narrative of progress, that Enlightenment ideal that had in the decades before Panassié's birth been developed by Comte, Marx and many others, their 19th century visions all rudely interrupted by the 20th. Placed alongside those New York experiences, in which Panassié the jazz ‘ethnographer’ found his understanding of music and self transformed by the encounter with Otherness – his chosen modes of linguistic access to that experience transforming in consequence – it is tempting to read Panassié's anti-modernism as postmodernism in embryo.Footnote 35
But whenever Panassié's views are removed from a contemporary norm they are harking back, not looking forward. Since the stoics, the decline narratives of theological and cultural primitivists had been opposed by the anti-primitivists' narrative of progress, the latter eventually becoming, as Guénon had written, the ‘intangible, indisputable dogma’ of the modern West. The modernist critics' adherence to the progressive idea, one which rendered the earlier jazz necessarily of lesser interest, was for Panassié just another articulation of a decadent philosophy that perversely celebrated what was in fact the journey away from primitive purity (Guénon Reference Guénon1999 [1927], p. 8). Aside from Guénon, Bloy and Maritain also rave against the notion in their writings, and, ranting against progress and reform in La Bataille and Monsieur Jazz, it is these writers, along with Jesus Christ, Pope Pius X, Thomas More, St Bernard, Simone Weil, CS Lewis and, somewhat out on his own, Baudelaire, that Panassié cites as his anti-progressive authorities.
Conclusions
Removed by geography and historical circumstance from the viscerality of the everyday lived encounter between white and black, the French critic could luxuriate in a theoretical, textual, auditory relationship with fantasy primitives. But Panassié's primitivism was not one simply comparable with the negrophilie of his early Paris milieu, additionally informed as it was by a long cultural heritage – and by cultural insecurities – quite distant from modern European encounters with blackness. And more than any negrophilie, this primitivism signified not just a condescending pleasure taken in the gifts of a simple Other, but also a loathing for the same: Panassié borrowed from Bloy, Guénon, Maritain and their informing primitivist sources a decline narrative in which ‘black’ jazz was sometimes simply employed as the organon of an argument directed at ‘white’ society.
It was nevertheless a bargain always made to that society's advantage. By ascribing the Other a depersonalised, limiting set of cultural characteristics – no matter whether positively or negatively portrayed – Panassié's primitivism rendered the black unknown ‘known’, exalting it as ideal so as to neutralise the kinds of instability it engendered among most of the critic's rightist confreres.Footnote 36 That the fictive, desirable Noir might have had the upper hand in this worldview of Panassié's does not change the fact that the Noir was being used, imagined, for the benefit and definition of a European self.
Still, that is no less an interesting proposition for historians than a body of work that would seek to engage African American music according to its ‘own terms’ (perhaps also characterised, imagined). Indeed, I have argued that Panassié's work begins to entertain this kind of task as well: in its rejection of so many normative European artistic values, Panassié's politicised primitivism somehow leads the critic further than any of his contemporaries towards alignment with a putative black American musical ontology. But I am in no way suggesting that this demonstrates how unproblematically productive attitudes towards race can, after all, emerge from the right, as whatever useful conclusions Panassié arrives at are realised by an increase, not a decrease, in the employment of reactionary and essentialist thinking. I am hardly any keener to argue that the proximity in Panassié's work of anti-modern and proto-postmodern thinking, the two bound by the veneration of a fetishised difference, identifies one dubious scheme as the twin of another.
It is, however, intriguing to ponder what might be our response when those working from a set of racialist presumptions arrive at what would otherwise be regarded as potentially liberating insights, and what use contemporary readers might make of such tainted knowledge. Certainly, in failing to make anything of Panassié's writing beyond the dutiful noting of his adherence to Noble Savage ideas and conservative disavowal of bebop, jazz scholars contribute to a wider tendency in the discipline, one that often condescends to speak from an illusory contemporary enlightenment to race-insensitive historical poor relations and which, in the name of liberal moralising, ignores the complexities and intersections of a historical array of attitudes towards Otherness. When Panassié's work is situated in its proper intellectual and cultural contexts, the true importance of the critic's primitivism emerges: rather than a simply misguided, racialist oddity, Panassié becomes another player in the post-Enlightenment European contest of self-definition and understanding – one taking place across modernisms, anti-modernisms and postmodernisms – in the face of what is Other.
The primitivist impulse of this critic's work is often ascribed to a moment in history which, while regrettable, was at least brief. But this is not an issue that easily goes away, because such primitivism does not arrive in Europe with the cakewalk, Picasso's painting, or James Reese Europe's band: instead it is an eternally recurring theme, passingly given voice in Panassié's writing on jazz.
