As it grows, every field of cultural production seems to manifest a certain anxiety about its closing frontier, even music. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill was tormented by the idea that, given its limited number of tones, music would eventually exhaust its possibilities.Footnote ¹ His anxiety about diminishing space for newness and creativity resonated with his own demons and drove him to a nervous breakdown; yet as a new century arrived, music was still expanding its creative frontiers. One of the reasons for this was the emergence of a hybrid African-American music that came to be called jazz, and which defined the first half of the twentieth century as it expanded its influence to the far reaches of the globe. Its impact on French musical culture, as four new books on jazz in France remind us, was profound. By the 1950s, however, French critics were worrying aloud that the frontier for freedom and innovation in jazz was closing. Fearing its end, they began asking the rhetorical question ‘le jazz, est-il encore possible?’ For some, the emergence of a repertoire, of a body of shared tradition based on variations of ‘standards’ as a mode of jazz performance, meant that the story of jazz, understood as a musical field that renewed itself by expanding its boundaries and providing the necessary conditions for individual freedom, had come to an end.

Four score years and ‘Some of These Days’ later, culture critics looking at written accounts of the crescendo and decrescendo of jazz in France might ask a similar question. Has the frontier of retrospective writing about jazz in France begun to close? Has the age of discovery been replaced by an age of retelling and revising the standard repertoire of what is known? After reading four new books about jazz in France by Andy Fry, Jeremy F. Lane, Deborah Mawer, and Tom Perchard, one can say with certainty that such anxiety in both cases is misplaced: repertoire and variations on standards can still yield tremendous innovation and insight. There are still many stories to be told.

To be sure, anyone working in this field over the last couple of decades might notice a certain similarity among books on jazz or African-American artists in France.Footnote ² As in many jazz performances, the authors often begin with a vamp section (introduction) before they play their head theme (thesis). Like jazz musicians vamping, authors begin by working through the literature to establish resonance or dissonance with the existing tradition. Now, part of this is convention, as writers honour those who came before them and acknowledge their work in the field, but it also has an aesthetic function. The way authors do this – their treatment of the tradition and their framing of the field – establishes the rhythm, the thematic resonances, and the feel of the story that is about to unfold. As is the case in jazz standards, these intro sections reveal both markers of continuity and discontinuity, because the choices of emphasis, of concordance, and of discordance with the stories that have come before are ways to situate both the rhetor and the auditor. Though the vamp and the head theme index the standard repertoire, there is still a lot of space for improvisation and manoeuvring, just as playing over blues, or rhythm changes, or even John Coltrane's famous ‘Giant Steps’ progression situates the jazz musician as someone who knows the tradition, and yet still can have something to say.

So, for instance, in Jeremy Lane's vamp and head, he frames the tradition of acculturation or assimilation of jazz into French culture as a narrative that limits the richness of the story, so he aims to expand the frontier. There are two important concepts that help tie this book together. The first is ‘machine-age imperialism’, the historical context used to situate the sets of cultural forces, the ‘disruptive dynamism’, pulling at French culture during much of the twentieth century. This is an extremely helpful lens through which to refract what French-speaking intellectuals – even those who didn't consider themselves French – had to say about jazz, which indeed was as disruptive as the social and economic changes that accompanied its arrival. Jazz, as Lane sees it, became a powerful symbol of the turbulent times. ‘Understood as corresponding to a historically specific regime of accumulation, machine-age imperialism created the enabling conditions for jazz's emergence as a musical form and for its dissemination into Western Europe from the end of the First World War onward’ (29). It also set the conditions for how jazz was received, understood, and written about. Although this claim resonates with what writers such as Ludovic Tournès and Jeffrey Jackson have said about jazz and the conditions for its reception, and with what most writers have said about French culture in general during this period, it is a wonderfully phrased head theme.

Where Lane sees too much sameness in the field, he aims to clear some space for his iterations by establishing a more inclusive harmonic system, using substitution chords, so to speak, that would allow for different kinds of voices. He does this by evoking and adopting Derrida's concepts of ‘iterability’ and ‘difference’, and expanding the borders of the imaginary France beyond its normative hexagonal geography. Though this theme might not surprise anyone in literary studies over the last forty years, it is, he argues, an innovation in the field of writing about jazz in France. Based on this shift, he makes a strong case for including voices – such as the Nardal Sisters and Léopold Senghor – who come from outside the hexagon and who had much to say about jazz. Yet alongside this gesture toward inclusion, he also clears space within the discourse through rhetorical exclusion and negation, seeking to dismiss other scholars’ voices whose version of the story differs from his. This is an aesthetic overtone that emanates from his Derridean modals; not everyone can play along with such giant steps.

Deborah Mawer's French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck utilizes a mode of storytelling commensurate with her shift in perspective. A musicologist by training, she focuses on how the relationship between ‘French music’ (by which, she explains, she means what might be called ‘classical’ or ‘concert’ music [13]) and jazz throughout the twentieth century ended up changing both. Like Lane, she wants to destabilize the fixed notion of what constitutes ‘French music’ and jazz by blurring the distinctions between them, but she goes about doing it differently. Her vamp section indexes a range of authors in the field, but she establishes a space for her own voice by shifting the focus to another set of authors who, like her, have helped listeners unpack what they are listening to in jazz: musicologists such as Barry Kernfeld and music historians such as Ted Gioia, who write about the structure and history of the music more than the French cultural context.

One of the driving forces behind changes within musical culture in France and America, Mawer argues, is the interaction and cross-fertilization between French concert music and jazz. She seems to say that each was using the other to deal with its own anxiety about stagnation and closing frontiers, each finding inspiration in the other. Her chapters follow this head theme throughout as she performs a series of close descriptions of both French classical composers and jazz musicians who drew inspiration from the other. Though this blurring at times can take away from the cause–effect framework of the book, it is more in line with what we know about musicians, who don't seem to care much about where their influences come from and care less about the categories critics employ; what matters are the sounds that inspire their work.

In Paris Blues: African American Music and French Culture, 1920–1960, Andy Fry uses a different technique to clear room for his story to unfold, blending archival material that focuses on African-American musicians in France and a mode of story telling that frames each chapter with thematic examples drawn from films that relate to and echo with the case studies presented in the chapters. This form of literary montage creates very interesting and engaging dissonances, clearing space for unlikely echoes and resonances. The technique is especially useful since Fry touches on examples of phenomena that have indeed become part of the standard scholarly repertoire, such as Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre.

For example, Fry frames his chapter on Baker with a reading of Spike Lee's film Bamboozled. Whereas more historicist writers might shy away from this type of frame, Fry leads the reader through the many ambiguities raised by Bamboozled and leaves these floating in the imagination, where they lend heft and depth to his muscular reading of Josephine Baker's ambiguous representations. These episodes serve as head themes for each chapter – which he returns to at the close of each – and the musicality of the technique yields great results. Fry is by no means turning away from history or ignoring the archives. His reading of the revue Blackbirds of 1926, for example, is grounded in rich historical detail, including analysis of sheet music and reviews that haven't been treated by previous scholars. His section on the staging and rewriting of Offenbach's La Créole as a star vehicle for Baker – as the reader thinks about Bamboozled – is as innovative as it is instructive.

Tom Perchard's After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France in some ways offers the most familiar vamp section of the four books for those who know the field. He pays tribute where he should, and breaks up some of the assumptions characteristic of the familiar storylines, such as the myth of acculturation which many writers – myself included – have employed as a plot device. Yet though the vamp may index the repertoire, there is nothing pedestrian about his lyrical analysis. He expands the frontier partly by shifting the time period and dealing with contemporary jazz phenomena that extend beyond the interwar years to the present. His head theme – his thesis – is that one sees a kind of repetition compulsion manifesting itself again and again as French culture critics sought for and promoted a musician who would be the next Django Reinhardt. They dreamed of someone who could keep up with and improve upon the innovations in the musical form, like Django did with Bebop, and yet still make it sound French. The theme is returned to and amplified throughout the chapters by way of a rich and musical prose. His ability to deal with the nuances of cultural and intellectual history while also making sense of music and how it manifested itself in different media makes this book a standout performance. One chapter that deserves particular praise is his reading of Miles Davis's score for Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, which I am going to start assigning to students as a primer for thinking about how film scores work to structure feeling.

Judging the resonances of the different authors’ writing within a field is an interesting though problematic exercise. Most of the time it is like comparing apples and oranges, or Dukes and Monks, and trying to say which is better. Yet it is precisely when listening to performances of standards within the repertoire that one can start to judge the perspectives and strengths of these particular texts. For example, no account of jazz in France could be performed without treating an influential figure such as Hugues Panassié, a tireless crusader for jazz in France, so long as it was his kind of jazz. Yet there is much to say about a man who had so much to say about jazz in France, and some of the best writing comes out of each of the authors when dealing with this figure. Thinking through how they do so helps us to evaluate their relative commitments and sheds light on the different stories they are trying to tell.

Perchard rightly locates a central paradox in Panassié’s oeuvre: he raved about the ‘music's lived coincidence of creative thought and execution’, yet heard it only – and repeatedly – through the mechanism of the phonograph. This goes a long way to help explain what Perchard calls ‘the extraordinary arrogance of a critic who would sit in moral judgment on a distant cultural activity, praising jazz when it could be put in the service of his own primitivist ideals and damning it when it couldn't’ (23). For Panassié, Perchard argues, the focus on primitivist spirit received through machine-manufactured disks gave flight to all the best and worst in his fantasy. As he moved from ‘prophet to priest’ in the promotion of jazz, Perchard shows, his authoritarianism became more manifest.

Lane, whose guiding concept is ‘machine-age imperialism’, offers a similar perspective on Panassié, arguing that he promoted the fantasy of jazz primitivism to French culture as an antidote to the age of the machine. Lane sits on this chord throughout his reading of Panassié, and opens space up for his iteration – as one would expect from someone used to performing in the literary field – by way of a ‘close reading’ of Panassié’s Le jazz hot that is refracted through another pair of Derridean riffs, this time on ‘supplementarity’ and ‘phonocentrism’. Though for my sensibility, harping on how writers ‘fell victim’ to paradoxes identified by Derrida, like having an ‘ethnocentric’ schema (as if they could have avoided such a thing, being the product of their particular ideological conjuncture), makes quoting Derrida more important than the cultural context, it fits into Lane's reading of Panassié as a writer who thought more about protecting an imaginary moral French culture from the ravages of machinism than he did about the intensions and feelings of modern musicians who performed jazz. I must confess that as someone who values jazz musicians who listen and respond to what their fellow musicians are playing – who have ‘good ears’ as they say – I too fall victim to a certain Rousseauiste phonocentrism in my own evaluation of jazz music.

Mawer's variation on Panassié is characteristically gentle and reflects her tendency to focus on the compositions expressed by particular musicians rather than the ideological underpinnings of the field. Since her focus is the classically inflected music that Panassié and his ilk denounced, her take on him is not surprising. ‘One the one hand, his was a positive, seemingly farsighted and enlightened stance: on the other hand, the almost exclusive extolling of African-American early “hot” jazz meant that effectively it came to represent the only authentic jazz locus, fixed in time and place’ (47). If, for Panassié, even post-war bebop was not really jazz, ‘what hope would remain for figures like Hylton, denigrated by the former through the 1930s for his corruption of jazz, together with later musicians such as Evans and Brubeck’ (48). Panassié’s fault, for Mawer, was that he listened exclusively to the same music all the time, and therefore, unlike the musicians she extols, never developed a more ‘balanced hybridity’ (271) in his voice. This variation helps her story in other ways, as she is much less interested in French jazz critics such as Panassié or Hodeir than she is in Evans and Brubeck, whose work she examines for its resonances and countenances, listening for traces of harmonic influences that originated from French sources.

Fry, too, whose reading of Jack Hylton is central to his thinking about jazz in the 1930s, situates his perspective with his variation on the Panassié story. ‘Endeavoring to establish hot's supremacy, the authoritarian Panassié was quick to denounce others who mistook straight jazz for the real thing or otherwise failed to uphold [his] critical standards’ (109). Fry shrewdly points out Panassié’s strange contempt for the audience he nominally sought to convert, a contempt that he relates to Panassié’s attempt to establish borders and boundaries in the field of jazz production and criticism. He ‘relied on a process of othering, such as has been commonplace in processes of canon formation’ (115). For his part, Fry does a good job of not repeating a similar rhetorical practice in relation to the writing on jazz in France, and rather relies on new archival material and interesting chapter frames to create space.

To be sure, there are other figures in the history that have become part of the repertoire, and these authors tell their stories well. Critics such as André Coeuroy and André Hodeir, and musicians such as Django Reinhardt and Sidney Bechet are given their fair share of attention in these four books. Mostly these authors don't spend too much time tarrying with other writers’ variations, unless previous takes on such figures warrant serious revision or intervention. But sometimes, as is the case when Lane treats the fascinatingly complex critic André Schaeffner, one sees that need to create space within the field manifest itself in the ‘process of othering in canon formation’ described by Andy Fry.

So why then do critics or musicians resort to othering and negation to open up space in their respective field? Perhaps one way to understand the critical urge is to think again about the way that jazz musicians in France negotiated similar tensions in their public performances. As Western frames for art criticism became more dominant, jazzmen (and women) who failed to embody the critical ideal of jazz as an artistic creation in the moment and instead lapsed into standard repertoire or performed something that seemed like work – even if audiences were digging it – often received intellectual scorn.

In these books, the best description of this cultural dynamic in French jazz criticism comes again from Tom Perchard, in his sections on the comparisons of French jazz musicians such as Barney Wilen and Michel Portal to the Reinhardtian narrative and artistic ideal. Following the pattern of comparing particular musicians to their ideal Django – which increasingly resembled the Western avant-garde artist turning his back on the audience to find freedom – the press lured both musicians into a mode of performance that set them at odds with themselves. In order to play with enough freedom to avoid the wrath of critics enthralled by an ideal jazz, an ideal increasingly at odds with the tastes of the listening publics, the musicians turned to modes of playing that simultaneously left them unable to perform with other musicians and less interested in performing at all. Perhaps this stretches the analogy beyond utility, but rejecting repertoire and striving for innovation and freedom for its own sake in jazz is a bit like worrying there is nothing new to say in any field of cultural production. It is only a problem if the idea of originality, one could say, is more important than telling a story. Following Perchard's description of collectivist reactions to this dynamic in France, the answer seems to be that performers in any field should adopt more collective ways for understanding our own articulations and iterations, listening to the ways in which musicians – and fellow storytellers – can complement, even in dissonance, the polyphonic resonances of our collective work.