History/Music
Book Details

Dancing with De Beauvoir

Jazz and the French

Colin Nettelbeck

Explores the powerful synergies between jazz and the French to show how jazz has helped shaped modern French culture and influenced cultural icons from Ravel, Matisse, Sartre and De Beauvoir to Derrida.

Opinion

“if you have any interest in all or any of jazz, modernism and French cultural theory, you must buy this book.”
(Bruce Johnson - Professor of English Literature at the University of NSW)

“As Professor of French at Melbourne University and a jazz practitioner, Colin Nettleback is ideally positioned to write this account of the love affair between Parisian bohemia and American jazz.”
“The book is written as well as it is researched and the production, including some terrific photos, does it full justice.”
(Sydney Morning Herald, 11-12/9/04)

About this Title

When live jazz arrived in France towards the end of World War I, it was seen from the start as a fertile symbol of other things. It was an embodiment of artistic freedom, it was modernism, it was America, it was African primitivism, sexual liberation, social decadence and moral decay. Its energy and innovation helped produce an unprecedented explosion of activity in modern French art and thought.

Paris and jazz had a special relationship. From the United States flowed a stream of black jazz artists keen to taste the freedom and sophistication of the City of Light: Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. In their audiences were other significant Americans who called Paris home – Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, Sylvia Beach, and Man Ray. Django Reinhardt, Jean Cocteau, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Boris Vian, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and Jacques Derrida were among the French artists and intellectuals who also responded, transforming their culture into jazz’s second home.

In Dancing with De Beauvoir, Colin Nettelbeck explores the powerful synergies between jazz and the French. This authoritative cultural history not only recalls influential performances and recordings. It teases out the threads of artistic collaborations and rivalries, revisits influential meetings, love affairs and friendships, and explores tensions in US-French relations, to show how jazz has helped shaped modern French culture. Stylishly illustrated with rare black-and-white photographs, this is a book for anyone who has ever fallen in love with France, and wondered why.

About the Author

Colin Nettelbeck is AR Chisholm Professor of French and Head of the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne. He has written many books and articles about twentieth century French literature, cinema and cultural history, including Forever French: Exile in the United States 1939-1945 (1993) and A Century of Cinema: Australian and French Connections (with Jane Warren and Wallace Kirsop, 1996).
He is a jazz fan and sometime practitioner and, like Cole Porter, loves Paris in any season.

Book Preview

978-0-522-85113-7