La musique pour tout le monde: Jean Wiener and the dawn of French jazz.

Abstract

Jean Wiener was perceived as an authority on Parisian jazz in the early 1920s; he promoted the music for two decades. At first he explored possibilities for combining jazz with European art music traditions in both formal and informal venues. He came to prominence in 1921 as the pianist for the Bar Gaya (and its successor, the Boeuf sur le toit), where his adventurous musical tastes and his performances with African-American saxophonist Vance Lowry attracted the patronage of Jean Cocteau and his coterie. At the same time, Wiener organized an innovative concert series, based on the principle of unusual juxtaposition: jazz with modern French music, Stravinsky, the Second Viennese School, and mechanical instruments. By 1925, the proponents of music for everyday had largely dropped American popular music from their aesthetic program. But Wiener devoted himself to it all the more, forming a duo-piano concert team with Clement Doucet to bring what he billed as jazz a deux pianos to the widest possible audience. The Wiener-Doucet team made several dozen recordings and gave approximately 2000 concerts during the next fourteen years. Having already parted company with one musical avant-garde, Wiener then found himself at odds with proponents of the newest hot jazz, who condemned what Wiener played as inauthentic. His devotion to popular, accessible music, in part, led him to the Communist party, which he joined in 1938. Wiener's career brings to light many of the musical, cultural, and racial issues that arose when Paris first embraced American jazz. By drawing on periodical literature, French music criticism, published and unpublished music, recordings of the time, dance manuals, experiences of musicians, memoirs, and concert programs, the dissertation approaches an understanding of the complicated Parisian jazz world of the 1920s and Jean Wiener's contribution to it.