French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck (Music since 1900)
Cambridge University Press, 12/4/2014
EAN 9781107037533, ISBN10: 1107037530
Hardcover, 322 pages, 24.7 x 17.4 x 2 cm
Language: English
French concert music and jazz often enjoyed a special creative exchange across the period 1900–65. French modernist composers were particularly receptive to early African-American jazz during the interwar years, and American jazz musicians, especially those concerned with modal jazz in the 1950s and early 1960s, exhibited a distinct affinity with French musical impressionism. However, despite a general, if contested, interest in the cultural interplay of classical music and jazz, few writers have probed the specific French music-jazz relationship in depth. In this book, Deborah Mawer sets such musical interplay within its historical-cultural and critical-analytical contexts, offering a detailed yet accessible account of both French and American perspectives. Blending intertextuality with more precise borrowing techniques, Mawer presents case studies on the musical interactions of a wide range of composers and performers, including Debussy, Satie, Milhaud, Ravel, Jack Hylton, George Russell, Bill Evans and Dave Brubeck.
Introduction. French music and jazz
cultural exchange
Part I. Locations and Relations
1. A historical-cultural overview
2. Critical-analytical perspectives
intertextuality and borrowing
Part II. The Impact of Early Jazz upon French Music (1900–35)
3. Debussy and Satie
early French explorations of cakewalk and ragtime
4. Milhaud's understanding of jazz and blues
La Création du monde
5. Crossing borders
Ravel's theory and practice of jazz
Part III. The Impact of French Music upon Jazz (1925–65)
6. Hylton's interwar 'jazzed' arrangements of French classics
7. (Re)moving boundaries? Russell's Lydian jazz theory and its rethinking of Debussy and Ravel
8. Bill Evans's modal jazz and French music reconfigured
9. Milhaud and Brubeck
French classical teacher and American jazz student.