“We must expand the domain of jazz so we never have to leave it”: André Hodeir and the search for a European jazz art

The writer and composer André Hodeir (1921-2011) was responsible for some of the most influential French jazz criticism and music of the post-war period. In training and outlook Hodeir was positioned with unusual equilibrium between classical music and jazz worlds; in the wake of bebop and through the 1950s, jazz, though still a popular, “commercial” music, would take on more and more of the trappings of “art” proper, and Hodeir would emerge as a key figure in the local attempt to translate jazz practice into an extant system of bourgeois artistic values. This presentation examines some of Hodeir’s 1950s work in both sound and words, along with the wider French effort to assimilate “foreign” jazz into “local” musical and intellectual traditions: the manner in which this project was constructed tells us much about French cultural hierarchies, self-perceptions and anxieties as they existed – and were changing – at mid-century.