John D Pelzer. History Today. Volume 51, Issue 10, October 2001.
In his novel the Second World War from Here to Eternity, James Jones sought to convey the music of Belgian-born gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose rhythms and melodies had a profound impact upon Europe’s pre-World War music scene:
‘But when it came to describing for them who had never heard it the poignant fleeting exquisitely delicate melody of that guitar, memory always faltered. There was no way to describe them that. You had to hear that, the steady, swinging, never wavering beat with the two-or three-chord haunting minor riffs at the ends of phrases, each containing the whole feel and pattern of joyously unhappy tragedy of this earth (and of other earth). And always over it all the one picked single string of the melody following infallibly the beat, weaving in and out around it with the hard-driven swiftly-run arpeggios, always moving, never hesitating, never getting lost and having to pause to get back on, shifting suddenly from the set light-accent of the melancholy jazz beat to the sharp erratic-explosive gypsy rhythm that cried over life while laughing at it, too fast for the ear to follow, too original for the mind to anticipate, too intricate for the memory to remember.’
‘I know his music,’ states one of Jones’s characters. ‘Theres I [sic] nothing like it in the world.’
Few cities in the world are more associated with jazz than Paris. When American jazz first appeared in France during the First World War, it was little more than all imported novelty. The Second World War, however, completed the transformation of jazz into a truly French institution.
One way to understand this transformation is to trace the career of the individual most responsible for it, Django Reinhardt. During the 1930s, Reinhardt created a new style that combined the elements of his traditional gypsy music with those of American jazz, and became Europe’s most accomplished jazz artist. Less known, yet no less intriguing, is the story of how Reinhardt, a member of a group chosen by Hitler for extermination, not only survived the Nazi occupation but achieved stardom in wartime Paris.
American-style jazz, arriving when the American army brought African-American soldiers to serve in France, ingrained itself deeply into the fabric of French tastes during the interwar years. Some fine bands accompanied the American military units. Among them was the Hell Fighter’s Band of the 369th Infantry Regiment, an all-black group led by New York ragtime pioneer James Reese Europe. Civilian bands also began to appear. Among the first of these was Mitchell’s Jazz Kings, an all-black American group, led by drummer Louis Mitchell. Mitchell’s band arrived in the French capital in 1917 to play at the Perroquet cabaret located in the basement of the Casino de Paris, one of the French capital’s most important and prestigious music halls. Not exclusively a jazz hand, the group included ragtime numbers in its repertoire, it spent the next six years playing in France.
American jazz music fitted well into the public tastes of post-1918 France. The public sought escape in the unusual and the exotic. Their tastes moved easily to things reflecting Black and African cultures. Both French art and philosophy reflected this fascination. The work of French intellectuals like Blaise Cendrars and Paul Nizan opposed colonialism and celebrated the spontaneity and values of black culture. Official France may have continued to support colonialism, but it also undertook the first serious ethnological studies of the African people. Signs of this interest were everywhere, as a magazine entitled La Race Negre attested. This fascination with African culture encompassed things African-American. The immense popularity of such entertainment productions as the Revue Negre and the meteoric rise to French stardom of one of its performers. Josephine Baker, were obvious examples.
Black musicians found French racial attitudes far more relaxed than in the United States, and this relative freedom attracted a sizable community of African-American performers to the French capital. These expatriate entertainers provided the backbone of the Paris jazz scene. Yet music in these clubs was a novelty, not a serious art form. Improvisation by the musicians was often discouraged. In fact, there was considerable confusion as to exactly what the term ‘jazz’ meant. The French often associated it as much with dance as music. Previously unknown to the French, the drums themselves, and not the music, often assumed the identity of ‘un jazz’. As al result, the quality of the music of the early French clubs was generally inferior to the music being performed in New York or Chicago. Neither was the music arriving in France the traditional New Orleans-style jazz. It tended to imitate the more sophisticated and avant-garde sounds then evolving in the major cities of the American east coast. By the 1930s, however, the French jazz scene began to change.
Jazz now began to be increasingly identified with the Left Bank. In 1932, French jazz enthusiasts, primarily university students, created the Hot Club of France to promote the music and organise French fans. In 1929, France’s first jazz magazine, La Revue du Jazz, appeared.
This shift in focus also marked the appearance of French jazz’s first significant indigenous artists, gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli. Reinhardt had been born at Liverchies, Belgium, in 1910, where his mother performed as a dancer in a travelling troupe of gypsy players. The family were Manouche, a tribe that had migrated from its homeland in northwest India during the eleventh century and continued its travels throughout Europe. Their dark skill and dark, heavily-lidded eyes still betrayed their Hindu antecedents. Reinhardt’s early years reflected the nomadic traditions of his people. He travelled around Europe and North Africa, finally settling just outside Paris at Barriere de Choisy in an area called the ‘Zone’ after 1918.
Django began playing the traditional popular music of Paris in the bistros, bars, and dance halls of the city, generally accompanying accordionists on a guitar-banjo, a hybrid instrument with the six strings and tuning of a guitar but the resonator of a banjo, which added to the instrument’s volume in the days before electrical amplification. Reinhardt became the stuff of legend in November 1928 when he was badly burned in a caravan fire. The blaze caused extensive injuries from his knee to his waist, along the left side of his body. The greatest injury, however, was to his left hand, which he used to fret the strings of his guitar It was so badly deformed that only two of his fingers functioned well enough to continue playing; the fourth and fifth were almost totally paralysed. Yet miraculously, within two years, he was again playing the guitar well, using only his two remaining fingers.
The young Reinhardt discovered the full potential of jazz in 1931. He and his brother were playing their way through the clubs of the south of France when they met artist Emile Savitry in Toulon. Savitry played his collection of American jazz records, and Django heard for the first time the music of such jazz greats as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. He was said to have placed his head in his hands and wept.
The other pivotal figure in French jazz had trained as a classical pianist. Stephane Grappelli began playing jazz and the violin after seeing a performance by American jazz violinist ‘Snuff’ Smith. Grappelli proved the ideal partner for Reinhardt. They met in the autumn of 1934 while working with the bassist Louis Vola at the Hotel Claridge in Paris. During breaks, the two played together, imitating the American duo, violinist Joe Venuti and guitarist Eddie Lang. Guitarist Roger Chaput and bassist Louis Vola soon joined them and the quintet was completed by a third guitar, played by Reinhardt’s brother, Joseph.
The newly formed Hot Club of France sought to establish a jazz band entirely of French musicians, and the Reinhardt/Grappelli band fitted the bill. The group became the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, and in late 1934 they released their first record. The quintet was the first French group to compete on favourable terms with imported American performers. Nonetheless the band was distinctly European. Its small string band configuration producing a unique sound. The success of the group’s records led to offers to play live performances, and those at Stage B, a Montparnasse club, attracted visits from jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins.
Reinhardt and Grappelli’s popularity brought the Quintet of the Hot Club of France to the pinnacle of the European jazz world. Their association, however, did not survive the Second World War. The quintet was in Britain when war was declared in September 1939. Reinhardt immediately returned to Paris, but Grappelli stayed behind in Britain for the war’s duration. Django spent the first winter of the war playing in Jimmy’s Bar in Montparnasse; but in spring 1940 the German blitzkrieg led to the speedy fall of France. He fled the city when the Germans occupied Paris on June 14th, but returned after the French surrender left northern France under occupation.
Far from closing down Parisian social life, the Germans exploited the city’s cultural and entertainment resources as an opulent recreational area for their soldiers and officials. Soon after the occupation, theatres re-opened, playing to capacity audiences of French and Germans alike. It was a time of expansion for the city’s nightclubs as well. About 125 of central Paris’s 200 cabarets were founded after the 1940 armistice.
With the resurrection of the city’s centres of entertainment, Django set about creating a new and more permanent ensemble. Replacing Grappelli was no easy task. Django finally chose clarinetist/saxophonist Hubert Rostang. Changes in instrumentation were carried out throughout the band with the addition of bass, drums, and a single rhythm guitar.
Jazz achieved unprecedented popularity in the occupied nations of Europe and even in Germany during the war, but nowhere more so than in France. Paris concerts had traditionally attracted audiences of around 400. Now even those performances in provincial towns featuring lesser artists, attracted audiences of a thousand or more. Record sales also increased. Many of these were recordings of French artists playing American-style swing. Undoubtedly jazz fulfilled the desire for escape of many in the occupied nations; it was a reminder of a different time and a different place. ‘Jazz became the symbol of, or the last tie with, the outside free world,’ claimed a 1946 article on Paris’s music scene in the American .jazz magazine Down Beat. ‘The French seized upon hot music as upon a floating straw in a sea of doom.’
Its appeal was more than just escapism, it was also political. Jazz made an ideological statement. With its unrestrained style and African-American origins, it became the antithesis of everything for which fascism stood. Jazz was thus controlled defiance and a symbol of resistance to the Nazi regime. It was an ideological challenge to fascism as well as an outlet for those forced to endure it.
As jazz was becoming more popular, it was also becoming more indigenous. Cut off from importations from America, the idiom became more self-sustaining. This development added to the stature and popularity of Django, already Europe’s premier native performer. The primary source of Reinhardt’s popularity was the youth of Paris known as the ‘Zazou’.
The exact origin and meaning of this term remain vague. The Zazou was first and foremost a movement of youths who countered the humiliation of the German occupation and the social confines of Nazi ideology through non-conformity. Some of this was manifested through dress. In 1942, L’Illustration described the dress of Zazou men: they wore ‘long jackets down to their thighs, dark, narrow trousers, heavy unpolished shoes, and either a cotton or a thick woollen tie’, completing the outfit with a ‘lumber jacket, which they show an unwillingness to take off, even when it’s soaking wet’. Zazou females dressed no more fashionably. ‘The women, under their cheap furs, wear turtle-necked sweaters and very short pleated skirts … their long hair hangs down the backs of their necks in spirals, their stockings are striped, their shoes flat and heavy, and they are armed with vast umbrellas that remain obstinately folded whatever the weather’.
The Zazou also demonstrated their non-conformity through devotion to swing music. Swing was the popular form of jazz in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was also a term of approval for anything that fitted into the Zazou lifestyle. ‘The terrace is “swing”, the bar is “swing”, the restaurant is “swing”‘, according to La Gerbe in June 1942. ‘Swing money pours out of all these gentlemen’s little pockets. What it is to be a “Zazou”!’
Everything that was at all original or redolent of American life was baptised swing. ‘Zazous, swing, were spontaneous,’ said a popular war-time singer, ‘a way of showing our occupiers what we thought of then.’
Jazz remained the centre of Zazou life, and Django was its personification. it was swing, according to La Gerbe, to get drunk and ‘play Django Rheinhardt [sic] and Alex Combelle records’. Music halls which, before the war, had ignored the original quintet now began to vie for bookings. The new group played at the Cinema Normandie, the Folies Belleville, the Olympia, the Moulin Rouge, the ABC and the Alahambra. The band also began to play regularly in Paris’s most fashionable nightclubs, including Ciro’s, Jane Stick, and Le Montecristo. Reinhardt may well have reached his peak as an artist during the German occupation. His playing achieved a new level of maturity and virtuosity. He also came into his own as a composer, and some of the most memorable recordings of his own compositions, including ‘Manoir de Mes Reves’, ‘Douce Ambiance’ and ‘Nuages’, were created during the war.
As its popularity increased, Reinhardt’s music soon outgrew the limitations of the small group. He increasingly played and recorded with larger numbers of musicians, and in the autumn of 1941 he formed his own big band to play an engagement at a new cabaret, the Paris-Plage, near Place Clichy. By this time, Reinhardt had begun to achieve the outward signs of stardom. He moved into a luxury flat on the Champs-Elysees. He became a household name. That Reinhardt, a gypsy, was able to survive, much less achieve such stardom, in Nazi-occupied Paris borders on the miraculous. The Nazi regime was based upon all ideology of the racial superiority of Aryan Germans. The gypsies, like the Jews, had been earmarked For extinction. As they gained power throughout Europe, the Nazis set their racial theories into practice with ruthless efficiency. By the end of the war, an estimated six million Jews had died at the hands of the Germans in the concentration and extermination camps. An estimated 400,000 gypsies, identified as ‘criminal and asocial’, joined them in their fate.
Reinhardt’s stature as Europe’s greatest jazz practitioner added to his danger. The Nazis certainly were not the first to condemn jazz for what was perceived to be its detrimental effect upon society. Critics in the US at the height of the jazz age had questioned the impact of the music. Even before Hitler came to power, conservative Germans had condemned foreign music. In 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm had forbidden his officers to dance the tango, denouncing the dance as ‘a nigger grotesque’. Jazz met a similar response in Germany a decade later. In 1925, Seigfried Wagner, son of the composer, slated jazz as ‘barbaric noise’. Fervent in its suppression, the Nazis, according to The New English Weekly, ‘felt the Hebrew uses jazz and like methods to iron out racial differences and produce a general neurasthenia in which Hebrew influence may ascend among peoples.’
Yet despite Nazi racial policies, France remained a relatively safe place for Reinhardt. Hitler in fact had little desire to impose a strict fascist-style social order there. Instead he wished to maintain the amenity of the French people and exploit their economy to benefit the German war effort. German authorities were thus more tolerant in France than in other European countries. French jazz enthusiasts exploited this tolerance by convincing German authorities that jazz was a French custom and therefore permissible under German policy. This task was made easier by the changing nationality profile of French jazz musicians.
The economic upheaval of the 1930s had depleted the numbers of African-American jazz performers living in the French capital. With the Second World War nearly all of the remaining African-American performers fled the city. In wartime Paris, most jazz musicians, like Reinhardt, were French.
To avoid Nazi suppression, the French dropped the term ‘swing’, with its American connotations of defiance, and used the more neutral ‘jazz’. Jazz standards were re-titled in French. ‘St Louis Blues‘ became ‘Tristesses De St Louis’. ‘I Got Rhythm’ became ‘Agate Rhythm’. Tunes were often given titles that would not betray their origins, such as ‘Blues in C Sharp’. Whenever possible, composers’ names were either omitted or changed to French ones. The French jazz musician and critic Charles Delaunay disguised the songs by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five under the name Jean Sablon. The Hot Club of France co-ordinated such activities and their efforts were effective: American swing was banned by the Germans, but French jazz remained permissible.
Not all of the Hot Club’s anti-German activities were so subtle, however. The three-storey house that wax the headquarters of both the Paris Hot Club and the Hot Club of France also served as a meeting place for the French resistance, In October 1943, the Gestapo raided the Hot Club headquarters, taking into custody British agents and Hot Club officers. Delaunay was released From Fresnes Prison about a month later. Others were not so lucky. Club secretary Madeleine Germaine and a lieutenant in the underground eventually died in a gas chamber.
The comparative autonomy given to French authorities in implementing Hitler’s racial policies undoubtedly helped contribute to Reinhardt’s survival. Nonetheless, Paris was not it safe place. Once he fled the city after hearing that gypsies were to be gassed in Nazi Germany. He was captured attempting to cross the Swiss border but was released by the Wehrmacht frontier commander, who was a fan. He was turned back again at the border by Swiss customs officials during a second attempt a few days later.
The German occupation of Paris ended on August 25th, 1944, when General Jacques Philippe Leclerc’s Second Free French Armoured Division, supported by the US Fourth Infantry Division, entered the city. The French capital only barely escaped destruction, Hitler ordered the German commander, General Dietrich yon Cholitz, to hold the city or leave it in ruins. Cholitz disobeyed orders, however, and surrendered the city intact.
The Allied occupation of Paris brought a new audience to Django. American jazz fans, seeking out Europe’s master, became a common sight in the French capital. ‘If most of the GIs were out for cognac and mademoiselles, there were others who had but a single idea in their heads: to meet Django Reinhardt,’ wrote Delaunay. ‘You were always seeing tall, ingenuous-looking types in the street around Pigalle stop passers-by and ask them if they knew where Monsieur Django Reinhardt was playing.’
The French fascination with jazz continued into the post-war years. The new centre of the Paris scene was the Left Bank and the cellar clubs of Saint Germain des Pres. During this period, though, the world of French jazz seemed to leave Reinhardt behind. The end of the war marked the return of touring American jazz performers, and with them came new styles and new influences. During the war, American jazz had taken a bold new direction with the Be-Bop style introduced by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Swing became almost instantly passe for many jazz aficionados.
The elitist nature of the new style divided jazz fans around the world, and the French scene was no exception. The Hot Club of France split into two factions. One, led by Belgian critic Hugues Panassie, rejected the new music and promoted traditional jazz. Another, led by Charles Delaunay and made tap primarily of the youthful followers of existentialism, embraced the new style.
During the late 1940s Reinhardt explored the new musical styles. Yet a younger generation of jazz fans heard his music as something from a bygone age. Increasingly, Django left the music scene, retiring to the village of Samois-sur-Seine, where he pursued painting and fishing. His career underwent a revival between 1951 and 1953, when he formed a new band of young French musicians including alto saxophonist Herbert For But the revival was cut short when Reinhardt died suddenly on May 16th, 1953, of a massive brain haemorrhage. He was Forty-three years old.
There can be little doubt of the impact of Reinhardt’s music. Duke Ellington called Reinhardt ‘Europe’s pre-eminent jazz instrumentalist of all time … He’s one of those musicians who are unable to play a note that’s not pretty or in good taste.’ His virtuosity continues to inspire hosts of admirers and imitators, many of whom gather each year in the village of Samois-sur-Seiue for the festival devoted to his music and memory.
But Reinhardt’s story is about more than his music. His experience also provides a unique view of the Nazi-occupation of Paris and its impact upon individualism and artistic expression there. Such forces survived and flourished even in the face of the social conformity imposed by the Nazi regime. French jazz, in fact, thrived and worked its way into French culture as a symbol of resistance to the Nazi occupation.