Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology

Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France

Siv B. Lie

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226810959
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Django Generations shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France's most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as "Gypsies") to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France's assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.
 

One

Making Jazz Manouche

Contemporary jazz manouche narratives tend to rely on a compelling and improbably coherent story that begins with Django Reinhardt’s first forays into the jazz world. In the 1930s, Django became Europe’s most illustrious jazz musician, thanks primarily to his leading role in the Quintette du Hot Club de France and his development of guitar soloing techniques.1 As popular lore has it, Django was musically inspired by his Manouche Romani roots. Thus, it was only natural that his extended Manouche family would carry his musical torch after he died in 1953. Since then, according to this narrative, generations of Manouches have sustained an ethnoracially distinctive jazz tradition that Django self-consciously invented.

This chapter tells a different story. Jazz manouche is the result of several decades of selective reinterpretation of Django’s work by both amateur and professional musicians, stylistic influences from the Romani communities that took up his music, and promotion by nonprofit and governmental organizations as well as the music industry. Nearly two decades after his sudden death, groups of Manouche musicians began performing jazz and jazz-derived styles inspired by his recordings, spawning an intergenerationally transmitted community practice. This practice became popularly known as jazz manouche only from around the early 2000s as a result of increasing commercial success. Although the genre remains grounded in Django’s recordings, including an emphasis on recreating his improvisational techniques, it has also evolved into a practice quite distinct from what he performed during his lifetime.

Despite the fact that Django considered himself a jazzman with little, if any, stylistic influence owing to his Manouche origins, critics have tended to project ethnoracial qualities onto his music and his persona. These descriptions helped lay the groundwork for future slippage between Manouche musical production and ideas about Manouche identity that show remarkable continuity from the 1940s through the present day. For example, journalist Michael Dregni recently wrote that at the moment Django recorded a version of “Tiger Rag” in 1934, “so Gypsy jazz was born: a wanderer’s music,” resulting from the guitarist’s “Roma sensibility [that] savoured minor keys and favoured emotional intervals” (2018, 655–59).2 In addition to linking Romani stereotypes with musical sound, temporal conflations like this reflect what Givan calls a “presentist” perspective (the improbable narrative just described), as opposed to a “historical” one in which the chronology of Django’s music is understood as distinct from the advent of jazz manouche (2014, 26–27).

Taking such a historical approach, this chapter explores how jazz manouche evolved in tandem with the development of ethnoracial discourses about Manouches in France. I argue that these ethnoracial and generic categories have developed symbiotically, each informing and reflecting ideologies about ethnoracial identity and its sonic expressions. The coalescence of jazz manouche as a practice and as a generic label depended overwhelmingly on its associations—forged by music industry representatives, critics, historians, audiences, and musicians themselves—with Manouche ethnorace.3 In turn, conceptions of Manouche ethnorace have also been shaped through discourses and practices of jazz manouche. I draw on scholarship that shows how genres are continually negotiated (Brackett 2016; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Holt 2007; Lena 2012) to illustrate the historical contingency of both genre and categories of social difference. Examining ideas about the genre and those who perform it helps differentiate between ethnoracial imaginaries and the people onto whom these imaginaries are projected. Ethnorace, constituted through discourse and cultural practice across semiotic modalities, is used to unite, distinguish, and segregate populations—processes observable in a wide variety of music genres and exemplified in jazz manouche.

In this chapter, I account for the sociopolitical and economic contexts that galvanized the coalescence of jazz manouche, including the pro-Romani identity politics that emerged internationally in the late 1960s and 1970s and the development of a “world music” market in the 1980s and 1990s. Two related processes were especially crucial to the growth of jazz manouche as a community practice in Alsace, the region on which I focus: the adoption of Django’s music by a West German Sinti musical collective (Musik Deutscher Zigeuner, or “German Gypsy Music”) and the promotion of Django-inspired music by French pro-Romani nonprofits such as L’Association pour la Promotion des Populations d’Origine Nomade d’Alsace (APPONA) as a means of cultural activism. Both the producer of the Musik Deutscher Zigeuner album series and APPONA’s leaders promoted Romani alterity as an expedient force: celebrating Romanies for their uniqueness was a way to combat discrimination, to prove the value of Romanies to the majority society, and to sell records. As such, the work of artists, activists, and entrepreneurs has given rise to a dynamic process in which ethnoracial difference and musical genre are co-produced.

As described in the introduction, French Romanies are subject to what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva ([2006] 2014) calls “color-blind racism.” The republican mechanisms that claim to ensure equality among citizens actually render White supremacy normative, reproducing racial inequalities and casting cultural difference as a barrier to inclusion in the nation. While most scholarship on Manouche racialization in France focuses on legislation and other forms of governmental control, little work has shown how Manouches have been racialized historically in the media. Close readings of media portrayals of Django and jazz manouche practitioners can illuminate important parts of the historical foundation upon which Manouches are popularly racialized today. By tracing how the raciosemiotics of Django’s musical legacy and his background evolved historically, I offer new contributions to understandings of genre, identity, and national belonging through music.4

This chapter draws primarily on research in public and private archives and published critiques of Django, jazz manouche, and related musical practices. Supplementing critical appraisals of musical performance with interview excerpts and ethnographic observations allows me to provide a holistic assessment of the genre’s historiography and its present. I focus on the development of jazz manouche as a community practice among Alsatian Manouches, though overlapping processes among Romanies have occurred elsewhere in France and in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands (Antonietto and Billard 2004; Awosusi 1996). I also touch on Django’s status as a major figure in nationalistic conceptions of French jazz, though I further explore the implications of his belonging to multiple heritages in chapter 3.5

In the following pages, I progress from the historical reception of Django and his cohort to the living history of jazz manouche in contemporary France and globally. The first section describes how Django was racialized in popular media from the 1940s through the late 1950s, followed by a brief section on how his music became discursively linked to actual Romani musical collectivities. The next sections describe how West German Sinti took up and transformed Django’s music, leading to its adoption by Alsatian Manouches as a community practice. I then examine how the Alsatian nonprofit APPONA cultivated this music as a means of cultural activism, reifying links between Manouche identity and particular forms of musical expression, followed by a section on how the commodification of jazz manouche solidified its reputation in French popular media. This narrative is necessarily incomplete and fragmented, but it sketches the contours of a specific ethnoracial imaginary relevant to current understandings of cultural citizenship in France.

Racializing Reinhardt

There exists no documented evidence for popular use of the term jazz manouche, nor that of its English equivalent Gypsy jazz, until well after Django’s time. According to Givan, “Reinhardt himself had no conception of ‘gypsy jazz,’ and even if he had lived to witness it, he would likely have had little interest in it” (2010, 6). However, in a wide variety of publications, Django is credited as the “founder” of jazz manouche, with the likely implication that his music was understood to be ethnoracially inflected during his lifetime. Even Patrick Williams and Alain Antonietto, the two most reputable French scholars of jazz manouche, misleadingly titled a coauthored article “50 Years of Gypsy Jazz” (1985), suggesting that the genre had existed since Django’s first major successes in 1935 (though this was probably meant to be tongue-in-cheek). In contrast, guitarist Matelo Ferret, who knew Django since the early 1930s, once claimed, “People say Django plays Gypsy style. He doesn’t play Gypsy style. He plays a style that’s only his” (quoted in Jalard 1959, 57).6 In part because Django was notoriously averse to giving interviews, his own opinions on the possible Manouche character of his work remain mostly undocumented.7 Additionally, most of what is known about Django’s personality comes from secondhand sources, many of which describe him as unreliable, errant, obstinate, and childlike (even while, according to some, he carried himself with a royal elegance; see Fry 2014, 175–76).

Attributions of an ethnoracial component to Django’s music tend to result in the conflation of individual creativity with presumed cultural traditions (or even genetics). Such conflations influence not only narratives about Django, but also understandings of Manouches more broadly. Historian Elizabeth Vihlen McGregor argues that critics from the mid-1950s through the 1980s “betrayed their own understandings about [Django’s] ethnic group and their belief that gypsies were not only culturally but also sometimes racially distinct from the French. According to these writers, this difference contributed in large part to Django’s musical talent” (2016, 168). Extending McGregor’s argument, I suggest that the attribution of racial elements both to Django’s music and to his persona—by musicians, Reinhardt family members, and others in addition to critics—gave rise to flawed narratives about Django and jazz manouche while shaping subsequent understandings of Manouche alterity. Antonietto writes that racial characterizations of Django

[deny] the great Manouche (as incidentally they still regularly deny his racial brothers) the faculty to set a personal goal and to undertake an intensive effort to reach it. Unfit for any personal endeavor as for any collective project, the image of the indolent and irresponsible Tsigane remains alive in our society. Nothing is more wrong. . . . We have been told ad nauseam that [Django] was born a musician, and for many this explanation suffices: Tsiganes, don’t they have music “in the blood” after all? As Blacks have rhythm? We know the refrain of this oblivious racism that attributes to heredity what it denies to intellect: one is born a Tsigane musician as one is born a hunchback, it’s destiny, by Jove! (1984, 77; emphasis added to indicate reported speech)

Antonietto’s frustration with the tendency for many Django listeners to project racialized qualities onto his music, and to attribute his musicality (and that of other Manouches) to racial determinants, reflects the pervasiveness of these sentiments. “The image of the indolent and irresponsible Tsigane” has suffused much commentary on Django since the 1930s and well beyond the publication of Antonietto’s critique from 1984.

Within ethnoracially inflected narratives of Django’s life lie the roots of jazz manouche. If the genre is so profoundly centered on Django’s music, retrospective projections of ethnoracial qualities onto his musical sound, as well as a focus on his Manouche identity more broadly, have contributed significantly to the ethnoracialization of the genre. While several critics have repudiated claims that Django’s ethnorace played a measurable role in his musical style, others—especially those writing well after Django’s death and who contributed to the creation of jazz manouche as a concept—have supported such claims. Furthermore, posthumous emphases on Django’s connections to his Manouche community, as propagated by critics and others in the media industries, set a precedent for the transformation of Django’s work into a Manouche-specific community practice. These retrospectives reinforce present-day popular notions that any personal and aesthetic links between Django and jazz manouche are a matter of ethnoracial significance. Although Django is consistently portrayed as a singular genius, his Manouche roots have come to bear strongly on his biography—in the words of Hot Club de France leading member and Django biographer Charles Delaunay, Django was considered both “primitive” and an “artist” (1954, 36). Below, I offer a sketch of Django’s life and musical output together with ethnoracializing appraisals thereof in order to show how ideas about Django’s relationship to his Manouche background directly shaped the decades-long evolution of jazz manouche.8

Django was born in Belgium but grew up primarily in France. From an early age, he became well versed in the popular musics of his time, learning to play the violin, the banjo, the banjo-guitar and, eventually, the guitar.9 According to anthropologist Patrick Williams (2000, 410), the Manouche milieu in which Django was raised had no ethnoracially distinctive musical tradition to begin with. Along with Gitans (a name for a Romani subgroup associated with southwestern France and Spain), Manouches started to become prominent performers in the bal-musette dance hall scene beginning in the early twentieth century (Roussin 1994, 135).10 This was the professional environment into which Django entered in his early teens. Musette guitarist and amateur historian Didier Roussin (1994, 139) cites several well-known musette performers of the time who were astonished by the young Django’s talent and credits him with popularizing the use of guitar instead of banjo as the musette accompaniment of choice.

A devastating accident set the course of Django’s life and later popular fascination with it. As Givan writes,

On the night of October 26, 1928, the eighteen-year-old musician returned from a playing engagement to his caravan . . . outside Paris. As he prepared to retire to bed, a candle’s open flame accidentally ignited a large pile of celluloid flowers that Bella, his first wife, planned to sell the next day. Bella escaped from the blaze with minor injuries, but the right side of Reinhardt’s body was burned so severely that a surgeon at the Hôpital Lariboisière recommended his leg be amputated to prevent gangrene. Reinhardt refused. (2010, 7; see also Delaunay 1954, 29–30)11

Following an eighteen-month period of convalescence, during which he retrained himself to play guitar with his newly deformed left hand—the scarring from the fire had rendered his third and fourth fingers virtually unusable, requiring him to rely overwhelmingly on his index finger, middle finger, and thumb (Givan 2010, 7)—he only joined the occasional musette gig (Roussin 1994, 139).12

Delaunay (1954, 31–32) writes that Django first encountered jazz as a near-religious revelation upon hearing a record by Louis Armstrong in 1930. Django’s big break into jazz occurred when Hot Club de France member Pierre Nourry enlisted him and his brother Joseph to perform guitar with the club’s ensemble (36–37). Django had met violinist Stéphane Grappelli in 1931 while playing in a band under the direction of bassist Louis Vola, and in 1934, the Quintette du Hot Club de France (hereinafter the QHCF) was formed with Django, Grappelli, Joseph Reinhardt, Vola on upright bass, and guitarist Roger Chaput (Grappelli 1992, 79–80).13

Many of Django’s best-known recordings of the 1930s were made with the QHCF, which performed on and off and with various personnel changes until the late 1940s. The ensemble’s first recording session with Odéon in 1934 was deemed by the record company’s executives “too modern” for release, but after a successful concert, Ultraphone agreed to release two QHCF records (Delaunay 1954, 37). In addition to his work with the QHCF during the prewar period, Django performed and recorded with other ensembles and musicians in France, among them US musicians Coleman Hawkins, Rex Stewart, and Benny Carter. His career flourished under the Occupation, but it was not until the end of the war that Django engaged again with musical developments across the Atlantic. He embarked on a US tour with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1946 and subsequently recorded more prolifically than ever before, drawing on the musical influences he was exposed to in the United States (especially bebop).14 During this postwar period, he played on both electric and acoustic guitar and infrequently as part of an all-string lineup. He died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in 1953 at the age of forty-three.

As a Manouche, Django inhabited an ambiguous position in the racial politics of mid-twentieth-c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Terminology
• List of Figures
• Companion Website
• Introduction
• 1   Making Jazz Manouche
• 2   Cultural Activism’s Living Legacies
• 3   Generic Ontologies and the Stakes of Refusal
• 4   The Sound of Feeling
• 5   Heritage Stories
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Appendix 2: List of Formal Interviews
• Notes
• References
• Index