RYTHME DE TRAVAIL, RYTHME DE JAZZ

Abstract

Existing studies of the reception of jazz in France have tended to posit a neat distinction between those commentators, who saw the music as the degraded product of an Americanized machine age on the one hand, and those who sought in its unconventional rhythms and melodies a source of primitive, Black African authenticity, on the other hand. This article questions such accounts by showing how notions of primitivism and modernity were closely articulated in the discourse of critics and fans of the new music alike. As a musical form apparently rooted in West African tradition, jazz was attributed a capacity for returning its audience to a more “primitive” state, a state figured as at once seductively authentic and dangerously debasing. In this, jazz mimicked the effects of mechanized industrial labour, which, through the imposition of a set of repetitive, mindless physical tasks, similarly risked reducing the French worker to a more “primitive” state, that of an unthinking beast of burden. If this state threatened to debase the worker, it simultaneously held out the possibility of recovering a sense of primitive harmony through the adaptation of the worker's bodily rhythms to the rhythms of mechanized labour in the new Taylorist and Fordist factories. Whether in the writings of the conservative commentator Georges Duhamel, or in the work of the surrealist ethnographer André Schaeffner, jazz was seen to be analogous to mechanized labour in the simultaneous threat of violent disruption and the chance of restored harmony it promised to the human body. As such, jazz in inter-war France could become a powerful figure for the wholesale transformation of bodies and affects contingent on France's continuing passage from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial economy.

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