East Meets West at Jazz Hot : Maoism, Race, and Revolution in French Jazz Criticism

This article examines the ideas about music and society of politically engaged editors and writers who headed the French jazz Magazine Jazz Hot in the late 1960s. Like many members of the New Left in Europe and the US, they drew from Maoist ideas about a global revolution with a strong cultural component. After identifying the assumptions and assertions they make about politics, the article asks how these basic elements may inform jazz criticism. The Maoist critics at Jazz Hot believed their predecessors in French jazz criticism had a patronizing, primitivist view of jazz and a bourgeois liberal bias. Against this static, classicizing view of jazz, the Maoist juxtaposed a view based on global solidarity and revolutionary action of colonial peoples in the developing world that recognized cultural and ethnic diversity and constant change and development. The Maoists saw this global project as highly relevant to politics and culture in the metropolitan center as well: i.e., to the extra parliamentary left in France, whose members led or incited student/worker mobilizations known as the May Events in France (and of which these writers were a part); and in the free jazz and hard rock emerging just at that time. The article concludes by asking how this revolutionary political engagement, and music that reflected it during the 1960s, may have informed discourse about diversity and global cultural interchange in jazz in the ensuing years, up to and including our time.