Hugues Panassié to Joachim Berendt: the critic as “artist”. Aesthetic debates, self-promotion and marketing strategies

Jazz music was, in the first half of the twentieth-century, what popular music is nowadys: just think about the so-called Swing Era, with its hugely popular big-bands and singers, and the related dances and vocal repertoires. Only in the 1950s, due to the phenomenal raise of success of rock-and-roll, through record sales and media exposure, things changed. Since then, jazz increasingly became a more intellectual and artistic genre, while popular music a more specifically marketing-oriented area of musical creativity, of course with all possible exceptions. Things, as we know, are nowadays much more mixed and variated.

The roots of jazz criticism and reviews, which by the way directly influenced subsequent popular music criticism, are to be found in the first world magazines dedicated to jazz, dance music and related genres, namely “Melody Maker” (London 1926), “Jazz and tango dancing” (Paris 1929), “Orkester Journalen” (Stockholm 1933), “Down Beat”(Chicago 1934), “Jazz Hot” (Paris 1935). And also “Metronome” (New York), which, born as early as 1881, in the thirties systematically converted its contents to jazz and big bands, and since 1939 hosted a regular annual readers’ poll to choose the best American instrumentalists and singers, in this promptly followed also by “Down Beat”. While the Anglo-American magazines, in terms of articles and reviews, were keener on a more neutral, informative approach, the Parisian monthly “Jazz Hot”, founded by a couple of music lovers and experts just into their twenties, Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay, became a sort of bullring of aesthetic debates, controversies and roaring battles between styles, genres and individual critics.  “Jazz Hot” was, in its conception, the most advanced magazine of that time, both for its critical commitment and for its international panel of contributors, either European or American renamed music experts like Walter Schaap, Stanley Dance and Leonard Feather. From 1935 to 1939 “Jazz Hot” was bilingual, with texts in French and in English. Reviews of records and concerts became an essential part of this still existing magazine, and the specific room given by Panassié and Delaunay to records end recordings opened the path to the develpment of a theoretical and practical discipline, discography.

Panassié (1912-1974), born in Paris from a family rooted in Montauban, close to Toulouse, in the Southwest department of France called l’Aveyron, was the son of a very wealthy engineer, an enterpreneur who, like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s father in Egypt, had made a fortune, importing and trading manganese from Russian Georgia to his own country. When his father Louis died, Hugues Panassié, who was only sixteen years old, inherited a conspicuous financial fortune, a castle and three Mercedes cars, in Montauban, where he would retire during the war years and after his cultural divorce from Delaunay, related to the post-World War II controversy between traditionalists and modernists. Charles Delaunay, on his side, was the son of a renamed couple of Parisian intellectuals and painters, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Terk, whose house was during the twenties a regular meeting point of famous writers, artists and dancers, such as Jean Cocteau, Sergej Djaghilev, Igor Stravinskij or Marc Chagall.  At fourteen, Hugues Panassiè was stricken with poliomielitis, which limited his physical activities and turned him into a cripple for the rest of his life; later on, he would pick up the saxophone, he spent on the French Riviera a summer, and fell in love with jazz, which he discovered either thanks to his music teacher Christian Wagner and through the gramophone records he started to collect. Panassié’s cultural background was, confusingly, rooted in conservatory ideologies, such as French philosophers Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain and Charles Maurras’ one, in a personal interpretation of Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the so-called primitive man, the “good savage”(“le bon sauvage”), of course applied, in a rather contradictory way, to jazz musicians, and in some different literary and poetic sources, like Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Henry Dumas. Panassié was a catholic and a monarchist, an authoritative man but also a “bon vivant”, in love with life, food and wine. He read Maritain’s essay entitled Art et Scolastique and shared his view of a “neotomism” inspired by a vitality and enthusiasm for life in opposition to contemporary social degenerations. He also believed, again quoting Maritain, that “learning through senses and sensibility is more important than approaching knowledge in an intellectual way”. Panassié criticized some of the French encyclopedists, like Diderot and Condorcet, who in his own view had “killed popular art”. During the war he adhered to Charles Maurras’ right-wing and anti-parliamentary movement called Action Francaise. Incoherence and theatricality were among his attributes. During the Nazis occupation of France, he was somewhere invited to make a public speech on jazz by some German officers, but he fierly criticized the Nazis who had invited him, and left the place before the conclusion of his lecture. Charles Delaunay remembered their first encounter with these words: ”The first time I saw him he was wearing a black tie and looked like an end-of-the-century, out-of-fashion intellectual. His visiting card defined him as a “man of letters”. He was both a spoilt child and a tyrant, and such attributes increased throughout the years. Besides this, he was a sort of comedian, willing to attract other people’s attention at any time”.[1]

Despite his personal contradictory cultural background, the difficult historical period and the lacking of a musical literature on this music, which he was one of the very first to promote at an age of only 22 with his 1934 pioneering book Le Jazz Hot (1942 he published his second book in English in the USA, The Real Jazz, translated and published in France in 1946), Hugues Panassié must anyway be regarded as the founding father of jazz criticism.[2] He expressed his qualities and his unrevalled knowledge of discographical sources (he had a personal collection of nearly 20.000 78 rpm records) either in sixteen books dedicated to Afro-American music or in his direction of magazine “Jazz Hot” and, later, when he “divorced” from Charles Delaunay, of another periodical called “Le Bulletin de l’Hot Club de France”. Panassié personally invented a terminology often employed, later, by several colleagues and by different medias. He fought to impose jazz as an artistic music, defining improvisation as one of the basic values of this genre, which he called “hot” as opposed to “straight”(in his view, conversely, straight jazz a kind of light and commercial type of music, to be banned and condemned). “Real jazz” should therefore be, in Panassié’s view, improvised, created for artistic purposes, aestethically uncompromising. Louis Armstrong, with whom he would become a close friend throughout his parallel activity of organizer of concerts and festivals and producer of radio programs, according to Panassié was the perfect symbol of the category of “hot” jazz. Moreover, Panassié has been the first to describe this music’s typical rhythmic features, including the concept of swing, but also the first, arguably, to stress the central contribution of black musicians, as opposed to white-American jazzmen (just to say, in his book Le Jazz Hot he labelled Benny Goodman as “a detestable clarinetist whose sterile intonation was inferior to black players Jimmy Noone and Omer Simeon”). His pioneering perception of rhythm as a source for this music, and its strict connections with dance, especially in its earliest traditional stylistic expressions,  was absolutely correct. A cripple who could not enjoy like other people this vital physical expression, Hugues Panassié believed that dance and bodily movements were an essential part of African-American music and communicative values. When he sailed with Madeleine Gauthier to New York, in 1936, for six months, to visit a friend of his, clarinet player Mezz Mezzrow, and to increase in numer and quality, with a sort of fled research, the Swing catalogue, an independent discographical label he had founded in Paris with Charles Delaunay, Panassié used to attend the Apollo Theatr and the Savoy Ballroom. In these well-famous places he listened to Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and other ouststanding jazz musicians. Reviewing in magazine “Jazz Hot” Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb’s performance at the Savoy, Panassié stated that “one should not speak of this music using such traditional concepts as “refined artistic emotion”, which should be left to to some degenerated intellectuals, but in terms of a joy difficult to express, to be appreciated not through intellectual knowledge but thanks to a sort of grace, difficult to express, which only God could deliver”. This quotation shows the sort of naive, enthusiastic, honest, passionate approach of Panassié to African-American music, of which he became a sort of prophet, even theorising, aside the idea of a long-term battle in its favour, jazz as “a religion”. He would actually spend a whole life, and possibly a relevant part of his inherited financial patrimoine, in promoting this genre in France and in the rest of the world, never looking for profits, but always working aside and for musicians (who often became his friends and sometimes wrote a tune entitled with his name) and in favour of their activities and artistic recognition.

A peak of Hugh Panassié’s polemical approach to articles and reviews is not represented, paradoxically, only in the reviews of concerts and records, an object he knew particularly well being at the same time a critic and a producer, but in the reviews that are part of the aggressive campaign he addressed against magazine “Jazz Hot”,  that he had personally started years before, and from which he resigned in 1947. Somehow similar to the Academie Francaise’s end of the eighteenth century Battle fought between the Ancient and the Modern (La querelle des Anciens et des Modernes), the war between Panassié and Delaunay erupted in the very moment in which Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop records arrived in France. Traditionalists on one side, with Panassié, modernists on the other, with Delaunay and a whole new generation of critics including the later famous writer Boris Vian, one of the best musicologists to come, André Hodeir, future publisher Frank Tenot, and sociologist Lucien Malson. Moving back to Aveyron, Panassié founded his “Bulletin de l’Hot Club de France” and in 1949 started shooting against the now modernist competitor “Jazz Hot”. Some of these reviews still represent a unique body of musical criticism. Pulling legs at Vian, who in his club close to River Seine, Le Tabou, hosted a generation of young people named “zazous”, Panassié calls the other magazine Zazotte or Jazote, instead of “Jazz Hot” (in turn, in “Jazz Hot” articles and reviews, Vian calls him, alternatively, Hugues-le-Père, Panapapassié, Panne-à-scier, Pape, Papenassier, Papasse, Papane, Panne d’Acier, Sa sainteté). Other enemies, Andrè Hodeir and Lucien Malson, might be stinking, so Panassié calls them, respectively, Odère and Mauvaisodeur. A poor drummer who has the wrong idea of contributing to Jazz Hot, Gérard Pochonet, becomes Porcinet; Aris Destombes, who dared criticize Duke Ellington’s trumpet player Cootie Williams Crètin Dutombeau (“a pure idiot”), and surrealist writer Gérard Legrand, who in 1953 publishes a book on jazz, Lepetit, becomes “the small” (as opposed to “the big”, Le grand ). The battle against modernism obviously includes rifle shots against modern jazz styles: bebop fans become boppiomanics, new cool-jazz lovers are addressed to as trouducool (assholes). Hugues Panassiè’s harsh attacks against progressive jazz critics raise non-philosophical categories like “crass ignorance”, “thick incompetence” and “triumphant stupidity”; his personal reviews on the Bulletin include such expressions, addessed to his Parisian colleagues, like repugnant glavioteur, formidable imbecile, and “donkey of the pen”.

All this remembered, it is quite clear that Panassie’s unremitting critical activity was also interpreted as a sort of theatrical, sometimes noisy, spectacular self-promotion. His rather unique, always passionate, somehow naive artistry of criticism, miles away from any specific or related economic interest, might have a literary, though unknown source in Oscar Wilde’s renamed book The critic as artist. Panassié’s views, especially those concerned with jazz as an artistic and uncompromising music genre, influenced a whole generation of Italian and European contemporary collegues. Including Arrigo Polillo and Giancarlo Testoni, whose reviews from the late Forties to the Seventies shared some of these basic ideas, and whose activity, due to various reasons, was based, in economic terms, on amateurial rather than professional basis.  British jazz critic and piano player Leonard Feather (1914-1994) started his career writing musical chronicles and reviews on “Melody Maker” magazine in the thirties, and developing the same activities that Panassié and Delaunay were jointly developing in Paris (Delaunay later became a successful record producer for Vogue, selling over one million copy of a record by saxophone player Sidney Bechet, Petit Fleur, and the publisher of Jazz Hot). Relocating in New York just before WW2 like the other European jews (and jazz lovers) Alfred Lion, Dan Morgenstern, and Stanley Dance, Feather would soon become the most famous American jazz critic, but also, at the same time, a press agent, a record producer, a prolific author of music and lyrics, a regular contributor to radio and tv programs, a promoter and emcee of concerts and events. He was as active as Panassié, or even more, considering the quantity of musical activities going on in New York and in the USA. Music magazines, rather than newspapers, though he became a regular contributor to the “Los Angeles Times” in 1967, where the basis of his long committment to music criticism. Feather wrote for decades for the famous Chicago-based bi-monthly “Down Beat”, besides being for some time the co-editor, with Barry Ulanov, of ”Metronome”, and a qualified contributor to Arnold Gingrich’s “Esquire”, a magazine dedicated to general cultural and social items for which Feather also promoted recordings and readers’ polls. There is a basic difference between Panassié and Feather, besides the fact that the first hated modern jazz and the second became one of the most active promoters of bebop and the new generation of American modern jazzmen. It concerns the economic side of their lives. As already pointed out, Panassié was wealthy due to his familiar patrimoine, whereas Feather, who left a normal bourgeois family which by the way disapproved his move to the USA, had to struggle to earn a monthly income. The fact that he succeeded in making jazz his profession, being able, after nearly twenty years of activities based in New York, to buy in 1960 a house in Sherman Oaks, relocating with his family in the California, shows how brilliant he was in managing himself in such a difficult environment like the American music market; which, by the way, in respect to jazz, grossed enough money, in those years, to allow his career. While other US critics of the same generation, like Barry Ulanov and Marshall Stearns, earned their living with their monthly wages of University professors of Literature (Ulanov teaching at Princeton, Barnard College and Columbia, Stearns at New York and Hunter College), or, like John Hammond and Ira Gitler, were employed in record companies, Feather could only count on the modest payments coming from “Down Beat”, “Metronome” or “Esquire”. In order to increase his incomes, he was able to develop further careers in record production as an artist and repertoire producer, but at the same time as a composer of tunes and lyrics that musicians would record in his “Leonard Feather’s” 78rpm and LPs, which nearly always printed his name before or besides the musicians’ ones, sometimes even with a bigger type. Feather did the same thing for a long time working in parallel for the radio, where he regularly hosted musicians and played records often related to his personal activities of author, consultant or independent record producer (besides Jazz Club, which he conducted for some years, the most famous of these radio programs was Platterbrains, aired first by WNEW and then by WOR and ABC between the late thirties and the early fifties). Feather was able to develop the project of jazz record production (probably inspired by the work done in Paris by Panassié and Delaunay with their own label Swing) transforming it in a business in which he would act as an indipendent producer for minor or major labels, from Decca to RCA Victor, from Commodore to Musicraft. And to relate it in a sort of circular way to his radio programs, at the same time promoting it through his articles and reviews published by “Down Beat”, “Esquire” and other media. One might notice that the business relation between a record production, the press promotion and publicity of the same record done by its producer through favourable reviews (which were often Feather’s ones, either in “Down Beat” or in other periodicals, and media) raises an ethic principle which, in legal terms, can be described as a “conflict of interests”. Feather, who became famous also through some books and his best-selling, informative Encyclopedia of Jazz, first published in 1955 and then updated in expanded editions in the following decades[3], was a true music lover, a close friend of several important musicians like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, George Shearing, Benny Carter, but also a very skillful self-promoter. Afro-American singer Dinah Washington interpreted and recorded some of Feather’s best-selling pieces, for which he sometimes wrote the music and in other cases only the lyrics, like Evil Gal Blues, Blowtop Blues, Whisper Not, while Louis Jordan’s and B.B. King popularized his How Blue Can You Get, turning it into a smashing hit. But Feather did not only review his own produced records, he also promoted in advance, through his articles, musicians that would later find recording and performance opportunities benefiting from his press coverage. As British music historian and critic Alyn Shipton pointed out, “Feather’s skill at writing glowing advance press pieces about artists he was to record, including his own compositions on the session, and then reviewing his own productions as if he were an impartial critic, was almost an art form in itself ”.[4] In doing so, Feather strictly adhered to the sort of liberal ideology and economic rules that, typically, pervaded  the United States during the fifties and the sixties, but was also a rather unique case of a sort of jewish enterpreneurship. It’s not by chance that his first professional employment was with Irving Mills, Duke Ellington’s jewish publisher and manager, who used to co-sign with his name Ellington’s tunes even if he did not write a single note or word. All considered, we have to remember that Feather was a sincere and prepared advocate of jazz music, since he moved from London to New York to follow this lifetime passion.

Shipton’s quoted description of Leonard Feather’s obiquitous and interactive music functions perfectly matches the enterprises of an Italian jazz critic still alive, Franco Fayenz (1930). Padua-born, and keen both in jazz and in classical music, but also in chasing young women, acting as an expert flaneur, Fayenz developped since his youth a passion for concerts, which he began to organize within the students’ association of his hometown University, and for jazz historiography and criticism.  A brilliant chronicler for magazines and newspapers, including Il Giornale, for which he wrote forty years since the mid-seventies, Fayenz developed a parallel career either as a manager of American and European jazz musicians or as a free-lance radio author and discographical consultant, for Italian RCA, Pausa, Carosello and other labels. He actually replied what Feather had more or less done in the USA, that is promoting through the media, and especially with reviews, the musicians he was dealing with as a manager, most of them coming from the avant-garde and modern styles, from Ornette Coleman to Lee Konitz and Paul Bley, from Randy Weston to Sam Rivers and Leroy Jenkins’s Revolutionary Ensemble. He also acted as the music consultant of some national festivals and of a short-lived music club based in the very center of Milan, Motta’s Jazz Power, being payed at the same time by the property of the Club for his artistic direction and, as a percentage on their contracted fares, by the musicians he used to invite to play in the Club, and whom he would later review in magazines or newspapers, earning further profits.

Either Feather’s or Fayenz’ careers pertain to a liberally-oriented, private cultural market. The case of German critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922-2000), on the contrary, is an interesting example of professional criticism exerted within a “lib-lab” (liberal-labourist) kind of economic professional environment. Berendt entered the staff of a German public radio, Sudwstfunk of Baden-Baden, just after the end of WW2 (working with the head of the music division Heinrich Strobel, a classical musicologist and critic), as the main pop and jazz (since 1949, only jazz) expert of the radio, and, in the late fifties, also starting to make programs for the local television. He retired from SWF in 1987, and later sold his impressive personal collection of records, books, magazines and other materials to the City of Baden-Baden, which on this basis created a public Jazz Institut still alive, directed by Wolfram Knauer. In the early fifties Joachim-Ernst Berendt published the first edition of his Jazzbuch, which in the years would become, with many updated versions and over twenty translations in other languages, the best-selling book on this music in the whole world, with more than two million copies[5]. The unusually wide popularity coming from the international diffusion of his book helped Berendt to develop parallel cultural activities, aside his work within the radio, but also in strict cooperation with it, becoming a pioneer and somehow a recognized master of what, years after, would have been called co-productions. Like his American and European predecessors Hugues Panassié, Charles Delaunay and Leonard Feather, Joachim-Ernst Berendt actually began hosting radio programs, writing articles and reviews and organizing concerts and festivals. But, in parallel, he also produced records for such German labels as Saba and MPS, at the same time raising funds from Public Institutions like the Goethe Institute, or private companies, like Lufthansa, which sponsored for years several flights of the international and national musicians he was working with. The case of his discographical work at MPS as a music consultant is a perfect example of his cooperative abilities in music production: he used to conceive a certain project, for example the interaction of jazz and ethnic musicians from an European, Asian or even African country (this topic, by the way, was developed in a fourteen LPs record serie, called “Jazz Meets the World”, that would later inspire Manfred Eicher’s record label ECM in developing recordings dedicated to the so-called world music). Once the project was defined, Berendt would produce at the same time, with the same musicians and in the same period, radio programs, concerts and a record session on the chosen topic. Concerts might fall within one of the artistic directions of the Festivals he organized from the sixties to the early eighties, like the Berlin Jazz Days, Berlin Jazz Feast, or others. In order to promote this massive and interesting serie of musical activities, the German activist of jazz production and diffusion would need a media coverage and exposition which was not always assured, due to the envies and oscillating relations he would entertain with colleagues from the press and the other media.

His personal articles, interviews and reviews would therefore be strongly needed to either support his projects and his growing figure of music critic, somehow close to that of visual art experts and historians working for public institutions and private galleries, auction houses and markets. Throughout a lifetime collaboration with such magazines as German Jazz Podium, Polish (but international, English written) Jazz-Forum, Italian Musica Jazz and many others, Berendt would “prepare the field”, with interviews, reviews and articles, to the development of his serial activities, in a way that somehow looked similar to Feather’s one. But that, in terms of incomes, would be often bigger than Feather’s, cumulating his monthly salary from SWF radio, his fee as a consultant of MPS Records, both a fixed sum and a percentage on sales, and his honorarium as artistic director of a festival.

The quoted cases of Hugues Panassié, Leonard Feather, Franco Fayenz and Joachim-Ernst Berendt show sometimes very different approaches towards music criticism and diverging conceptions on how to develop a review. The same “item”, a review, can be written and handled according to different but sometimes related criteria and goals. In the beginning, Panassié’s approach to concert and record reviews was meant to be functional to the development of a theorethical, aesthetic approach to Afro-American music, and of a critical debate between different views on styles, individual players and racial categories. Just to quote two examples out of thousands, in one of his final essays (N 197 Dictionary) Panassié accused Miles Davis, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders to be “traitors to the cause of true black music,” whereas in the “Bulletin de l’Hot Club de France” and also in the last numbers “Jazz Hot” directed by him he labelled Charlie Parker and Miles Davis as people who had “given up jazz in favor of bebop, though being an extremely gifted musician“ (Parker) and “entirely deviated from jazz to cool, while in earlier times being a gifted musician” (Davis). Gender considerations, in Hugues Panassiè’s times, were not yet fashionable: they would by the way be dealt with, in the late forties and fifties, by Leonard Feather, who systematically promoted female jazz musicians like Jutta Hipp, Una Mae Carlisle, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Marjorie Hyms either for purely artistic reasons, for ideal values and for commercial purposes (referring to a specific category of Franco Fayenz’s experience, maybe Feather was also attracted by some of these talented young ladies, at the time all in their twenties). Panassié, as I noticed, used articles and reviews also to develop a sort of permanent personal self-promotion as an outstanding and respected critic. And a glorification and auto-election of himself as the Pope and Missionary-in-Chief (in Afro-American terms, a Sunday Morning Preacher) of a permanent mission on Earth, the catechizing and conversion of an indistinct and potentially massive amount of people to the religion of jazz, to its purest and the most authentic values (by the way, in his final years Panassié developed a “jazz acculturation” organizing regularly attended summer lessons and seminars, on individual basis and with specific prices, in his house in Southern France[6]. 

Compared to their French predecessor, Feather’s hyper-liberal approach and Berendt’s “lib-lab”, co-production oriented kinds of criticism and use of reviews look far more advanced in conception, and often useful insights in professional terms. But, notwithstanding all his candours and limits, Hugues Panassie’s various activities, linguistic inventions, political fights and personal anecdotes remain unrevalled. They all belong, somehow, to Oscar Wilde’s concepts on the value and scope of criticism, as expressed in his famous 1891 text The Critic as Artist[7]. As we know, Wilde’s essay is a conversation between two men, Gilbert and Ernest. Gilbert is the leading voice, while Ernest suggests ideas for Gilbert to reject. As Oscar Wilde notes: “Critical contemplation is guided by conscious aesthetic sense as well as by the soul. The soul is wiser than we are. It is the concentrated racial experience revealed by the imagination. Criticism is above reason, sincerity and fairness; it is necessarily subjective. It is increasingly more to criticism than to creation that future belongs as its subject matter and the need to impose form on chaos constantly increases. It is criticism rather than emotional sympathies, abstract ethics or commercial advantages that would make us cosmopolitan and serve as the basis of peace”.

[1] Charles Delaunay, Delaunay’s Dilemma. De la peinture au jazz, Editions W, Paris  1985, p. 123.

[2] Hugues Panassié, Le Jazz Hot, Correa, Paris 1934; The Real Jazz, Smith & Durrell, New York 1942 (in French, La veritable musique de jazz, Laffont, Paris 1946).

[3] Leonard Feather, The Jazz Years. Earwitness to an Era, Da Capo Press, New York 1978; The Encyclopedia of Jazz, Horizon Press; New York 1955 sgg.; Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler, The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, Oxford University Press, New York 1999.

[4] Alyn Shipton, Life of Dizzy Gillespie, Oxford University Press, New York 1999, p. 98.

[5] Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Das Jazzbuch, Fischer, Berlin 1953 (last English version, Joachim-Ernst Berendt and Gunther Huesmann, The Jazz Book. From Ragtime to the 21st Century, Lawrence Hill, New York 2009).

[6] Pierre Casalta, Monsieur Jazz. Entretiens avec Hugues Panassié, Stock, Paris 1975.

[7] Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, Zwirner, New York 2019.