I’d like to start by saying I don’t think it can be completely chalked-up to indifference. I think Jordan addressed it best when he acknowledged there was both an aspect of revolt and intrigue, which I think is a fairly standard response to any new form of music that comes out – especially when the music is perceived as more “stripped-down” than other styles of music.
I’m almost tempted to claim that most of the reviews not only can but should be taken with a grain of salt. We have to remember this was a difficult time for Parisians who wanted to determine their own national identity separate from all other nations’. One of the difficulties of reconciling with the onslaught of jazz music upon French culture is the fact that not only is it a fairly American ideal – something the French respected but also kept at arm’s length – but the French have an established vision of their own ethnicity, whereas Americans can only lay claim to nationality; not ethnicity. While Africans and African culture had already been established in France for however many years before, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whiter side of the French were tentative to acknowledge that this group had a profound impact on popular music of the 1920’s, given that this goes against certain critics’ notions of what constituted French music, such as Jon Cocteau, who argued French music has to be from a native-born Frenchman/woman.
Taking the above into account, I believe it’s a simple case that many of these musicians simply didn’t know how to address the music they were hearing (one only needs to look at how anyone outside of rap or hip-hop writes criticisms about the genre to see what I’m talking about, more addressed later). In our current era, we also have the privilege of using certain terminology that has been academized and put into our standard vernacular, such as “fixed” versus “flexible” time signature; the prior being the result of jazz and pop music, the former being fairly standard within most of the western classic canon. The main difficulty comes when we’re addressing notions of primitivity, as now we’re addressing power dynamics. Certain French composers likened “primitivity” to “naivety” and, in certain cases, “child-like”. This is more than indifference, this is a blatant insult. Bizet even went as far as to compare it to the jungle, claiming it was “nostalgic and barbaric litany” (106, Jordan). Josephine Baker, however, was able to make an entire career off of live jazz musical performance, claiming it was, “a sign of originality and naturalism” and “expressed a ‘more sure and delicate taste'”.
Levinson, in my opinion, demonstrates an example of a critic trying to keep it at arm’s length at its best. Levinson tries to be objective, but he still refers to Josephine Baker’s dancing as if it were savage, writing that she, “…is able with one bound to join her savage forefathers and with another to go back to our common animal ancestors,” (75, Levinson). On top of this, he later goes on to claim that rhythm is not an art form in itself. This is blatantly untrue, however. According to one of the more formal and western definitions of what makes music “music”, it needs three different things: melody, harmony, and rhythm. If he’s going to address a classical, western definition of music, he has to admit that rhythm is worth addressing. My main problem is he’s taking something new and contemporary and comparing it to something that has been studied and established much longer in the same canon. I think the fact that we’re still talking about this today demonstrates that there was a real audience for this music. It sounds like some of the more formal scholars weren’t impressed by comparison, but the problem is they never created new metrics through which to judge the music.
To reinterpret what I’ve been saying, maybe the critics are irreverent towards French artists. The fact that musicians were able to make a livable career on it, however, speaks to a greater reality: the music was still enjoyed, regardless of what all forefathers believed. Like I addressed earlier, how did people in the 90’s refer to rap and hip-hop music? It was base, it was simple, repetitive, everything that all the music critics of previous generations couldn’t understand through traditional metrics. Farther back, what did they think of rock & roll when it first came out? Something similar in criticism, and yet rock and rap/hip-hop have both produced musicians who have gone on to win some of the most prestigious awards possible. I think it’s the same old story, whether it’s the 90’s, 50’s, or France in the 20’s.