La Revue du jazz
- Place of Publication: Paris, France
- Language: French
- Date of Publication: 1929-1930
- Periodicity: Monthly
- Editors: René Cezard & Krikor Kelekian,
- Publishers: Agence Orchestria
- Type: Full Text
- Introduction by: Zoe Drajem
La Revue du Jazz was the first periodical dedicated exclusively to jazz and dancing music in France. In the first issue dated July 1929, the editors claimed that France had been lacking a review of its kind, writing, “The Americans have the Métronome, the English the Melody Maker, the Germans Der Artist, we in turn have the Revue du Jazz.” Krikor Kelekian, known as Grégor, and René Cézard founded the Revue in an attempt to fill that gap. Their publication provided a professional, rigorous, neutral analysis of jazz that maintained the sense of intimacy of “their little world.”
A musician himself, Grégor was deeply invested in the journal as a promotional tool for French jazz musicians and the emerging jazz scene. He encouraged other local musicians to contribute: Ray Ventura, a key orchestra leader, Stéphane Mougin, a pianist who later went on to start Jazz-tango, and Hugues Panassié, clarinetist and the eventual founder of Jazz-Hot. The vast majority of the Revue was dedicated to intimate happenings in Paris and abroad, the boldest section being a column entitled “les petits potins” (“the latest gossip”) which printed the kind of stories one could overhear at a cafe. Each issue also typically included some opinion pieces on the state of jazz, critiques of instrumental groupings, reviews of the latest records, and letters from readers. On these topics the review took a strong pro-musician, and especially pro-French stance – often completely excluding the United States in their news from abroad.
Their small readership likely would have come across the twenty page publications in newspaper vending boxes around Paris, select storefronts, or simply circulated within their social circles.1 After less than a year however, the journal could not survive. Their final publication in February 1930 suggests that Grégor’s investment in the project was not enough to overcome the challenge of procuring stable contributors and distributors. Despite the limited scope and short lifespan of the journal, the commitment to taking jazz seriously in print, and cataloguing the activity within the scene was itself a significant action that helped legitimize jazz in a social environment that was still hesitant to embrace it. The mechanisms for legitimization, in this case, relied on the negation of American jazz in favor of “refined” French and European jazz. In defining European jazz as its own kind of music, the Revue perhaps aimed to cast aside social concerns about Blackness. The questions of how to present jazz in print, and what jazz even is, would continue to be core critical debates investigated for years to come in the subsequent French journals Jazz-tango, and Jazz-Hot.
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1 La revue du jazz, Vol. 1 no. 1 (July 1929): 1. “La confiance que vous nous témoignerez en diffusant la Revue du Jazz dans votre entourage sera pour nous, chers collègues, le plus parfait des stimulants et la première étape vers le succès définitif.” La revue du jazz, Vol. 1 no. 4 (October 1929): 1. “La revue du jazz est en vente à Paris dans tous les kiosques, chez Bouju, et au Tabac, 1 rue fontaine.“