PANASSIÉ, Hugues.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Histoire du vrai jazz, original holograph manuscript. The original handwritten manuscript of the work published as Histoire du vrai jazz (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1959), by the influential French critic, historian and producer Hugues Pannasié (1912-1974), attractively presented in a box titled "La vraie histoire du jazz", his original working title.Pannasié was a founding figure of the Hot Club de France (1931) and Le Jazz Hot magazine (1935), among the first and most fervent European advocates of jazz. His books, written with irrepressible passion, were instrumental in defining France's understanding of the music and its African American roots. To him, "true" jazz was the authentic, blues-based tradition of New Orleans and Chicago; he scorned the dance-band jazz of the 1920s and 30s as a "commercial counterfeit" and dismissed bebop as "a form of music distinct from jazz". Yet his influence on transatlantic jazz culture was profound.The manuscript comprises 15 chapters tracing the music's development from its origins to the 1950s, opening with a 7-page introduction in which Pannasié sets out his credo: jazz is "the musical language of another race", one that whites can learn only through sympathetic immersion. Extensively revised in ink and red pencil, the pages vividly record his working process, with alternative titles, corrections, and interpolations. There are also notes in another hand, probably that of an assistant.This is a remarkable working document from one o

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