CENTER FOR JAZZ ARTS PRESIDENT MEETS WITH FRENCH AMBASSADOR TO THE U.S., JEAN-DAVID LEVITTE, IN LOS ANGELES April 17, 2004 Los Angeles --- Center for Jazz Arts president Guy DeFazio recently met with French Ambassador to the U.S. Jean-David Levitte to discuss the CJA's future plans for the launch of its Paris branch center. Affirming their shared commitment to advancing the long-standing ties between the American and European people, both maintained the importance of creating new channels of cultural and social understanding between the U.S., France, and Europe. Following his personal showing of support for the work of the CJA, Ambassador Levitte presented a public address to a distinguished gathering of Los Angeles business leaders, stressing that both the French government and the French people continue to maintain the same shared values of individual freedom and enlightenment as those of the U.S., and that as the world continues to move forward on a path of globalization, even stronger trans-Atlantic ties would be central to that progress. Widely acknowledged as one of the first European capitals to open the door for American jazz culture to flourish throughout all of Europe, beginning in the early twentieth-century, and serving as a beacon of artistic freedom for scores of European and American artists, the French capital of Paris has provided the setting for some of the most important literature, art, and music of our time. As just a few examples of the American literary icons whose work in 1920s France will forever be considered as some of their most significant, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrud Stein all created extraordinary and defining works while there, and it would, indeed, be during this same period when American author F. Scott Fitzgerald would go on to coin the phrase "The Jazz Age," in the writing of his most widely recognized novel "The Great Gatsby." Completed and published in 1925, "The Great Gatsby" continues to be regarded as one of the most profoundly American novels of its time. In July of 1928, at the forefront of the rapidly-changing world of contemporary music, and just prior to receiving an offer to compose for the "talking pictures" that would take him from New York to Hollywood, American composer George Gershwin stated in a personal letter to a friend, "I should like to spend the rest of my life working mornings in New York and spending evenings in Paris." At the time, Gershwin had recently completed the last of several trips to Europe, where he had met with and befriended numerous, leading European composers, including Prokofiev, Milhaud, Stravinsky, Poulenc, and others. Several months later, in October of 1928, the New York Philharmonic would premiere George Gershwin's newly completed symphonic work "An American In Paris." Nearly a decade earlier, in 1919, African-American musical pioneer Sidney Bechet had traveled to Europe, first appearing at London's Royal Philharmonic Hall, where his New Orleans inspired performances would result in one of the earliest known pieces of serious jazz criticism, from Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet. Ansermet would praise the young, twenty-two-year-old American as "an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet … his performance was gripping, abrupt, with a brusque and pitiless ending like that of Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto. I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius; as for myself, I shall never forget it, it is Sidney Bechet." The following year, Sidney Bechet would make his first appearance in Paris, performing at the Apollo Theatre in Montmartre, where numerous, other, pioneering creative figures, from Berlioz and Picasso to Degas and Van Gogh, had previously established that area of the city as one of the artistic centers of Paris life. Also arriving in Paris during this same period was the experimental American photographer Man Ray, whose passion for integrating the innovation of Surrealism with the glamour of the Paris fashion industry would lead to one of his most widely-recognized works "The Violin of Ingres," juxtaposing the symbol of a violin onto the back of the nude, female model Alice Prin. Coming onto the Paris scene in 1921, Man Ray would go on to support himself as a professional fashion and portrait photographer, and would quickly become known internationally for his portraits of the intellectual elite of 1920s Europe, including such renowned figures as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Schoenberg, and Henri Matisse. An inseparable part of early twentieth-century Paris, the experience and attraction of American jazz culture had immersed all of these innovators of "the modern world" in a spirit of the times that would continue to dominate popular culture for decades to come. About the CJA: Established in 2004, the Center for Jazz Arts is an international institution devoted to the study and advancement of American jazz culture throughout the visual, literary, and classical arts, around the world. Through its primary operations in Los Angeles, it is building a prominent new platform of engagement for students, artists, educators, and the broader public, from every generation. For more information contact: Public Relations Center for Jazz Arts (866) 950-5200 info@centerforjazzarts.com [ back to top ]