Sound of a City: A journey through Paris in 20 songs
Those of you that have visited Paris will know it’s a city in which the past lives in tandem with the present. This is especially true when it comes to its musical life. Indeed, to walk by lamplight from Montparnasse to Montmartre is to be consumed by centuries of sound, to relive its many golden ages as if they were all unfolding at once.
It’s impossible to talk of Paris without mentioning La Belle Époque, a period between the 1870s and the dawn of the First World War in which France’s cultural and artistic climate flourished, leading to the creation of some of the most intoxicating musical works of the day. Before the likes of Debussy, Saint-Sans, Bizet, Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel, Germany was regarded as the centre of European musical excellence.
Together, these composers helped cement France as the home of a more impressionistic, modernist form of orchestral music. This was, of course, also an era of colonial expansion. The musical traditions of France’s colonies are perceivable in the experimental scales Debussy, Ravel and Satie pioneered in their music. Certainly, without Javanese Gamelan music, there would be no ‘Clair de Lune’.
Both Debussy and Satie found their start in the city’s various cabarets, including that impossibly famous den of Bohemian experimentalism, Le Chat Noir. Such spaces remained important social hubs well into the 1920s when Paris began soaking up American jazz music. After the First World War, it stepped into a new era of musical innovation.
The city welcomed American ex-pat composers like Cole Porter and George Gershwin, the latter of whom turned the noise of Parisian traffic into music in his symphonic poem An American in Paris. The era-defining performer Josephine Baker also arrived in the 1920s. Like so many before, Baker made her name in the smoky womb of clubland, where she performed her notorious ‘Danse Sauvage’, a seminude routine in which she wore a G-String ornamented with a dress of bananas.
The good times came to an end in 1940 when the Nazis marched into Paris and seized control. Baker retreated from public view, swapping her diamond-encrusted headpiece for a modest beret – the symbol of the French resistance. Other notable singers of the inter-war era, such as Edith Piaf, did not disappear so readily. The occupation failed to extinguish the ‘La Vie en Rose’ singer’s career and her need for love. Indeed, in 1944, Piaf travelled to the Moulin Rouge, where she fell in love with her collaborator, the singer Yves Montand.
During the occupation, the Nazis banned jazz because it was too decadent. It returned to Paris on August 25th, 1944, when the US Army arrived. After hooking up a record player to a loudspeaker tethered to a truck, Voice of America program director Sim Copans began broadcasting snippets of George Gershwin and other American artists. As the sound of Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie floated across the city, the people of Paris began to realise that the clouds of war had finally parted.
By the late 1950s, Paris was home to many of the leading figures in American jazz, including Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, all of whom came to the city to perform at the Paris Jazz Concert. It’s little wonder, then, that jazz made its way into Martial Solal’s lush orchestral score for Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
Orchestral music was also alive and well, with Quincy Jones travelling to the city to study composition under Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. Of course, by the 1960s, musician tastes had started to shift towards rock and roll. It wasn’t long before singers like Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc had control of the airwaves. A whole new era was about to begin. Below, we’ve put together a playlist that captures the sound of Paris – the perfect musical accompaniment to your own exploration of the city.
Listen below.
