I thought this morning that it was time for some hot jazz and so I turned to the music of the Avalon Jazz Band. The band was formed in New York in 2014 by vocalist Tatiana Eva-Marie and violinist Adrien Chevalier. Their musical style is inspired by the sort of jazz played in Paris in the 1930s and 40s, especially by the ‘Hot Club de France’, founded by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, whose repertoire consisted of original music and jazz standards. This French style of hot jazz then became what we now know as “Gypsy jazz” or “Jazz Manouche”. The Avalons also bring the zazou element to the mix: an ingenuous and mischievous joie-de-vivre.
The Zazous, the “swing kids” of Paris, were a subculture in France in the 1930s and 1940s. They were obsessed with American swing: their way of expressing their nonconformity and rebelling against the war was through dance and jazz (a forbidden music during the German occupation), displaying a very insolent kind of joy, which caused them to be aggressively marginalized. They wore big eccentric clothing, checkered and colorful, had long hair and always carried an umbrella when it didn’t rain, to underline the irony of their time. When the yellow star was forced on Jews, the Zazous began to wear yellow stars with ‘Swing’ written on them. They became persecuted and gathered in the medieval cellars in the Latin Quarter, the heart of jazz culture in Paris.
Our next selection is ‘Si Tu Vois Ma Mere’ (Have you seen my mother?) by Sidney Bechet, the father of the alto sax. (we shall hear more of him in the future)
Here they are playing Tatiana’s grandmother’s favourite song “Bésame Mucho” written in 1940 by Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velázquez.
