French Music and Jazz in Conversation

Deborah Mawer is Research Professor of Music at Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University. Her books include The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (2006), Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (1997), Ravel Studies (Cambridge, 2010) and The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (Cambridge, 2000). Her articles and reviews, also encompassing jazz and dance, have appeared in a variety of books and journals, including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music and Letters, Opera Quarterly, Music Theory Online and Music Analysis. In 2008 she was awarded a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship.

• Introduction. French music and jazz: cultural exchange; Part I. Locations and Relations: 1. A historical-cultural overview; 2. Critical-analytical perspectives: intertextuality and borrowing; Part II. The Impact of Early Jazz upon French Music (1900–35): 3. Debussy and Satie: early French explorations of cakewalk and ragtime; 4. Milhaud's understanding of jazz and blues: La Création du monde; 5. Crossing borders: Ravel's theory and practice of jazz; Part III. The Impact of French Music upon Jazz (1925–65): 6. Hylton's interwar 'jazzed' arrangements of French classics; 7. (Re)moving boundaries? Russell's Lydian jazz theory and its rethinking of Debussy and Ravel; 8. Bill Evans's modal jazz and French music reconfigured; 9. Milhaud and Brubeck: French classical teacher and American jazz student.

'This is the book for which jazz scholarship has long been waiting: at last, the hugely significant interactions between jazz and modern concert music have been unravelled with the insight, technical understanding and contextual awareness they deserve. Professor Mawer delves deeply into this two-way process in a series of fascinating case studies which celebrate some of the most exciting and far-reaching musical cross-fertilizations of the twentieth century.' Mervyn Cooke, Professor of Music, University of Nottingham