Some like it hot. The commercialisation of Jazz in interwar France

This work is a study of the effects of the pre-existing material, commercial and institutional factors that influenced the reception of jazz in interwar France. These factors not only offered the music a steady passage through the period but also shaped the evolution of the music as well as the venues in which it was performed, reflecting the tastes, class, spending power and, sometimes, the ethnicities of its audiences. Jazz, especially hot jazz, became special in France and the French exposition of its aesthetic values as a true art music became internationally acknowledged. How this all came about, the various factors that shaped these outcomes and the traditional practices they relied on are the subject of this thesis.