JAZZ ACCORDING TO SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Carleen Hardin
America Inside Out
18 December 2015

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Jazz music has been a prominent feature on the American scene for almost a century now.
It has infiltrated even the far reaches of the globe with its smooth tones and exuberant beats. One
could even say it is a force that has captured millions throughout the decades, remaining stalwart
through the myriad changes of American culture during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
According to jazz enthusiasts, jazz is representative of humanity and identity. It is comprised of
complex elements that correspond to the emotions and moods of the human soul. For some this
music stands for who they really are, deep down. It exposes the depth of human feeling in all its
jubilance and wretchedness. To some, jazz is alive, a living being in itself. This personification of
jazz may not be articulated anywhere better than by Simone de Beauvoir. In her travelogue
America Day by Day, de Beauvoir brings jazz to life as she writes of her self-impactful travels
throughout the country. In personal, social and cultural terms, the following literary exploration
will attempt to present a solid comprehension of de Beauvoirs juxtaposition between what she
describes as authentic jazz and counterfeit jazz.
In de Beauvoirs existentialist opinion jazz music was neither merely another one of
several existing musical genres to be enjoyed by a mass audience of mindless listeners, nor was
it a simplistic form of musicality, with a shallow depth and little complexity. Like many of the
abundant French jazz critics of the day, she believed that the new stuff in jazz music was close
to heresy. Jazz was a pure and uncorrupted art full of living energy, which expressed the
deepest forms of emotion and experience.1 As I read America Day by Day, I could not help but
sense de Beauvoirs excitement and adventurousness concerning America, its people and its
culture. Some of her experiences confirmed her suspicions of American culture while others
showed her elements of American society running contrary to her opinions. But almost nothing
was equal to her enthusiasm for jazz music. The excerpts on jazz in America Day by Day reveal
de Beauvoir to be (not surprisingly) a stark contrast to the racism prevalent in America. In her
descriptions of her encounters with jazz music, musicians and aficionados, the delineation
between authentic jazz and counterfeit jazz becomes ever clearer, and the authentic version
comes to be associated with the oppressed and discriminated and the counterfeit with the
oppressors and discriminators. If we put this delineation in historic context, it is obvious that
African Americans are the oppressed and the white majority is the oppressor. Although such a
racial binary in reference to music, or any element of American culture for that matter, may be
1 David Strauss, French Critics and American Jazz, American Quarterly 17, no. 3, 1965, 582-583.

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politically incorrect, slightly awkward or even clich, it clearly emerges de Beauvoirs writing
and becomes an undertone in her comments on jazz. And without this binary, interpreting her
writing becomes more difficult due to the binarys underlining prevalence throughout America
Day by Day.
So using the black/white binary, we can simplistically interpret authentic jazz to mean black
jazz and counterfeit jazz to mean white jazz. As a disclaimer, I do not feel that de Beauvoir
was lumping all white Americans into a generalized category and all black Americans into
another; she was not saying that all white Americans were desensitized mass-culture mongers2 or
that all black Americans were hyperemotional beings translating their personal pain through jazz.
On the contrary, through reading her daily excerpts, one gathers that she understands that there is
a complexity in race relations in America and that the culture is not always as clear-cut as black
and whiteand to try and decipher these elements takes much weeding through an extremely
dense history. Indeed, she proclaims that words, images, knowledge, expectationsthey wont
help me at all. To pronounce them true or false makes no sense. It is not possible to confront
things here; they exist in another dimensionthey are simply here.3 Although she makes her
sentiments known regarding American racial issues in America Day by Day, as we shall soon
see, she did not use much corrective language to berate the country for its mistakes nor did she
try to find solutions to the problems; she merely comments upon them, leaving no room for
doubt as to how she thinks about them, and moves on.
A main characteristic demarcating between authentic jazz and counterfeit jazz, according to de
Beauvoir, is emotionality. Authentic jazz radiates deep emotion whereas the counterfeit kind is
superficial. As she documents in her February 8 entry, de Beauvoir talks about American
literature and how some progressive American writers deride their shallow contemporaries as
sterile, and I cannot help but make the same connection to counterfeit jazz. De Beauvoir herself
states, Life can be too sterile if the novelist is too facile.4 And it seems appropriate here, for the
sake of this analysis, that novelist could be replaced with jazz or musician. Authentic jazz is
quite the opposite of sterileit is productive in that it transforms the emotion of an oppressed
people group into real music full of feeling that can be identified with. When de Beauvoir is in
2 Quite the contrary, de Beauvoir name-drops white American intellectuals such as Bernard Wolfe and Dwight
Macdonald who famously vehemently despised mass culture.
3 Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman, (Berkley: The University of California Press,
1999), 10.
4 Ibid, 51.

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New Orleans she and her companion search for real jazz played by black musicians, finally
discovering some in the Absinthe House. Her first impression is that they are transported and
that the music is nothing like the music at Caf Society or evenin Harlem. The small band
consisting of three black musicians plays only for itself and plays the way it feels like playing
(emphasis mine). This is a group of young black musicians led by the passionate depth of feeling
in their spontaneity, unlike the shallow counterfeit jazz blaring out of every radio in the country.
While speaking of another black jazz musician in a different excerpt, de Beauvoir says that jazz
is a way of life and reason for being. Just like the young man who puts his whole heart into his
trumpet playing, jazzs true dignity is that it is deeply emotional and transcends the moment.
The promptings of [the] heart are the conductors of authentic jazz, and because it is so
emotional, it can only be understood by those willing to go beyond stupefied in their listening.5
This examination of the emotionality of jazz, naturally leads to another distinguishing feature of
the authentic variety as compared to counterfeit variety: the representation of hardship. In
counterfeit jazz, a foremost component expressed by it is white privilege. Here, the black/white
binary comes fully into focus. Because of the hardships experienced by Black Americans at the
hands of a dominantly white, patronizing majority, it was assumed that blacks had a spirit of
their own, one which whites lacked, a kind of ferocity of rhythm, a violence which they call
swing. They also have a great deal ofbrutal sensitivity, absolutely not the sensitivity of
whites.6 Whether blacks really have more depth of feeling than whites is not exactly
quantifiable. However, their history is bursting with wounds that are felt to this day, and during
the height of jazz in which de Beauvoir writes, it was obviously no different; hard times impose
difficult emotions and a fuller sensitivity upon the suffering, and so the suffering possess deeper
feelings. Authentic jazz musicians reached into that depth and expressed their wounds through
their music. De Beauvoir put it succinctly when she said, If these men are often torments, its
because instead of keeping death at a distance, like other artists [perhaps those playing
counterfeit jazz], they are always mindful of the marriage of existence and death. The
background of deathmetaphorically and historically speakingis what authentic jazz
presents itself against. Back in New York, after her escapades in the South, de Beauvoir visits a
black church in Harlem. In her detailing of the church service, there is an interesting under-the5 Ibid, 222-226.
6 Strauss, American Quarterly, 583.

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surface comparison to jazz music. During the service there is much emotional religious fervor
among the congregants, but de Beauvoir instead of disparagingly writing it off as an intellectual,
she observes that the faithful have not taken leave of their senses, but are simply being
themselves. The wealth of feeling they express is something they possess in their daily lives.
This corresponds to the anecdote she relates in her April 11 excerpt. Here again she is at a club in
New York listening to jazz played by Sidney Bechet. De Beauvoir describes one black woman
who appears from a back room every so often to stand and listen to the music. According to this
account, the woman apparently has cares and troubles as shown by her tired face, but as she
listens to the jazz, her worn face is transfiguredand peace and joy have descended on her. As
she sways to the music, this woman forgets her troubles and transcends the moment into the
emotional refrain underlying the songs. In that transcendence the music justifies her difficult
life, and the world is justified for her. Negotiating through the poetic prose of de Beauvoir, we
can find her insinuation that in authentic jazz, there is a comfort for tortured souls, where cares
and burdens can be forgotten and one can simply exist in the moment, peacefully exalting in the
inspirational tones of the music. Counterfeit jazz on the other hand reeks of white privilege and
presents superficially sweet overtures to the listener. De Beauvoir refers to this jazz as a
bastardization of jazz, lacking the passion of the authentic version and emptiedof all
human and sympathetic content.7 Authentic jazz is tied to a past riddled with hardship, whereas
counterfeit jazz is surface, never hinting at any troubled past because it does not have oneit is
white and thus has no scars reaching from the haunted past to the equally burdened present.
Furthermore, as we look at de Beauvoirs discussion of jazz, we find that there is an element of
warmth she attributes to authentic jazz. While de Beauvoir recounts her evening spent at The
Savoy in New York, she outlines a distinction between the young black women she watches on
the dance floor and the white women she has met throughout her travels in America. On the
dance floor, the young black women dancing to the jazz music being played seem free. De
Beauvoir describes them as especially lively, which presents a highly different picture from the
coldness of white women. The white women were held back by archaic Puritanical morals,
trained from a young age to have control over themselves, never showing too much emotion,
never giving too much away. The young black women de Beauvoir observes possess an inner
relaxation, a carefree way of moving their bodies. It is apparent for the men on the dance floor
7 De Beauvoir, America, 225-226, 264-266, 275.

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as well, that their sensual life [is] unrestrained by an armor of Puritan virtue unlike most white
people of the day. This description corresponds, I believe, to de Beauvoirs view of authentic
jazz. There is a warmth and relaxation that radiates from authentic jazz, reaching out to the
listeners. In counterfeit jazz, there is not an overt sense of coldness per se, but one does not
exactly get a sense of unrestrained feeling that authentic jazz has. The warmth or coldness of
the specific jazz music in question is reflected in its listeners. According to de Beauvoirs
account, the black dancers in The Savoy display a freeness of spirit, an energy and warmth as
they dance to the authentic jazz being played. Then significantly, she juxtaposes the dancers and
the white Americans she has met. I doubt the coldness and Puritan virtue held so closely by
white Americans would have allowed them such liberty of expression. The jazz music played in
The Savoy that night, as de Beauvoir recalled, was perhaps the best in the worldtheres no
other place where it can more fully express its truthin the dancing, in the hearts and lives of
the people assembled there. Counterfeit jazz could never produce this sort of responseit is not
full of truth or warmth, it is just there swimming on the surface of expression and feeling. But
authentic jazz is a more complete reality, a pure idea.8
However, authentic jazz is not merely distinguished by emotionality, representation of hardship
or an expressive sense of warmth. There is another significant factor that de Beauvoir attributes
to the dividing line between authentic jazz and counterfeit jazz: commercialization. Like many
other intellectuals of the day, de Beauvoir despised commercialized art, or at least that is what
comes across while reading America Day by Day. In the simplest terms, authentic jazz is
intimate, not designed for the mass audience; counterfeit jazz, on the other hand, is
commercialized, created for the mass audiences connected by radio waves. Counterfeit jazz is
part of what Dwight Macdonald calls masscult, manufactured of the market and merely a
parody of High Culture. He goes even further to scorn mass culture saying, It is not just
unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art.9 Although I hesitate to call all jazz that was not
what de Beauvoir considered authentic as non-art or anti-art, I do have to agree that there is
a component within what she calls counterfeit jazz that seems to be profit driven,
commercialized and produced in such a way that there is no more appropriate title to be found
for it other than mass culture. Due to my limited knowledge of jazz, I, along with many other
8 Ibid, 38-39.
9 Dwight Macdonald, Masscult & Midcult, Against the American Grain, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1962), 3-4.

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unaware Americans, thought that authentic jazz included beloved voices such as Bing Crosby,
Frank Sinatra, or Nat King Cole (aka The Rat Packthe highly well-known and commercialized
marketing name for these men and others). The absence of their names in the intellectual
writings on jazz music of that time period and even of today is very conspicuous to the
newcomer of jazz study. But there is a reason their names are nowhere to be seen. They are not
participants in authentic jazz, however much fans would decry such a statement. They are part of
the counterfeit jazz culture created by and evolved from American capitalism and the desires of
the partakers of mass culture. They are merely entertainers, not artists.
In her February 8 excerpt, as she watches Louis Armstrong perform, De Beauvoir declares, The
American public has more or less murdered jazz, but they still love it. The fact that this
Armstrong performance was in Carnegie Hall confirms what de Beauvoir states, that he
(Armstrong) hardly plays except for commercial purposes, and then with one of those oversized
orchestras in which the intimacyof jazz is lost. The public applauds this commercialized form
of jazz just as much as the authentic jazzin the first part of the program.10 Counterfeit jazz
was so acceptable because it was what the white majority wanted, and producers and marketers
of the music shaped it according to those white preferences. And so it was proliferated to mass
audiences over the radio or on the silver screen, creating a myth that that was authentic jazz.
Counterfeit jazz is merely a commodity that attempts to appear authentic. In Theodor Adornos
essay On Jazz, he describes what I feel de Beauvoir would consider counterfeit jazz: The
elements in jazz in which immediacy seems to be present, the seemingly improvisational
momentsare added in their naked externality to the standardized commodity character in order
to mask it. In other words, counterfeit jazz tries to hide the fact that it is commercialized and
produced for the masses, that it is all done for profit. Its success would be jeopardize[d]if it
were to appear on the market undisguised.11 If this is held as a definition of counterfeit jazz,
then authentic jazz can be defined by opposite terms. Authentic jazz is never standardized nor is
it ever commercialized for a mass audience. It does not try to hide anything, but is an open
expression of the musicians who play it. The artists of authentic jazz care not for monetary
success, like their counterfeit counterparts, but play simply for the joy of it, most often in more
intimate settings, such as Absinthe House in New Orleans in de Beauvoirs narrative. Authentic
10 De Beauvoir, America, 52.
11 Theodor W. Adorno, On Jazz, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 473.

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jazz, like anything that clings to an unpopular truth, is belittled and pushed to the side by those
who arrogantly believe they are in the right, never examining the reality of things; yet it is also
held up as a banner to those trying to escape the stifl[ing] American civilization12 and, I would
add, the mundane mass culture of America. The audiences of authentic jazz may be small, but
they experience the truest form of jazz and derive from it a truer sense of having witnessed
passionate artistry.
After thoroughly exploring jazz as depicted by de Beauvoir, we can see how impactful jazz was
on her life. It was not simply another genre of music. It represented depth of soul and higher
values. Throughout America Day by Day there becomes clearly visible several lines drawn
between what she called authentic jazz and the counterfeit kind: black vs. white, emotional vs.
shallow, representative of hardship vs. white privilege, warmth vs. coldness and finally, intimate
vs. commercial. All of these factors make it apparent that authentic jazz is not meant for those
who skate along the surface of life, never knowing what it means to be marginalized, who take a
liking to something just because everyones doing it. Counterfeit jazz belongs to them.
Authentic jazz, however, is played simply for the joy of playing it, speaks to the heart, and brings
truth and vitality to the soul. It is not for the masses trudging along, but for the ones willing to
contemplate a pure Idea.13 To bring it full circle, I will repeat what was said in the beginning:
jazz is not just music, but an art form representative of humanity and identity, real, true and deep.

Bibliography

12 De Beauvoir, America, 53, 222.

13 Ibid, 39.

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Adorno, Theodor W. On Jazz. Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert. Translated by
Susan H. Gillespie, 470-495. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
De Beauvoir, Simone. America Day by Day, translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley: The
University of California Press, 1999.
Macdonald, Dwight. Masscult & Midcult. Against the American Grain, 3-75. New York: Da
Capo Press, 1962.
Strauss, David. French Critics and American Jazz, American Quarterly 17, no. 3, (1965): 582587.

Prospectus for Further Research

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The subject of jazz is a very interesting one. Since jazz music was so popular in the early to
mid-twentieth century, it undoubtedly had a great impact on American society as well as
European societies. Here I will list a few questions that could be further researched to gain a
greater perspective of jazz music:
1. What is the history of jazz music in the United States?
2. When did the white American majority accept jazz? When did it become commercialized
for that same majority? Were there certain cultural catalysts that prompted its acceptance?
3. When did American jazz become popular in Europe? Which American jazz
musicians/singers were the most popular in Europe during the heyday of jazz?
4. What were some common themes in jazz music and how were those themes reflective of
the time period?
5. Is there a certain psychology revealed in jazz music that is not seen in other genres?
Although this list could be more exhaustive, these questions could be a good starting point for
research. As far as primary sources go, I would look more in depth into works by Simone de
Beauvoir, Dwight Macdonald, Bernard Wolfe, and Theodor Adorno for a start. Then, of course,
from there I would proceed to secondary sources.
1. Primary sources:
a. Adorno, Theordor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002.
a. Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert. Translated by
Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002;
b. Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954.
c. Armstrong, Louis. Swing that Music. New York: Longmans, Green, 1938.
d. Crosby, Bing, and Pete Martin. Call Me Lucky. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1953.
e. Crosby, Ted. The Story of Bing Crosby. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1946.
f. De Beauvoir, Simone. America Day by Day, translated by Carol Cosman.
Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1999.
g. Macdonald, Dwight. Against the American Grain. New York: Da Capo Press,
1962.
h. Panassi, Hugues. Hot Jazz. New York: M.Witmark, 1936.
i. Panassi, Hugues. The Real Jazz. New York: Smith and Durrell, 1942.
j. Wolfe, Bernard, and Milton Mezzrow. Really the Blues. New York: Random
House, 1946.
2. Secondary sources:

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a. Balliet, Whitney. Jelly Roll. Jabbo & Fats: Nineteen Portraits in Jazz. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983.
b. Hobson, Wilder. American Jazz Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.
c. Leonard, Neil. Jazz and the White Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago,
1962.
d. Noble, Peter. Transatlantic Jazz: A Short History of American Jazz. London: The
Citizen Press, 1945.
e. Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
f. Parsonage, Catherine. A Critical Reassessment of the Reception of Early Jazz in
Britain. Popular Music 22, no. 3: 315-336.
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/stable/3877578.
g. Reisner, Robert George. The Literature of Jazz: A Preliminary Bibliography. New
York: New York Public Library, 1954.
h. Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1968.
i. Stearns, Marshall W. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
j. Williams, Lisa R. A Furious Battleground: World War I and the Development
of Jazz in American Popular Culture. Jazz Perspectives 8, no. 2: 153-184.
k. Williams, Martin T. Jazz Masters of New Orleans. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
l. Williams, Martin T. Jazz Panorama. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
m. Williams, Martin T. The Jazz Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press,
1970.
This list of sources is short; however, there are a plethora of jazz sources that could go on for
pages if listed out. Looking into the ones above would be a good starting point if one were to
research this topic further.
Possible hypotheses for some of the questions previously listed are as follows:
For question number two, I would suggest that jazz became popular with white Americans
during the early part of the twentieth century and probably started slowly becoming
commercialized with the proliferation of the radio in the home after WWI. For question three, I
believe that jazz became popular in Europe around the same time, around WWI. As for the most
popular jazz musicians or singers in Europe, I would have to research through several years
worth of sources to roughly hypothesize who the most popular artists were. Finally, for question
four, I would conjecture that love was a common theme, just like it is today. Overall, a lot of jazz
(perhaps more of the commercialized kind) were happy and peppy, not least of all during the

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World Wars when happiness was needed, so to generalize, I would say that most of the themes
were positive ones.
For jazz music, like any topic, there is so much more beneath the surface that one could
probably write a book to add to the mountain of sources already available. But although this
prospectus is not exactly exhaustive, I hope I gave a glimpse of the depth of what could be
further researched in the subject of jazz.