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“I Love Paris,” the winter series for the Oregon Festival of American Music, starts this week. The concerts showcase the cross-pollination between French and American music.
It’s French week at the Shedd, as the Oregon Festival of American Music’s winter series this year focuses on the interplay between French and American jazz.
“In the early days of jazz, jazz musicians were going to Paris because France was one of the first places in the world, even before the United States, to recognize jazz as truly an art form and not just some kind of a novelty,” said Chuck Redd, the music director of the festival.
It was a genre that traditional music gatekeepers had long looked down on. Redd compared the energy in France around imported American jazz to the birth of the punk scene in New York City, a kind of radical excitement.
The five-day festival, called “I Love Paris” and taking place at Eugene’s Shedd Institute for the Arts, includes American odes to the City of Lights, the works of American musicians who found success in France and French anthems that became known across the Atlantic.
Tickets are available online and by phone, 541-434-7000, for each of the concerts. The festival starts Wednesday, Jan. 21, and runs through Sunday, Jan. 25.
Here’s your guide to the concerts in “I Love Paris,” along with one song from each program to ease you in:
Hot Club +
If you had to pick out an early non-American jazz star to highlight in a tour of French music, the Belgian-born Romani guitarist Django Reinhardt is a solid choice.
Reinhardt, who became known for a burgeoning genre of “gypsy jazz” with his Quintette du Hot Club de France, taught himself to improvise after hearing jazz records that made it to Europe. He and violinist Stéphane Grappelli were encouraged by Charles Delaunay, who led the jazz appreciation group Hot Club de France, to form the group that would become the quintet.
The Quintette’s music was unlike imports from New Orleans and early swing bands, Redd said, which had music based in horn sections. Reinhardt and his peers played all strings, with three guitars, a bass player and a violin. But their music was anything but gentle acoustics. (Unlike the Hot Club performances, which were strictly instrumental, the Shedd will have vocalists singing along.)
“They were really swinging,” Redd said. “They were really giving it that groove that they’ve been hearing Americans do so much. Django was the catalyst for that kind of heat.”
Listen to: “Tears,” by Django Reinhardt and the Quintette du Hot Club de France
Saxophonist, author and jazz educator Carl Woideck will discuss the Hot Club on Wednesday, Jan. 21, at 5 p.m. in the Shedd’s Sheffer Recital Hall.
À Paris: The City of Songs
There are so, so, so many songs written about Paris. This concert, including the festival’s namesake Cole Porter tune, is a collection of those songs, often written by American artists: Bud Powell’s “Parisian Thoroughfare,” Vernon Duke and Yip Harburg’s “April in Paris,” Duke Ellington’s “Paris Blues.”
Bonus: Vocalist Lynnea Berry will sing a song called “Mambo de Paree,” recorded by Eartha Kitt. Redd, who worked with Kitt for two weeks in Washington, D.C., when he was in his early 20s, got to know the iconoclastic star firsthand.
“Who knows, I might even tell my Eartha Kitt story,” Redd said, as he declined to tell Lookout the Eartha Kitt story. “They have to come to the show to hear that.”
Listen to: “I Love Paris,” written by Cole Porter for the musical “Can-Can”
Jim Ralph, the Shedd co-founder and executive director, will talk about the program and the many songs written about Paris on Thursday, Jan. 22, at 5 p.m. in the Shedd’s Sheffer Recital Hall.
Mise-en-scène: Paris in Song
This concert is also centered on songs about Paris, but from a different perspective: these songs are largely written by French musicians and specifically tied to a scene, vignette or other narrative moment told through song.
Siri Vik, who is both directing and singing in this concert, said she’s performed various revues of French music for 16 years at the Shedd, and wanted to use this year’s winter festival to survey her repertoire.
She had found French lyricists to be heavily detailed, often on different parts of Paris, pointing to Charles Trenet’s “Menilmontant” as a key example of directly evoking a Parisian scene.
“What you get is just a ton of specificity,” Vik said. “You just feel like you’re sitting there in the cafe.”
Listen to: “Menilmontant,” by Charles Trenet
Ralph will talk about the songs in Mise-en-scène, with special focus on Édith Piaf, Charles Trenet and Jacques Brel, on Friday, Jan. 23 at 5 p.m. in the Shedd’s Sheffer Recital Hall.
Joie de Vivre
This concert focuses on one sliver of American musicians who found success overseas: Black American jazz musicians who crossed the Atlantic in the 20th century and made artistic homes in France.
“Joie de Vivre” focuses on three such musicians, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins and Eddie South, who turned to the concert halls and ensemble bands of Europe as both glitzy performing opportunities and respites from the Jim Crow-era racist codes of the United States.
“They were treated almost like kings,” Redd said. “They were really celebrated as great artists and they didn’t have to go through the back door. They didn’t have to stay in the wrong part of town.”
Listen to: “Petite Fleur,” by Sidney Bechet
Woideck will discuss Bechet and Hawkins’ time in Europe between World War I and World War II on Saturday, Jan. 24, at 5 p.m. in the Shedd’s Sheffer Recital Hall.
