For my fifth installment in Jazz Mirrors Iran, I'll look at a tune from a third country in which the secretive consociation between the American art form and Persian culture took place: France.
If you were in Paris during the cold winter of 1941, walking by the Seine and watching the German barracks, you could whistle a beautiful tune by Alix Combelle Orchestra, a song ironically called Strictement pour les Persans, or in English, Strictly for the Persians.
Strictement Pour Les Persans (Strictly for Persians) - Alix Combelle Orchestra
Paris’ underground resistance did not stay paralyzed for too long. To write the French off as cowards or conceding would be dismissive and inaccurate. A Parisian writer at the time was “incapable of surviving for long hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print,” silenced essayist Jean Guehenno observed. “He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him.” Satre himself had stated that artists and writers had a duty to tell the rest of France “not to be ruled by Germans.”
We all know that jazz played a significant role in uniting African-Americans under the oppressive Jim Crow laws. In Paris of 1941, even as a borrowed art form, it still manifested the self-empowerment to create a nationalistic identity at a point where the country was already fractured into rubble. Before the Nazi invasion of France, when news of an eventual war reached Paris, many African-American expatriate musicians left to return to the United States. Their sudden departure left the active French jazz scene on its own, and club owners found themselves without any entertainers or live music to supply the demand of tasteful customers.
