‘Hot clubs’ proliferated all over Europe and the United States during the 1930s. For a brief period (1935–6), they joined forces in an International Federation of Hot Clubs (IFHC), the main purpose of which was to link together devotees in search of American hot jazz recordings at a time when they were difficult to find and buy in Europe, since that sub-genre was less popular and commercially successful than what was then called ‘straight’ jazz. The expression ‘hot jazz’ was coined by jazz musicians at the end of the 1920s and referred to a style based on performance and improvisation rather than on the composition and performance of written parts. A founder of the Hot Club de France (HCF) in 1932, the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié was the first to establish a hierarchy between these two styles:
Straight means […] playing the text as written […] This formula is most often employed in large ensembles led by Paul Whiteman, Jack Hylton and Ray Starita, etc. […] This formula […] is also the least representative of the true physiognomy of jazz. On the contrary, hot jazz, which is much less well-known in France, is the true form of jazz. Hot jazz consists in performing a tune with fantasy, without paying too much respect to its original melody.Footnote 104
The distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘straight’ jazz may sound peculiar, as the characteristics of hot jazz broadly correspond to the definition of jazz in general, as we commonly refer to it nowadays. However, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the term applied to only one part of the repertoires that were regarded and categorized as ‘jazz’. Some of the most popular jazz musicians, combos and orchestras (including Paul Whiteman, Jack Hylton and Ray Starita) fell into Panassié’s ‘straight jazz’ category. Initiated by Panassié and the American jazz critic Marshall Stearns, the IFHC helped to promote the leading figures of hot jazz (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Bix Beiderbecke, among others), who were then little known to a European audience. The IFHC also fostered exchanges between national hot clubs, especially in Europe. Tracing the history of this organization is of particular interest for the study of international institutions and internationalism in music. That such an institution was short-lived raises three overarching questions about internationalism in music during the interwar period. To what extent was it based solely on shared ideals and passion for this music? Was it homogeneous – were all countries involved put on an equal footing in international music institutions? Was it reciprocal – did all countries take similar advantages of exchanges fostered by international music institutions or, in the case of jazz, were European countries only following initiatives coming from the United States?
In addition to questioning the ideals of music internationalism, this article also has a historiographical ambition – to try to break down the national compartmentalization of previous and current historiography of interwar jazz in Europe.Footnote 105 The IFHC is an ideal case study for exploring the implications of going beyond this nation-centred historiography by illustrating the tensions between internationalism as a topic and internationalism as an approach. There are many challenges to undertaking such a wide-ranging history, of which dealing with a plurality of languages is only one. In order to emphasize the polyphonic dimension of internationalism both as a topic and a method of investigation, this article will draw on research and archival materials from American, Belgian, Dutch, English, French and Spanish sources. The American perspective on the IFHC will be taken into account as well. In addition to examining this federation from its inception in 1935 to its silent dissolution from 1936 onwards, the article will discuss what I term ‘jazz internationalism’ as an initial step towards a deeper understanding of European jazz.
Asymmetry, networking and international commonality: three aspects of jazz internationalism before the creation of the IFHC
Jazz internationalism was asymmetrical in terms of its power relations even before the creation of the IFHC. Jazz from European countries was most often seen as subordinate or derivative in relation to jazz from the USA; this imbalance can be seen in the commercial arrangements of jazz sheet music and record companies, as much as in the categories and rhetoric deployed by jazz periodicals. American record firms established local branches in European countries, or they sold the rights to sell American sheet music or recordings to European publishers. For example, the Columbia label was introduced into Europe in 1900,Footnote 106 and during the 1920s, the founder of the Belgian ‘International Music Company’, Félix-Robert Faecq, was in constant touch with American and European editors in order to acquire the right to market their catalogues in Belgium.Footnote 107 During the interwar years, this asymmetry coincided with the respective status of US and European jazz within international jazz discourse and categorizations.Footnote 108 In Faecq’s jazz journal Music (1924–39), for instance, monthly lists of hits were divided into an ‘international’ category and various national categories. Without exception, the ‘international’ category exclusively consisted of US tunes, whereas national sections were mostly devoted to European countries. Thus, despite ideals of mutual cooperation (especially after the First World War),Footnote 109 ‘internationalism’ more often referred to forms of hegemony, revealing very unequal power relations between the countries in question. This also explains why the first histories of jazz almost exclusively dealt with the USA without specifying the name of this country in their title.Footnote 110
Prior to the creation of the IFHC, jazz internationalism was also shaped by European journals, which – much more than their American equivalents – gathered an international network of jazz critics and musicians. Sections were devoted to news for different countries, which included America of course, but also European countries. As a consequence, journals such as the French Jazz‑Tango and Jazz Hot, the British Rhythm, Melody Maker and Tune Times, the Belgian Music, the Dutch Jazzwereld and the Spanish Musica viva and Jazz Magazine regularly translated or reproduced interviews and articles by foreign specialists. Many European jazz journals contained a large number of articles on American jazz, reflecting its dominance. The reverse was not true, as European jazz and European critics were almost completely absent from American journals such as Downbeat.
There was also an intra-European dimension to this discourse, since a good share of the international sections of the aforementioned journals were devoted to other European countries. Such transatlantic and intra-European internationalism is found in Jazz Hot, a journal launched by Panassié in March 1935. It was entirely bilingual (French and English) and could be bought in Belgian, Swiss, British, Dutch and Spanish shops.Footnote 111
Jazz Hot employed an important network of contributors (see Table 1), two thirds of whom were European, and one third American. European jazz life was, therefore, regularly covered. Panassié began to build this close-knit network between 1930 and 1935, when he worked for the French journal Jazz-Tango. It was based on reciprocal exchange, with European collaborators regularly inviting one another to contribute to their respective journals. This is how the French jazz critic and record collector Charles Delaunay’s reviews of the Parisian jazz scene came to be published in the Spanish Jazz Magazine. Footnote 112 By the same token, a series of articles written by the British pianist Billy Mayerl for the Keith Prowse Courier was featured in Music. Footnote 113 As early as 1926, translating texts about jazz in order to foster their international circulation in European journals was common practice. The last major aspect of jazz institutional internationalism before the creation of the IFHC lies in the increasing number of national hot clubs from 1932 to 1935, both in liberal democracies and in fascist and Nazi regimes, where a jazz culture still existed in the 1930s.Footnote 114 These clubs played a key role in the production and dissemination of hot jazz records in America and Europe, but their second major goal was the gathering together of local fans. Between early 1932 and late 1935, clubs did not actively seek to develop links with one another. In other words, before the creation of the IFHC, the jazz world was an international one by happenstance; internationalism as a self-conscious political strategy had no place in it.
Table 1 Contributors to the first issue of Jazz Hot
| Contributor | Nationality | Number of contributors |
|---|---|---|
| Henri Bernard, Charles Delaunay, André Ekyan, Madeleine Gautier, Pierre Gazères, Georges Herment, Georges Hilaire, Stéphane Mougin, Hugues Panassié, Michel Prunières, Léo Vauchant | France | 11 |
| Jeff R. Aldam, Stanley Dance | United Kingdom | 13 |
| Michel Andrico | Romania | |
| Dietrich Schulz, Perrin Strikes | Germany | |
| Henk Nielsen Jr, Jaap Sajet, Joost Van Praag | The Netherlands | |
| Ezio Levi | Italy | |
| Alexander Landau | Poland | |
| M. Philipott, N. Suris | Spain | |
| P.-E. Beha | Switzerland | |
| Bernard Addison, Louis Armstrong, Bennie Carter, Garnet Clark, George Frazier, Ad. de Haas, John Hammond, Wilder Hobson, Preston Jackson, Helen Oakley, Marshall Stearns, Edgar Wiggins, Spencer Williams | USA | 13 |
The chronological coincidences displayed in Table 2 raise the question of the connection between the creation of the various hot clubs. Did they result from similar contexts and needs in different countries, or from the imitation of the French and/or Belgian model in European countries and in the USA? In the case of European hot clubs, both answers are valid. The creation of these institutions was a consequence of a common context in the early 1930s: the discovery of a new style of jazz by a small group of fans, through American records; and the difficulty of accessing these records in Europe. Besides this European commonality, French and Belgian hot clubs served as a model that was rapidly known and emulated in other countries, thanks to the aforementioned international networks. For instance, it was Stearns who, in 1935, asked Panassié if he would let him found his own organization (the Yale Hot Club), after the model of the HCF, which he noticed was efficient in giving hot jazz more visibility.Footnote 116
Table 2 Hot clubs and their establishment, as recorded by European jazz journals
| Date | Official name | Country | First director(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 1932 | Jazz Club de Belgique | Belgium | Robert Goffin and Félix-Robert Faecq |
| Hot Club de France | France | Hugues Panassié | |
| June 1933 | Rhythm Club n° 1 | UK | Bill Elliott |
| 1933 | Hot Club | Italy | Alfredo Antonino |
| Nederlandse Hot Club | Netherlands | Eddy Crommelin | |
| 1934 | Swing Club | Germany | Dietrich Schulz |
| Early 1935 | Yale Hot Club | USA | Marshall Stearns |
| Gramoklub | Czechoslovakia | Emmanuel Ugge and Jan Sima | |
| March 1935 | British Rhythm Club Federation | UK | W. Elliott |
| May 1935 | Hot Club de Barcelona | Spain | Pere Casadeval and Juan Durán Alemany |
| October 1935 | United Hot Clubs of America (UHCA)Footnote 115 | USA | John Hammond and Marshall Stearns |
| 1935 | Jazz Club de France | France | Stéphane Mougin |
| 1936 | Circolo Jazz Hot (Milano) | Italy | Ezio Levi, Gian Carlo Testoni and Marcello Marchesi |
| April 1939 | Hot Club de Belgique | Belgium | Willy de Cort, Carlos de Radzitzky and Albert Bettonville |
The case of hot clubs is thus particularly interesting in that the model for such clubs was created in Europe and then adopted in the USA, which reverses the asymmetric transmitter–receiver pattern of jazz internationalism until then. This is one of the reasons why Europe was seen by American musicians and critics as one of the first places where jazz was recognized as art music.Footnote 117 As the multiplication of jazz journals gave birth to an international network of jazz critics, the flourishing of jazz clubs soon posed the question of their connections, hence the idea of an international federation.
Beyond wishful thinking: the IFHC, international cooperation and standardization
Rather than being the result of cooperation between hot clubs from every country, the IFHC was born out of French and American initiatives. The HCF provided the first impetus, the fourth article of its statutes calling for an ‘international association of regional Hot Clubs’. It was published in the February 1933 issue of Jazz‑Tango:
The club [the HCF] proposes to extend the network of its local clubs to foreign countries, and to encourage the creation of similar clubs, in order to give an international scope to its actions.Footnote 118
A similar concern was expressed by Stearns, founder of the Yale Hot Club in 1935. A few weeks before the creation of the IFHC, he advocated the creation of an ‘International Hot Club’ to gather individuals from all countries, proposing that ‘New York will be the centre of activity, and meetings will be held at the Brunswick studios’.Footnote 119 These statements, as well as international connections already established between jazz critics, led to the foundation of the IFHC, placed under the direction of Panassié (president) and Stearns (secretary). The Yale Hot Club became the headquarters of the organization, and Jazz Hot its official organ. In the next few months, hot clubs from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the USA joined the federation, and information about the creation of the IFHC was circulated in all existing jazz journals.
The creation of the IFHC, the first of its kind in the history of jazz, was fuelled by the existence of shared interests across national boundaries, all of which were expressed in its objectives:Footnote 120
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1. Having special hot records made with a picked personnel chosen by an international committee.
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2. Issuing rare old classics – a project now well under way by the Yale Hot Club, the central organization of the UHCA.
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3. Staging concerts all over the world under its auspices, by obtaining orchestras freely offered by the record companies.
As acknowledged in a 1935 article in the English magazine Melody Maker,Footnote 121 recordings played a central role in the creation of the IFHC and the promotion of hot jazz all over the world. This is easily understandable, since the recording industry had functioned on an international basis since the early 1900s and had become the main vehicle for the dissemination of music across borders. The IFHC thus aimed to pool discographic resources by a constant exchange of information – which most effectively took place in Jazz Hot – and by encouraging the music industry to put more hot jazz records in their domestic and international catalogues, which is reflected in the numerous letters and articles in which members of the federation urged record labels to reissue characteristic hot jazz records.
Another goal of the IFHC was to establish international standards to foster discussions on jazz and avoid misunderstandings between jazz devotees from different countries. As in the field of business and industry, the musical internationalism of the IFHC entailed setting a body of rules and technical terms which every hot club would endorse. The federation sought to:
Establish definitely the meaning, use and spelling of general technical terms characteristic of the music which Hot-Clubs intend to study and spread. For the sake of unity, which we deem indispensable, we urge all Hot-Clubs members and all jazz amateurs to observe the principles presented in this study […] The undersigned hereby declare that they agree with the terminology adopted by the authors of this study: Hugues Panassié, Henk Niesen Jr, John Hammond.Footnote 122
In that regard, the development of the IFHC can be seen as part of a more global trend in favour of international standards which developed after the First World War, under the auspices of the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations (1926–39).Footnote 123 Finding common ground on the very definition of hot jazz was a means of joining forces in order to battle more effectively for its recognition.
The IFHC and ‘minorities internationalism’
The IFHC’s preoccupation with international standards was closely linked to its mission: to campaign for the international recognition of hot jazz and to avoid confusion with other forms of jazz. Members of the federation regarded international exchanges and cooperation as highly necessary, especially since they saw themselves as a minority (a numerically small group in comparison to the global jazz audience) advocating another minority (hot jazz musicians, and especially African American musicians). Thus, IFHC internationalism stands as an example of what I call ‘minorities internationalism’.
The IFHC was determined to bring international exposure and recognition to hot jazz musicians. Panassié argued that the obscurity of hot jazz musicians was to be denounced as ignorance of a ‘new form of art’: the ‘negro style’ of jazz.Footnote 124 His advocacy of hot jazz was a further manifestation of French negrophiliaFootnote 125 and primitivism.Footnote 126 As such, it reinforced racial stereotypes shared by left-wing artists and critics (Darius Milhaud and Michel Leiris, for instance) as well as by those of the right wing. In the name of these stereotypes, however, Panassié criticized the music industry that privileged white musicians. A regular reader of the far-right newspaper Action française, Panassié certainly belonged to that group. His fascination with hot jazz was partly based on the neo-Thomist Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s 1922 book Antimoderne:Footnote 127 the spontaneity of musicians whom Panassié called ‘black musicians’, as well as the liberties they took with the aesthetic norms of art music and ‘good taste’, reflected what he considered to be the vitality and natural creativity of human nature in its universal dimension, irrespective of culture and skin colour. To his mind, modernity had corrupted this universal human nature in developed countries. On the contrary, hot jazz was one of the purest expressions, and a means by which anyone could get back to a more natural form of shared human nature.Footnote 128 As overblown as Panassié’s understanding of the cultural meaning of hot jazz may be, the fact that he defined it as a ‘negro style’ of music did not necessarily mean that stylistic differences were to be explained by racial differences; rather they stemmed from culturally incorporated habits. This is the reason why Panassié’s hot jazz canon included ethnically diverse musicians: Armstrong, Ellington, Earl Hines and Sam Wooding belonged to it, alongside Beiderbecke, Bennie Goodman, Frankie Trumbauer and Tommy Dorsey, to give only a few examples.Footnote 129 Stearns also campaigned for the recognition of hot jazz and its African American origins, promoting a diverse canon. However, his support of hot jazz was grounded in a very different political agenda, since it was based on heavy criticism of racism in the US music industry and society, in keeping with the leftist cultural front during the Depression.Footnote 130
The dimension of the IFHC which concerned ‘minorities internationalism’ was one of scale. Persuaded that they defended the only form of jazz worthy of being considered art, IFHC members saw themselves as a minority amid the wider jazz audience. Being a small group encouraged them to establish connections across boundaries to defend their cause – hence the quasi-religious dimension of hot jazz internationalism. Members of the federation expressed their goal as a mission: to spread the ‘truth’ about jazz among a wider audience whom, according to them, the music industry had misled by promoting less authentic and more commercial jazz repertoires. IFHC members thus regarded themselves as missionaries battling heresies. Such a parallel with hot jazz internationalism and evangelization can not only be drawn from the goals of the IFHC, but can also be substantiated by similarities in the vocabulary used in the journals of IFHC-affiliated hot clubs. The first Italian book on jazz, written by two of the founders of the Circolo del Jazz de Milano, was entitled Introduzione alla vera musica jazz Footnote 131 and contrasted ‘true’ (‘pure’) jazz with ‘pseudo’ (‘false’) jazz, with the intention of persuading readers to dismiss straight jazz and listen to hot jazz musicians. In Spain, the journal of the Hot Club de Barcelona assumed an ‘educative and proselytizing function’.Footnote 132 One of its contributors, the jazz critic Baltasar Samper, regarded the arrival of jazz in Spain as a ‘revelation’ which had to be disseminated.Footnote 133 Similarly, Panassié, whose writings on jazz were influenced by Maritain, likened his discovery of what he called ‘hot jazz’ to an epiphany.Footnote 134 He and other members of the IFHC often presented themselves as devoted believers fighting the ‘general misunderstanding from which hot jazz suffer[ed]’,Footnote 135 and striving for ‘the triumph of true jazz’.Footnote 136 The creation of the federation was also motivated by explicit intentions to proselytize:
Such an organization will have tremendous power, and justly so, for there is much that needs to be done […] The aims of this federation are many, but they may be summarized by the motto: ‘Dedicated to the universal progress of swing music.’Footnote 137
Stearns’s ‘motto’ for the IFHC also shows that the internationalism of the organization was motivated by one precise cause, for which its promoters militated irrespective (in principle) of their nationality, genre and ethnic origins. Yet the plea for ‘universalism’ did not mean that the IFHC membership contrasted with the then predominantly male and white world of music criticism, even if Jazz Hot had two female (Helen Oakley and Madeleine Gautier) and five African American contributors (see Table 1). That the latter figure was higher than it was for many other music journals in the 1930s may be explained by the IFHC’s ambition to give more exposure to African American musicians.Footnote 138 Such internationalism corresponded neither to socialist nor to liberal internationalism (the latter model having been adopted by the music industry in its promotion of what hot club members deemed commercial jazz), but had more in common with a secular form of the religious international paradigm which, according to Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene, is based on ‘religiously inflected voluntarism’ and calls for ‘mobilization’.Footnote 139
Not only did IFHC members aim to disseminate a new discourse on jazz, they also sought to impose a major change in the taste of the public and the recording industry. This was why action was taken to lobby record labels and to inform the wider audience. In September 1933, for instance, Panassié convinced the Compagnie Française du Gramophone to let him select, categorize and comment on the jazz records that would be promoted in the label’s catalogue. Such action shows that IFHC members also aimed to provoke the music industry into circulating and promoting more hot jazz records. Although different as a model, the IFHC internationalism was thus connected with the more ostensibly capitalist internationalism model of the music industry.
The case of the IFHC shows that the sense of belonging to a minority can stimulate internationalism.Footnote 140 Being small in number in America and Europe, the first hot jazz fans felt the need to join forces beyond national boundaries. For this reason, the IFHC and Jazz Hot kept nationalist and protectionist claims at bay, at a time when such claims were strongly supported by many American and European jazz musicians – in particular, those affiliated with musicians’ unions such as the French Syndicat des Artistes Musiciens, the British Musician’s Union or the Belgian Union des Artistes, for instance. These unions opposed capitalist internationalism, in which they saw a tool to use foreign workers in order to lower existing salaries in one given country; their internationalism implied more protectionism, and consisted of improving terms of conditions for workers in every country, so that employers would be prevented from exploiting national differences in social and labour legislation.Footnote 141 The IFHC, meanwhile, advocated a third kind of internationalism (a more liberal one) already set out by songwriter Eddie Pola. Born of Hungarian parents in New York and active in England, Pola stated that:
There is room for everyone, but only the best talents are chosen, and those who agitate for the removal of ‘alien’ writers are merely grousers whose own work would only be accepted in the event of there being no others against whom they must compete.Footnote 142
Another dimension of the IFHC’s ‘minorities internationalism’ was its twofold elitism. On the one hand, IFHC members were persuaded to advocate a form of jazz that for them had more artistic value than other jazz repertoires acclaimed by the wider public.Footnote 143 On the other hand, they considered only musicians whom they deemed to be the best, irrespective of the colour of their skin. This elitist taste went hand in hand with sociocultural elitism, as it mainly involved students and members of the upper class. In 1932, the HCF initiators Elwyn Dirats and Jacques Auxenfants were students at a private high school in Saint-Cloud, a wealthy town in the western suburbs of Paris. Panassié, meanwhile, was born into a wealthy industrial family. To take a few other examples, the Belgian jazz critic Robert Goffin was a lawyer, and Stearns’s Yale Hot Club gathered students from Yale University, including John Hammond, who belonged to the rich Vanderbilt family. Likewise, Dietrich Schulz’s Swing Club mostly attracted students from the University of Königsberg. Although tinted with Bourdieusian distinction, the sociocultural elitism of hot jazz internationalism was not a matter of social stratification of musical taste. Indeed, a large part of the European and American elite kept relishing straight jazz. Hot jazz internationalism was also linked to more practical and pecuniary considerations: establishing international connections entailed spending money – buying rare records or having them imported, travelling to other countries to meet with foreign hot club members. As universalist, disinterested and selfless as it may seem, however, the internationalism of the IFHC was also a matter of power. This can explain why the federation was a short-lived institution.
Geographies of internationalism: questioning the failure of the IFHC
The first reason for the IFHC’s failure lies in members’ disagreements over the establishment of international standards for jazz lexicon and discourse. In spite of the efforts of Van Praag, Hammond, Niesen and Panassié, most IFHC members kept asserting their own stances on what ‘real jazz’ was. It should be noted here that such disagreements seem consubstantial with jazz criticism and institutions. Before the creation of the IFHC, they had already caused the first endeavours to federate the Jazz Club de Belgique and the Nederlandse Hot Club to be failures.Footnote 144
National and personal rivalries also caused the IFHC to become an empty shell, contrary to most national and local hot clubs founded in the 1930s, which remained active throughout the decade and outlived the Second World War. In a letter written in 1936 to his fellow leader of the IFHC and of the UHCA, Stearns, Panassié regretted that the federation ‘has not yet shown much activity’.Footnote 145 It seems unlikely that Stearns was really concerned about this organization, as historian Jeffrey Jackson recalls in an anecdote that Dan Morgenstern, the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies founded in 1952 by Stearns himself, ‘knew nothing of the International Federation of Hot Clubs’.Footnote 146 Stearns was much more involved in the direction of Yale Hot Club and the UHCA, both organizations in which he did not have to share power with Panasssié. As early as the creation of the IFHC, the two jazz devotees competed for its control. Moreover, Panassié clearly tried to use the federation as a means to make Jazz Hot prevail over all other jazz journals, and above all against Melody Maker, the organ of the British Federation of Rhythm Clubs.Footnote 147
Personal ambitions were also linked with institutional rivalries. In this regard, the absence of Belgian representatives from the IFHC and Jazz Hot is particularly interesting. As early as 1931, Faecq and the already well‑known Belgian jazz specialist Robert Goffin had clear intentions of encouraging international cooperation. To this end, Faecq’s Music, the official organ of the Jazz Club de Belgique, had been transformed into a ‘Franco‑Belgian jazz journal’ in January 1931, and then into an ‘international jazz journal’ in April of that year. Music also formed an alliance with the French Jazz‑Tango, to which Panassié still contributed in early 1935. It thus appears that when he quit Jazz‑Tango to found Jazz Hot and form the IFHC, Panassié tried to overtake Goffin, Faecq and Music and stand as the only European critic of international calibre. As a response to what was seen as Panassié’s treachery to serve his own ambitions, Jazz‑Tango and Music reinforced their alliance in March 1935, the very same month when Jazz Hot was launched. And then, instead of joining the IFHC, the Jazz Club de Belgique chose to develop international relations on its own. In December 1935, it proudly announced that it ‘had established tight connections with every jazz club in the world’ and that it would collaborate directly with Stearns’s UHCA, the statutes of which were published in Music, instead of with the IFHC.Footnote 148
In light of this context, one can understand that when Jazz Hot presented the IFHC as an organization in which power was equally distributed between Europe and America, it only expressed a French perspective (Panassié’s), which other organizations did not necessarily share. The American and English take on the IFHC was indeed slightly different. It was formulated by Warren Scholl, secretary of the New York Hot Club, in the British journal Melody Maker. Whereas Panassié presented himself and the HCF as a centre of the federation, Scholl explained that the IFHC would gather clubs ‘all acting as branches of the Yale Club’; Panassié was only mentioned as the head of the ‘French division of this Federation’.Footnote 149
The IFHC was thus downgraded to the level of one of the local branches of the UHCA.Footnote 150 This clearly indicated that the internationalism of the IFHC was not egalitarian. Rather than being put on an equal footing, each member was institutionally and symbolically placed at one or another level of a threefold hierarchy. At the top of it stood the USA, then there was France – because of Panassié’s activism – and then the rest of Europe. In other words, the case of the IFHC shows that internationalism does not at all mean the absence of power relations and hierarchies; it still has its centres and peripheries. Following the failure of the IFHC, jazz multilateralism was replaced by multidimensional and kaleidoscopic international relations – consisting of a multitude of various bilateral or trilateral initiatives taken by national hot clubs and their journals. For instance, the collaboration between the HCF and the Hot Club de Barcelona took the form of regular information exchange and international concerts. In January 1936, one of these concerts gathered Bennie Carter, the Quintet of the HCF and the Orquestra del Hot Club de Barcelona.Footnote 151 Another major axis of post‑IFHC jazz internationalism was formed by the Belgian and Dutch hot clubs. In addition to intense exchanges between Music and De Jazzwereld, representatives and musicians from these two organizations regularly met during Dutch‑Belgian jazz tournaments.Footnote 152 More generally, each European national hot club developed its own international network, in which some countries were privileged and others marginalized; in other words, each country had its own particular geography of jazz internationalism, with its own centres, peripheries and blind spots. While the HCF paid attention to jazz in Spain and Italy, the Jazz Club de Belgique was much more centred on the Netherlands and England; meanwhile, English hot clubs interacted with Denmark, a country that did not appear on the French map of international jazz.
Conclusion
In 1947, Delaunay referred to the IFHC (which was suspended in 1936) as an institution which should be revitalized, as it could ‘bring about peace and understanding between men of good will’ through hot jazz.Footnote 153 By hinting at one of the main dimensions of internationalism, peace, as a philosophy and ideology, Delaunay was certainly more influenced by the pacifist air du temps of the post-war years than by the actual preoccupations and achievements of the IFHC.Footnote 154 On the one hand, the failure of the IFHC exemplifies the difficulties of organizing and running international institutions based on a supranational model. As grand as their name can sound, such institutions can easily become empty shells used by actors to assert their credibility and visibility at the international scale; they are also constantly undermined by personal and national power relations. On the other hand, such pacificist ideals were never a preoccupation of the organization during the 1930s. The jazz internationalism of the IFHC was a pragmatic one – an internationalism by necessity – aiming to promote hot jazz. This explains why Panassié, who was ideologically close to the nationalist Action française, could simultaneously be a fervent promoter of jazz internationalism.
Jazz internationalism during the interwar years therefore had an intra-European dimension. By exchanging information between European groups – that is, without systematically involving their American counterparts – and organizing international concerts and tournaments without engaging American musicians, European hot clubs contributed to the development of a European jazz world which did not totally depend upon the US scene. The blossoming of European hot clubs and the fact that they could feel united by having to confront similar issues concerning their relationship with their American counterparts contributed to the emergence of a shared European consciousness. This would eventually lead to claims for a European identity of jazz in the late 1960s. This study of hot clubs during the interwar years, therefore, is the first step of a research project aiming to go beyond a history of jazz in European countries and propose a European history of jazz.
