Sim Copans and the American roots of jazz in France

“…is a by-product of the unique cultural environment
found in New Orleans at the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
with the vestiges of French and Spanish colonial roots, the
resilience of African influences after the slavery era and the
influx of immigrants from Europe. The ways these cultures mingled,
collided and evolved together in the Crescent City produced
America’s most distinctive musical style.”

“Jazz came to France in World War I with the US army,
and became fashionable in the 1920s-treated as exotic African-
American folklore. However, when France developed its own
jazz players, notably Django Reinhardt and Stéphane
Grappelli, jazz became accepted as a universal art. Two well-born
Frenchmen, Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay, embraced
jazz and propagated it through the Hot Club de France. After
World War II, several highly educated commentators ensured
that jazz was taken seriously.”

“…jazz was used as a weapon by both sides of the
Iron Curtain: RFE (Radio Free Europe) in its early years contributed
its quota of forbidden jazz in daily programs beamed to the
younger listeners, although some of the exile broadcasters,
brought up on mazurkas, polkas and waltzes, were inclined
to doubt the assurances of their American advisers that jazz
music would prove as infectious behind the Iron Curtain as
it had been all around the world. But after Stalin’s passing
in 1953 the Communist regimes grudgingly lifted their taboo
and their radio stations cautiously ventured to play whatever
jazz records they had on file, mostly music of the 1920s and
1930s. By 1956, however, the appetite for jazz was so accepted
that the regime radios boldly introduced hit tunes from the
West. Radio Warsaw smartly had its records flown in from New
York.

“To counter this competition, RFE sharpened its own
programs, and put on recognized Western jazz experts to provide
the know-how that the Communists could not match. Simon Copans,
an American authority who had lived many years in France and
who conducted a jazz program on France’s Radio Diffusion Francaise,
was borrowed from that network to prepare a weekly record
session, which in turn was translated and made available for
broadcast by all of RFE’s Voices. John Wilson’s program, ‘The
World of Jazz’,broadcast regularly over New York City’s WQXR
radio station, was made available for rebroadcast over RFE,
as were special jazz programs contributed by New York’s radio
station WNEW.

“Simon (Sim) Copans actually provided jazz program texts
to Radio Free Europe’s language services in Munich from October
1956 to June 1959. His program text “Jazz from Paris”
in English was then translated into the respective RFE languages
for broadcasting.

“He created an international jazz festival in 1976 in
Souillac, France, that continues today. Sim Copans died in
2000 and remains a “legend” in France for his promotion
of Jazz and American Gospel music.

“On May 30, 2012 there will just be the start of an
exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Sim Copan’s
birth to run through this year’s international jazz Festival
(“Le Festival Sim Copans”) July 15-22, 2012. In
addition there will be a five-day program of events in his
honour in the Vallee de la Dordogne lotoise (Dordogne Valley)
from June 5-9, 2012.”

“Copans received a doctorate in 1938 from Brown University
with a dissertation on French perceptions of American democracy
under the Second Empire. He did research in France in the 1930s
when he also met and married a French woman before returning
to teach French civilization at Colombia University. Although
exempt from military service as head of a family, he nevertheless
volunteered as an interpreter in the information service and
participated as a “Radio Officer” in the (June 6 1944)
Normandy landings. Since the Germans had confiscated most of
the radios on the northern French coast, one way chosen by the
US army to communicate with the French villages and towns they
passed through was the “mobile unit”-a truck mounted
with a loudspeaker. Copans found the best means of attracting
attention was to start by playing a loud jazz selection, often
by an American big band!”

“Copans, who remained in France until his death in
2000, became a kind of American ambassador of culture:
delegate and presenter with the Voice of America (he hosted
a retransmission of the Newport Jazz Festival on French
radio), head of the Franklin Roosevelt Cultural Centre [sic]
(this in fact is the Benjamin Franklin Library at the American Cultural Centre in Paris), and founder of L’Institut d’Études
Américaines in 1959, where he also lectured. He was a
major force in creating the jazz festival at Souillac, near Lanzac,
his home from 1963 and where he died in 2000.”