The Vienne jazz festival in south-east France attracts big international stars. Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP
It being holiday time, I thought jazz and I might be able to get along without each other for a week or two. But on a stopover in Paris heading south last week, I found myself mysteriously drawn to the sidestreets housing the city's famous jazz clubs, and on the next leg of the journey, to a jazz weekender at a Roman amphitheatre in the Provence town of Vaison-la-Romaine.
The music mostly remained in the imagination - for once, not much was going on in Paris, and Afrobeat sax-star Manu Dibango's gig in Vaison (due to celebrate the music of legendary jazz pioneer and adopted Frenchman Sidney Bechet) was blown out by a spectacular thunderstorm. But the vigorous presence of jazz in French culture was rubbed in by the inclusion of big international stars like Dibango and piano legend Ahmad Jamal on the jazz menu of this tiny southern French town - as likewise happens at the same time of year at Vienne, near Lyon, and Marciac, in the Armagnac region, and plenty of other out-of-the-way locations around the country.
This summer, Vienne and Marciac between them had Sonny Rollins, Wynton Marsalis, Madeleine Peyroux, the Pat Metheny-Brad Mehldau group, David Murray, EST, Dave Douglas and John Zorn, among many. Such all-star programmes - sweeping across genres and generation-differences - are the rules rather than the exceptions, and their pulling-power brings in audiences that also find themselves running across the best of the local scene's music in the process.
Small-town arts festivals all over the world, when they can find the key to the town-hall coffers or private sponsors, naturally try to out-do each other in attracting the most prestigious names. But France is still a standard-bearer in Europe when it comes to treating jazz as an equal contender, as tempting as tempting to backers and punters as any rival artform.
It's not hard to see why, because the music was perceived in that country from the 1930s onward as a natural soundtrack to all kinds of progressive and creative art and thought. Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were Paris hot tickets at the end of the 40s, with Parker finding himself introduced as a fellow artistic heavy-hitter (though with mutually baffled results) to Jean-Paul Sartre. French streets are named after Bechet, the pioneering soprano saxophonist, Louis Armstrong contemporary, and Francophile. Two of the bebop movement's leading creators, pianist Bud Powell and drummer Kenny Clarke, moved to Paris to evade racism and cultural indifference in the 1950s.
Powell turns up as a guest on two tracks on drummer Art Blakey's Paris Jam Session , a rough-and-ready affair charismatically displaying the young Wayne Shorter, from a live show at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 1959. The set is one of a hundred or more French reissues from the 50s and 60s - including performances by Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Bechet, Chet Baker and many more - emphasising that the country wasn't just a second home for jazz in that period, but in some ways the first one.
