Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2007

Publication Title

Lingua Romana: A Journal of French, Italian and Romanian Culture

Volume

6

Issue

1

Pages

1-8 pp.

Abstract

“I love to watch you play,” a reporter once said to Duke Ellington during a television interview. As Ellington gracefully moved up and down the keyboard, he replied, grinning wistfully, “Playing? I’m not playing . . . I’m dreaming!”1 For the poet Jacques Réda, whose most famous works such as Les ruines de Paris (1977) and Amen (1988) chronicle his experiences as a modern flâneur in a Paris which is sometimes overtaken by what Marc Augé has labeled surmodernité,2 or an anaesthetizing over-abundance of technology and empty modern spaces, Réda has also led another life as a jazz critic, often writing for the French monthly Jazz Magazine. As a respected jazz scholar and an admired poet, Réda has maintained that his love for jazz is strictly separated from his poetic endeavors, almost reserving it as his private space far removed from the pressures of the Parisian literary world.

Comments

© 2007 Copyright Peter Schulman.

Original Publication Citation

Schulman, P. (2007, 2016-01-11). The Jazz Critic as Flâneur. Lingua Romana: A Journal of French, Italian and Romanian Culture, 6(1). https://linguaromana.byu.edu/2016/06/10/the-jazz-critic-as-flaneur-peter-schulman/

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