Hugues Panassié

Hugues Panassié
Hugues Panassié, Red Prysock, and Tiny Grimes New York City (circa 1946–1948) William P. Gottlieb, photo

Hugues Panassié (27 February 1912, Paris – 8 December 1974) was an influential French critic, record producer, and impresario of traditional jazz.

Panassié was born in Paris. When he was fourteen, he was stricken with polio, which limited his extracurricular physical activities. He took-up the saxophone and fell in love with jazz in the late 1920s.

Panassié was the founding president of the Hot Club de France (1932).

During World War II, the Germans occupied the northern half of France beginning June 1940. The Nazi's regarded jazz as low music — music from an inferior people. Jacques Demetre, in the 2014 book by Steve Cushing, Pioneers of the Blues Revival, said that people had expected the Germans to ban jazz entirely. But instead, they only banned American jazz and American tunes. Demetre explained that many American standards were in French with alternate titles. Panassié, for example, managed to keep broadcasting American jazz on his radio station submitting to censors obtuse French translations American song titles, and even relabeling records. Panassié's friend, Mezz Mezzrow, describes a particular example in his 1946 autobiography Really the Blues:

Panassié produced several jazz records by artists that include Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier.

In a changing world of jazz, Panassié was an ardent exponent of traditional jazz — strictly Dixieland. He harbored a particular love of style similar to that of Louis Armstrong from the 1930s. Panassié criticized West Coast jazz as inauthentic, partly because most musicians were white and also sounded white. In his book, The Real Jazz, Panassié ranked Benny Goodman as a detestable clarinetist whose sterile intonation was inferior to black players Jimmy Noone and Omer Simeon. Mezz Mezzrow became Panassié's lone example of a white musician who played jazz authentically. Panassié famously dismissed bebop as "a form of music distinct from jazz."