Hughes Panassie

Without question the initial great non-American jazz critic, Hughes Panassie studied saxophone and began authoring the music at 18. He was a founder and afterwards leader of “The Scorching Membership De France” and edited Jazz Scorching from 1936 to 1947. He also had written the reserve Le Jazz Scorching, a middle-’30s treatise that was a head among periodicals in handling the music as a significant talent. Panassie organized some small-group recording periods in 1938 with Mezz Mezzrow, Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet that apparently resulted in Eddie Condon’s well-known comment that “he didn’t review there (to France) and simply tell him how exactly to stomp a grape.” Count number Basie documented “Panassie’ Stomp” that same season. Panassie documented and created a swing time led by Frankie Newton in 1939. But he was an avowed, unrepentant anti-bebop scribe, frequently denouncing the proper execution as the antithesis of jazz. He continuing the fees until his loss of life in the middle-’70s. Panassie’s intensive private collection today resides in the Discotheque Municipale at Villefranche-de-Rougergue.