For Jazz Musicians, a Paris Tradition Continues

FRANCE: For Jazz Musicians, a Paris Tradition Continues

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Jul 25, 2007 (IPS) - On a quiet side street in the Paris suburb of Louise Michel, jazz musician Bobby Few from the United States sits at his 120-year-old Gabriel Gaveau piano and reminisces about what he has seen come to pass in his nearly 40 years in France.

"After struggling in New York City for so many years, we wanted to find a new territory," Few says when visited at his home on a drizzly, unseasonably cool July day, speaking of his jazz group's decision to move to Paris in 1969. "We landed as total strangers, not knowing anybody, not knowing the language, not knowing where to go. But the music seemed to be everywhere."

Thus Few, who had moved to New York from his native Cleveland, Ohio in the early 1960s on the advice of the legendary jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, headed to Paris in search of artistic renewal, following an established pattern of African-American musicians who have crossed the Atlantic in search of something they couldn't find in their native United States.

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