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The Jazz Critic As Flâneur, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

“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, …