History and Rebirth of the Quintette du Hot Club de France

Until very recently, I thought that the Hot Club de France was simply the name of the band led by Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli back in the ’30s and ’40s. Some of the august readers of The Syncopated Times—many of whom are astute historians of early jazz—know better. But a bit of research taught me that the Hot Club de France began its life as a group of people in Paris who congregated to listen to 78s of what was then a new genre. After its earliest beginnings in 1932 as a high school jazz club meant to organize dances, the Hot Club became more formal and organized when they managed to recruit Hugues Panassié, who wrote for the review Jazz-Tango, and who insisted on the name Hot Club de France. Under the leadership of Panassié and Charles Delaunay, the Hot Club de France established and expanded listening groups, sponsored jazz concerts, issued a periodical called Jazz Hot, and eventually established its own record label, Swing Records. In 1934, Panassié and Delauney were discussing how to expand the readership of Jazz Hot to the English speaking world, when Walter Shaap arrived on their doorstep. A Columbia College graduate who had gone on to graduate school at the Sorbonne, Walter Schaap was well-suited to that expansion, and he also had a substantial record collection; the listening clubs relied at that point on the record collections of its membership. F