Maurice Ravel was hailed around the world as France’s greatest living composer when he embarked on his first trip to North America, boarding the S.S. France on Jan. 4, 1928. His fourth-month tour was a whirlwind: Ravel visited 25 cities, conducting virtually every major American orchestra and meeting everywhere with rapturous approval. But the most fateful outcome of the trip was his firsthand exposure to jazz. It left a profound impression on Ravel’s music, which eventually inspired jazz musicians in turn, forming a loop of reciprocal influence.
What Ravel Got From Jazz
Jazz was deliriously popular in 1928, though by no means considered a “serious” music. In New York, Ravel saw the hit Gershwin musical Funny Face on Broadway, and was charmed enough to inquire about meeting George Gershwin and hearing his Rhapsody in Blue.
Both things happened on March 7, at a birthday party for Ravel organized by mezzo-soprano Èva Gauthier. (At the piano, Gershwin dazzled the guest of honor with Rhapsody, and also played and sang his song “The Man I Love.”) Over the next few nights, Ravel accompanied Gershwin uptown, to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom and Cotton Club, where he experienced the elegant excitement of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He also paid a visit to the Victor recording studios in Liederkranz Hall for a session by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, featuring Bix Beiderbecke on cornet.
Ravel had shown a burgeoning interest in African-American popular music a decade earlier, when he borrowed elements of ragtime for his 1919 opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. (Hear the comic exchange between a cup and a teapot in the song called “How’s Your Mug?”) But what he encountered in New York — and in Chicago, where he’d been enraptured by the New Orleans clarinetist Jimmie Noone, whose band featured Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano — ignited the fire and fervor of a convert.
“I think you know that I greatly admire and value — more, I think, than many American composers — American jazz,” Ravel had said that February, in an expansive interview with the New York Times critic Olin Downes. He added: “I am waiting to see more Americans appear with the honesty and vision to realize the significance of their popular product, and the technic [sic] and imagination to base an original and creative art upon it.”
The French composer rearticulated this view — with an unmistakable whiff of Gallic condescension — in an article titled “Take Jazz Seriously!” for the March 1928 issue of Musical Digest. “You Americans take jazz too lightly,” he scolded. “You seem to feel that it is cheap, vulgar, momentary. In my opinion, it is bound to lead to the national music of the United States. Aside from it you have no veritable idiom as yet.” Ravel voiced the same convictions in an April lecture at Rice University, and in subsequent interviews and correspondence.
“I have used jazz idioms in my last violin and piano sonata,” Ravel told Downes in the Times, “but from what point of view? That, of course, of a Frenchman. Fascinated as I am by this idiom, I cannot possibly feel it as I would if I were an American.” Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2, completed in 1927, does in fact refract jazz’s influence through an impressionist lens — most clearly in the second movement, simply (and somewhat inaccurately) titled “Blues.” (It’s more of a rag.) But the more impactful borrowing transpired just after his American sojourn — in Boléro, an orchestral piece that became his best-loved work.
Boléro famously consists of just two 18-bar melodic motifs, developed in repetition. It’s been said that Ravel based one of these, most likely the more syncopated second theme, on a clarinet improvisation by Jimmie Noone. (This claim was, at least, printed in Noone’s 1944 obituary in the New York Times.) Whether the inspiration was direct or circuitous, there can be no mistaking the jazz inflection in the piece, which builds to a climax of braying trombones.
Ravel also brought jazz phrasing and bitonality into some of his more complex creations, notably his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, commissioned by the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the first World War. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Ravel described the piece’s rollicking second movement, the Allegro, as “an episode like an improvisation which is followed by a jazz section. Only afterward is one aware that the jazz episode is actually built up from the themes of the first section.”
The Piano Concerto in G Major, which Ravel composed at the same time, was similarly suffused with jazz syncopation and blues inflection. It also suggests the influence of his new friend and colleague, Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue haunts the periphery of the opening “Allegramente” movement. Jazz also leaps back into frame toward the end of the piece, in the “Presto” movement. Through this Concerto, generations of classical pianists have found their way to jazz-like expression — everyone from Martha Argerich with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1987 to Seong-Jin Cho with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on an album released this year.
There are, to be clear, limitations to Ravel’s understanding of jazz, which provoked the well-founded skepticism of critical observers like the French violinist and musicologist André Hodeir. For one thing, Ravel exhibited scant awareness of a figure as foundational as Louis Armstrong, and by his own admission, he looked to jazz as a “picturesque” accent, an appealing and exotic flavor. He seemed to conflate the music of Black originators with concertized translations by the likes of Gershwin and Whiteman. Writing in his book Early Jazz, the composer Gunther Schuller carped that Ravel “made the error of regarding jazz instrumentation and jazz sonority as the primary ingredients, and completely disregarded such aspects as improvisation or the inflection and swing of jazz.”
But if the composer’s enthusiasm was imbalanced, it wasn’t inconsequential. “Crucially, Ravel’s engagement with jazz gives as much as it takes,” writes Deborah Mawer in her insightful 2014 book French Music and Jazz in Conversation: From Debussy to Brubeck. “It created an impetus for, and a key to our understanding of, his late works from Boléro to the piano concertos.” And of course, jazz got its share out of the exchange as well.
What Jazz Took From Ravel
Kind of Blue, which Miles Davis released on Columbia Records in 1959, is the best-selling jazz album of all time, and widely understood as the most iconic. And it’s unimaginable without the influence of Ravel. Listen to how the album begins, with an impressionistic a tempo figure for Paul Chambers’ bass and Bill Evans’ piano, no more hurried in its drift than a plume of smoke. Evans, a pianist deeply enamored of certain Romantic and Impressionist composers, had introduced Davis to the possibilities inherent in Ravel’s music (and even turned him on to specific Ravel interpreters, like the Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli).
Writing about Kind of Blue in his autobiography, Davis recalled that “because we were into Ravel (especially his Concerto for the Left Hand and Orchestra) and Rachmaninoff (Concerto No. 4), all of that was up in there somewhere.” Of particular interest was Ravel’s exploration of the Dorian mode. As Davis recalled: “We were just leaning toward — like Ravel, playing a sound only with the white keys.”
There are other notable classical influences on Kind of Blue — the opening of “Flamenco Sketches,” which Evans adopted from his “Peace Piece,” triangulated Bernstein, Chopin and Messiaen — but Ravel is the shining constant. As Mawer points out in her book, even the famous bass ostinato in “All Blues” bears a close resemblance to the four-note contrabassoon figure that opens the Concerto for the Left Hand. “Additionally,” she adds, “Evans’s opening piano material comprises a simple tremolo oscillation, G–A, where another Ravelian connection (this time, an impressionistic one) is implicit.”
Charlie Parker, a mentor and contemporary of Davis, was also on the record as an admirer of Ravel: in his only Blindfold Test for DownBeat magazine, in 1948, he mentioned Ravel in a string of composers he admired, alongside Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Debussy and others. (On “Merry Go Round,” recorded with Davis that year for Savoy, he paraphrases Boléro in his solo.)
Naturally, there were earlier attempts to bring Ravel’s music into a jazz context, often in direct translation. Benny Goodman recorded multiple versions of Boléro, over a 4/4 swing beat. (Schuller, in his book The Swing Era, dismisses Eddie Sauter’s arrangement as a “reduction and diminution” of the original, necessitated by the limitations of a 10-inch disc.) Ravel’s music was also recorded by Goodman’s clarinet rival, Artie Shaw, with a symphony orchestra.
Tin Pan Alley also took a few cues from Ravel, most obviously in the late 1930s, when Peter DeRose and Bert Shefter adapted elements of his Pavane pour une infante défunte in order to write “The Lamp is Low.” (The original sheet music is clear about this debt of influence: “Based on a theme from Maurice Ravel’s PAVANE,” reads a tagline under the song title.) “The Lamp is Low,” with lyrics by Mitchell Parish, became a standard soon after Mildred Bailey first recorded it in 1939, with hit versions by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Connee Boswell and others.
Decades later, when saxophonist John Coltrane wrote his modal showpiece “Impressions,” he based his bridge on a melodic theme quite similar to “The Lamp is Low.” The Coltrane scholar Lewis Porter argued in his book John Coltrane: His Life and Music that the bridge had actually been adapted directly from Ravel’s Pavane — an idea that Dr. Porter has since reconsidered, based on new research, though the core influence stands regardless.
Speaking of bridges, a less ambiguous example of Ravel’s influence is “Chelsea Bridge,” which Billy Strayhorn composed for the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1941. Strayhorn, a great admirer of Ravel’s music, based the song on a chordal development in which the major seventh avoids resolving to the tonic. As the Dutch musicologist Walter van de Leur has argued, this “parallel movement of tonally independent chords” is in part a nod to Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.
Ellington — who had no doubt impressed Ravel at the Cotton Club — borrowed reciprocally in his effort to forge a Black American music that could stand alongside the European canon. His 1937 piece “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which later delivered popular resurgence and cultural capital after a live performance at the 1954 Newport Jazz Festival, is a case in point. As Mawer has argued, the piece “might conceivably be viewed as an equivalent of Ravel’s experimentation with volume, terracing and tension in Boléro.”
Partly through the legacies of Ellington, Strayhorn and Evans, Ravel has continued to be a touchstone for jazz artists — and not just those who play his repertory, as in the case of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who recorded a crystalline reading of Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera; or flutist Hubert Laws, who once offered a resourceful arrangement of Boléro, with Chick Corea on piano; or vibraphonist Gary Burton, whose “Ravel Prelude” from a 1969 album is a head-spinning act of homage.
When pianist Herbie Hancock started working on his Oscar-winning score to the Bertrand Tavernier film ‘Round Midnight, for instance, “my mind went right to the harmonies of the great French composer Maurice Ravel.” Writing in his biography, Possibilities, Hancock adds: “Over the years I had often used Ravel’s harmonies in my music, and they were also used in popular music of the early twentieth century.” Hancock later included a performance of the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G on his 1998 album Gershwin’s World.
In more recent years, pianist Aaron Diehl — a sterling interpreter of classical music as well as jazz — recorded a sparkling trio arrangement of the “Forlane” movement from Le Tombeau De Couperin on his 2013 debut. The 2015 Blue Note Records compilation Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1 included a hip-hop reimagining of Jeux D’eau by the producer Terry Slingbaum, with Eldar Djangirov on piano and a small cohort of strings.
And in 2018, American trombonist Ryan Keberle teamed up with French pianist Frank Woeste, in a jointly led group called Reverso, to create Suite Ravel.
“I think that Ravel’s harmony probably influenced jazz musicians more than the other way around,” Keberle mused in an interview with The Jazz Gallery. “I think that for Ravel, what he found interesting about jazz is its sense of rhythm, groove, and syncopation. I also think Ravel was attracted to jazz’s blending of musical cultures, the way that it drew from disparate worlds and found ways for them to coexist in one setting.”
That blending can also be described as a borrowing, and what the music makes clear is that for Ravel, as for generations of jazz artists, it always flowed in both directions.
