By

Published: April 18, 2006 in All About Jazz

“ Much like American jazz, blues and country, musette was born of a world of rough and shifty ne’er-do-wells, a volatile tableau of killers, prostitutes, pimps and gangsters. ”

Watch any old movie that’s set in Paris and the soundtrack is sure to be musette, the charming, accordion-fueled music so identified with the city’s romantic aura. But before it became clichéd Hollywood shorthand for a location change, it was the social music of Paris’ unsavory criminal underclass. Much like American jazz, blues and country, musette was born of a world of rough and shifty ne’er-do-wells, a volatile tableau of killers, prostitutes, pimps and gangsters. And the musicians themselves were frequently just as colorful, as ready to pull a knife as play a waltz.

The word musette was originally the name for a bagpipe-like instrument played in the courts of France’s upper classes during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Eventually it fell out of favor with the privileged population and was picked up by the country’s rural peoples, especially those in the central Auvergne region. When the Auvergnats moved to Paris in search of work in the early 1800s, they brought their folk music to town, many of them opening cafés that catered to factory workers and their families. It was in these cafés that Sunday dances, or bals musette as they came to be known, began to be held.
Read the rest of this entry