Frenchman Hugues Panassié took credit for practically introducing Americans to their own music. After getting his hands on some jazz recordings, Panassié founded the Hot Club de France in 1932 and published his first book, Le Jazz Hot, in 1934. The Real Jazz was his first book in English, published during WWII as propaganda for music that he thought was in danger of being lost.

Like the Belgian Robert Goffin, Panassié considered himself witness to the birth of a marvelous new phenomenon, “hot jazz.” Unlike a symphony, which was played according to an unchanging conception imposed at the creation by the composer, jazz was spontaneous and dynamic, emphasizing rhythm over melody, more sensuous than cerebral. Jazz moved the musician to the fore, and musical creation became a matter of interpretation and improvisation. Panassié believed that European intellectuals discovered jazz before their American counterparts because the latter were mired in class and race prejudice. The history of slavery and white animosity forced Negroes in the U.S. to form a society of their own and prevented them from participating in the prevailing cultural stream. Whites could not be expected to recognize or appreciate the creative accomplishments of blacks, writes Panassié. (The point is effectively refuted by James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison and others. There never was a time when black music and dance were not an influence on American culture, mainstream or otherwise.)

The jazz that so excited Panassié was what he first heard as a young man: Dixieland, New Orleans jazz, and the so-called Chicago school celebrated by Mezz Mezzrow. Between the publication of Le Jazz Hot in 1934 and The Real Jazz in 1940, though, Panassié changed his mind about the authenticity of the (white) Chicago style and argued in favor of the bluesy accent of Joe ‘King’ Oliver and other Negro bands. He believed that jazz had been diminished by commercialism; white orchestras replaced improvisation with prearranged patterns and melodic scores and added instruments (saxophones!) to appeal to the broader public. The overworked arrangements and refined tones of the showy big bands meant the loss of purity and character and authentic jazz flavor. What Panassié could not have known in the 1940s was that he was fighting a futile rearguard action. He was the quintessential ‘moldy fig’ shouting down the innovations of modern jazz, already nostalgic, trying to define the parameters of ‘real jazz’ even as the music was about to change forever (and again, as it always had) with the emergence of bebop.