An ambitious survey of jazz in the 20th century is one dazzling image after another. But uprooted from all context, this disparate collection of jazz gems is a little lost in the wilderness

A common complaint from those unfortunate enough not to understand the Promethean spark which elevates jazz to one of the 20th century’s greatest art forms is that the music often sounds like a series of random notes. (This, along with “They’re making it up as they go along!”, a charge to which any jazz musician would gladly plead guilty.)

Of course, there is nothing “random” about it.

A jazz solo nearly always exists within the parameters of key, chord structure and time signature, or makes a virtue of working against these. This isn’t Sousa we’re talking about, whose marches’ melodies rattle around within a shiny exoskeleton of four rigid beats to the bar; nor is it any European “tired-ass shit”, as the ever tactful Miles Davis referred to fully notated classical music.

Jazz is not about making those parameters particularly obvious to the listener. You either “dig” it or you don’t.

So perhaps a generous interpretation of “The Jazz Century”, which has just opened at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (and is attracting coverage throughout Europe and America), is that it, too, should be viewed as a jazz solo.

You know where it starts (1903) and where it finishes (2002); you can take in every one of the nearly 1,000 exhibits, covering “art, film, music and photography from Picasso to Basquiat”, laid out chronologically and divided into ten sections.

But because there is no explanation or signage beyond the couple of paragraphs that appear below the title of each section (“Harlem Renaissance 1917-1936”, “The Free Revolution 1960-1980”), there is no contextualisation, no clues as to what the viewer should make of it. You dig? Well, that is the question.

A case can be made for this. Maybe the roll-call of images in the early sections speaks for itself: black musicians are depicted as entertainers in top hats and bow ties, the livery of servitude, and all (but all) are grotesquely gross of lip. “Whistling Rufus”, one piece of sheet music informs us, was written by Kerry Mills, composer of “Rastus on Parade”.

A poster from Basin Street, the most famous thoroughfare in Storyville, the New Orleans red-light district from which jazz first emerged, advertises the attractions of Countess Willie Piazza’s establishment. The countess, we learn, “has made it a study to try and make everyone jovial who visits her house”.

Jazz was born out of racism and prostitution, and long remained associated in white America with lasciviousness, backwardness and danger. Yes, maybe that point doesn’t need to be explicitly made.

What, though, are we to make of the artists of the 1920s and 1930s who incorporated jazz images into their art?

Far from being a friendly hat-tip to another contemporary art form, the crude stereotyping in this context (again with the lips, discernible clearly in many examples of workaday cubism), seems less easy to forgive as the well-meant but mistaken representation of a music they as yet knew little about. Instead, it appears to tie in directly with the contemporary obsession with “the primitive”; and to reference jazz thus was to degrade it, to strip it of the mastery it had already attained.

It would have been fascinating to discuss this topic, and I wish the curator, Daniel Soutif (who is also a philosopher), had done so.

Also shown here is Clean Pastures, a 1937 animation that United Artists withdrew from circulation in 1968 due to its racially sensitive nature (Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway are depicted as angels with chimp-like faces). But you will find no explanation of this film’s origins or of the controversy that surrounds it – nor even any of the information I have provided above save the film’s title – at the Musée Branly. This, frankly, is inexplicable.

The same goes for Jackson Pollock’s Watery Paths from 1947. It is simply too much of a stretch to assume that the visitor knows that Pollock listened to jazz night and day while he was painting, and that the American artist thought it was, according to his wife, Lee Krasner, “the only other really creative thing happening in this country”.

Even more misleading is a display of albums from the late 1950s, whose covers are designed in the style of Piet Mondrian.

The obvious implication is that these musicians – Sonny Stitt, Gerry Mulligan and Bud Powell among them – were groovy cats who were into the same bag as Mondrian; one album is even titled Music for Swinging Moderns. And it’s true that the painter did love jazz; but he was inspired by a much earlier, premodern form.

He died in 1944 and his last work, Victory Boogie Woogie, makes it plain what his musical tastes were. So the suggestion that he and the generations of boppers that emerged almost immediately afterwards were thinking the same thoughts, just in different art forms, is not just unprovable, but almost certainly false.

That said, the exhibition is a treasure trove, with album covers designed by a young Andy Warhol, and wonderful photographs by Guy Le Querrec.

Here is Charles Mingus, his face obscured by his double bass as he wheels it on an airport trolley, man and instrument looking like conjoined twins. There is the space freak Sun Ra emerging from the basement of Sweet Basil in New York, a smile beneath what appears to be a First World War helmet and the sun glinting
off his tinfoil garments. Ben Webster sits in shirtsleeves and tie in a Paris hotel room in 1968, staring, after nearly 40 years on the road as a jazz musician, at his open saxophone case with as much resignation as a travelling insurance salesman might regard his briefcase.

There are delights, such as the 1913 newspaper in which one Ernest J Hopkins writes of the emerging phenomenon of “jaz”: “A new word, like a new muscle, only comes into being when it has long been needed.”

In Jean Dubuffet’s extraordinary paintings from the 1940s, Mademoiselle Swing, Pianiste and Jazz Band (Dirty Style Blues), spectral figures weave an other-worldly magic. And Miguel Covarrubias’s portraits of Paul Whiteman, in which the cherubic face of the 1920s “King of Jazz” is sketched as a bulbous sphere, his features reduced to a few cubist lines at the centre, instantly earned a fond place in my memory.

Yet, without contextualisation, these are the delights of a miscellany.

There is a catalogue, an impressive doorstopper with lengthy essays in French. But it costs €50. If those without deep enough pockets to buy the book (or strong enough muscles to carry it around) have sufficient background knowledge of jazz, they will likely find this show fascinating, troubling and slightly infuriating.

Without such background, I’m afraid it may all seem a series of random exhibits, a jazz solo comprehensible only to those who already “dig”.

“The Jazz Century: Art, Film, Music and Photography from Picasso to Basquiat” is at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until 28 June, and then at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona from 21 July to 18 October

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