Presented in partnership with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and featuring Herbie Hancock as Goodwill Ambassador, International Jazz Day encourages and highlights the power of jazz as a force for freedom and creativity, promoting intercultural dialogue through respect and understanding, uniting people from around the globe.

The 2015 International Jazz Day celebration will kick off in Paris on April 30 with a daylong series of jazz education programs, performances and community outreach. An evening All-Star Global Concert at UNESCO Headquarters in the 7th arrondissement will feature performances by Dee Dee Bridgewater, A Bu (China), Igor Butman (Russia), Herbie Hancock, Al Jarreau, Ibrahim Maalouf (Lebanon), Hugh Masekela (South Africa), Marcus Miller, Guillaume Perret (France), Dianne Reeves, Claudio Roditi (Brazil), Wayne Shorter, Dhafer Youssef (Tunisia) and many other internationally acclaimed artists. John Beasley will serve as the evening’s Musical Director. Further details about the concert can be found here.

The concert from Paris will be streamed live worldwide via the UNESCO, U.S. Department of State and Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz websites. Daytime events in Paris will include master classes, roundtable discussions, improvisational workshops and education programs led by world-renowned jazz musicians, educators and diplomats. In addition to the All-Star Concert, multiple evening concerts and performances will take place across the city of Paris.

Given its legendary place in jazz history, Paris is an ideal choice to serve as the International Jazz Day Global Host City. The city’s major figures in jazz include guitarist Django Reinhardt, vocalists Edith Piaf and Josephine Baker, violinists Jean-Luc Ponty and Stéphane Grappelli, and many more. Today, Paris continues to play an important role in the ongoing development of jazz as a musical art form at jazz clubs such as Au Duc des Lombards, Le Baiser Salé, Caveau des Oubliettes, Caveau de la Huchette, Sunset/Sunrise, Le Café Universel, New Morning, Jazz Club Etoile, Caveau des Légendes, Le Petit Journal Montparnasse and many other venues.

“Jazz means dialogue, reaching out to others, bringing everyone on board,” said UNESCO Director-General Bokova. “It means respecting the human rights and dignity of every woman and man, no matter their background. It means understanding others, letting them speak, listening in the spirit of respect. All this is why we join together to celebrate jazz—this music of freedom is a force for peace, and its messages have never been more vital than they are today, in times of turbulence, in the year when we celebrate the 70 anniversary of UNESCO.”

Ambassador Hancock said, “Every single country on all seven continents will shine the spotlight on jazz for 24 hours straight, sharing the beauty, passion, and ethics of the music. Educators, visual artists, writers, philosophers, intellectuals, dancers, musicians of all ages and skill levels, photographers, filmmakers, videographers, bloggers and jazz enthusiasts will participate in Jazz Day by openly exchanging ideas through performances, education programs, and other creative endeavors.”

The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz is once again working with UNESCO and its field offices, national commissions, networks, Associated Schools, universities and institutes, public radio and public television stations and NGOs to ensure their involvement and participation in International Jazz Day 2015.

Additionally, in countries throughout the world, libraries, schools, universities, performing arts venues, community centers, artists and arts organizations of all disciplines will be celebrating the day through presentations, concerts, and other jazz-focused programs. As in past years, it is anticipated that programs will be confirmed in all 196 UN and UNESCO member countries.

Ultimately, International Jazz Day seeks to foster intercultural dialogue and raise public awareness about the role of jazz music in promoting the universal values of UNESCO’s mandate. As a language of freedom, jazz promotes social inclusion, enhancing understanding and tolerance, and nurturing creativity.

For more information about International Jazz Day and to register for events on the official website, visit www.jazzday.com.

The post Paris Takes Center Stage on International Jazz Day appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Advance tickets are advisable at the top classical music and opera festivals, though it’s even more important to secure accommodations if you wish to stay nearby a concert venue. But don’t let a lack of tickets or advance planning or even lodging keep you from venturing into these villages, towns and cities during festival time. There’s often room for one more visitor, and a room in the region to spare.

Alsace: Musica. Strasbourg holds a major European festival devoted to the contemporary repertoire featuring the work of 20th-century composers and 21st-century creations, two weeks from late September to early October.

Aquitaine: Festival du Perigord Noir. The angels sing, are sung and are played to at this festival with venues at various locations throughout Black Perigord, between Périgueux and Souillac, from early August to mid-October.

Auvergne: Festival Europavox,  late May, during which a square in Clermont-Ferrand gives itself over for three days to European rock. Festival de Craponne-sur-Arzon, a 3-day celebration of country music (mostly American) in the heart of the country of France at the end of July.  Near Craponne, the village of La Chaise-Dieu is consumed by classical music for 10 days at the end of August during the Festival de la Chaise-Dieu.

Burgundy: Les Francos Gourmandes. French music and French gastronomy go hand in hand—ear and mouth—during a weekend in early June in the town of Tournus (Soane-et-Loire).

Centre-Val de Loire: Le Printemps de Bourges is a rock ’n roll rite of spring that draws hoards to this town at the very center of France for six days in late April. Musicalies en Sologne transforms the village of Pierrefitte-sur-Sauldre (Sologne) into the happy home of traditional music and folk dance over the first weekend of May.

Champagne-Ardenne: Le Cabaret Vert, a 4-day ecologically conscious rock festival held toward the end of August near the Belgian border in Charlesville-Mézières. The Reims Jazz Festival, runs for ten days in November and provides another good reason to visit the city’s champagne cellars off season.

Languedoc-Roussillon: Festival Radio France brings a rich and dense program of classical music (in its broadest sense) to Montpellier for two weeks in mid-July. During more or less the same period, jazz fans from the region and from well beyond flock to Jazz à Junas, held within the remarkable setting of the old quarries at Junas (Gard), between Nimes and Montpellier.

Limousin: Festival des Nuits de Nacre. The accordion, now there’s a beloved instrument in France, but there’s only one accordion factory left in the country, in Tulle (Corrèze), which explains the reason for Tulle’s mid-September festival celebrating the accordion in all its glory.

Nord-Pas de Calais: Nuits Secrètes. The secret is out: if you want to discover lesser-known and up-and-coming French and European band, come to Aulnoye-Aymeries, near the Belgian border, over the first weekend of August for three musical marathon nights devoted to all kinds of rock and contemporary sounds. More well-known names fill the posters for the Mainsquare Festival within the vast confines of the citadel at Arras over the first weekend of July. In 2013: Green Day, Sting, Indochine.

Normandy: Festival Beauregard. A rock festival in the park of the Chateau de Beauregard, just outside Caen over the first weekend of July. Further proof that there’s more than war tourism in the area of the 1944 Battle of Normandy.

Pays de la Loire (Western Loire): La Folle Journée de Nantes, when the city of Nantes goes crazy for classical music for five days late January to early February.

Poitou-Charentes: Les Francofolies de La Rochelle. A joyful 5-day French rock festival in the Atlantic coastal town of La Rochelle, mid-July.

Provence-Riviera (PACA): French and foreigners alike swell the villages and towns of southeast France, making it fertile ground for music and theater festivals to bloom. Among the best of them is Les Chorégies d’Orange, mid-July to early August, when opera (mostly and most impressively) takes to the great and dramatic stage of the Roman Theater of Orange (Vaucluse). Through the month of July, Aix-en-Provence also stretches the vocal limits of performers during its Festival International d’Art Lyrique.

Rhones-Alpes: Jazz à Vienne. A major jazz festival devoted mostly to classical jazz with some blues, is held in Vienne, 20 miles south of Lyon, from late June to mid-July.

Continue to Festivals in France, Part II: Exceptional and Unique Celebrations.

The post Festivals in France, Part I: Major Musical Events appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

It’s a smooth evening in the lounge-bar at the Hotel Lutetia. Daniel Roca, in-house pianist and musical programmer, wends his way through jazz standards at the center of a well-oiled trio. Head bartender Gilles Guyomarch supplies a harmony of cocktails, swaying lyrical conversation from the crowd.

I’ve given Mr. Guyomarch carte blanche to prepare me something not too sweet. He keeps the first one classic Lutetia with a cocktail called Le Lutèce: Grand Marnier, Havana rum, raspberry juice and lime juice.

I clink glasses with Christine and Paul Wegmann who are visiting from New Orleans. Christine is a writer who’s also a lawyer; Paul is a lawyer who’s also a writer. When not litigating, she writes about celebrities, he writes about sports.

At 7:30 pm, the lounge at the Lutetia can feel a bit too much like the first-class lounge at a sleek airport. Most large hotel bars give that impression at this time of day. The music helps sooth that. The cocktail helps us sink into the furniture and become a part of the atmosphere. It’s a long, classy, stylish room. Before long we aren’t in a waiting room but exactly where we should be. Dinner can wait. More olives, please.

Peggy Newland, another visiting American, joins us. She’s in town to do research for an article about jazz in the Saint Germain Quarter, a welcome break from her work as an adolescent psychologist. Her daughter is upstairs in the room.

The Wegmanns soon leave for dinner. Peggy and I, satisfied with an appetizer of olives and nuts, stay for a second cocktail. Again, I give Mr. Guyomarch carte blanche and this time his envoy returned with a Hemingway Special: dark Caribbean rum, tonic, lemon juice and sugar.

Peggy and I discuss journalism and writing, pretending that we’re here for work. When the jazz trio takes a break and leaves the room silent we realize that indeed we are. We finish our second drink and separate for our respective interviews: I go to interview the bartender, she goes to interview the pianist.

Gilles Guyomarch, originally from the distant island of Ouessenant off the coast of Brittany, is one of the most faithful bartenders in Paris to judge by his longevity at the Lutetia. With 25 years of experience here, Mr. Guyomarch has seen two generations of patrons and assorted fads and trends come and go.

In recent years, he says, the tendency has been to more champagne, to wine by the glass rather than the bottle, to lighter drinks and, more regrettably, to a clientele that doesn’t bother to dress up to swirl a drink in the lounge. Such changes are part of the natural evolution of drinking since the 1980s. It’s the bartender’s job to adapt.

What’s disheartening, he continues, is that clients sitting alone at his bar are no longer interested in conversing with the bartender or even with each other. He indicates with his chin a man having a heart-to-heart with his handheld. “People want to live to the rhythm of Google… they have no patience for conversation.”

Mr. Guyomarch does have such patience. Between cocktail preparations he speaks with the calm, discreet confidence of the best hotel bartenders.

Peggy joins me back at the bar. The pianist, the double bassist and the drummer have settled back into position for another set.

Peggy and I give Mr. Guyomarch our own confidence: we’ll stay for a third cocktail.

I watch as Mr. Guyomarch improvises: vodka, Blue Cuacao, orange juice and apple liqueur for Peggy; gin, strawberry liqueur and peach liqueur for me.

I ask what these drinks are called. “It’s more difficult to find names than recipes,” he says. “We’re like musicians. I found the recipe, you’ll find the name.”

So Peggy and I take up the challenge. We allow our drinks be transported on a silver tray into the lounge.

The bar, crowded when I arrived at 7:30, had emptied out by 8:45 as dinner reservations beckoned, and now, already 10 o’clock, people are trickling back in.

Peggy’s daughter comes to sit with us for a while. We tell her that we’re trying to find a name for our drinks. While unknotting her shoelaces the color of Curacao blue, she nonchalantly suggests Buster Blue as the name of Peggy’s drink. We unanimously agree.

But we’re stuck on the name of my drink.

Peggy’s daughter has again been invited to disappear. Peggy and I head back to the bar. Daniel Roca, the pianist, having finished another set is now hanging out near the end of the counter. We ask for his help and he gives a stab at naming my drink “Apollonia.” Mr. Guyomarch rejects that off-hand as though for personal reasons. We don’t ask why.

Finally Mr. Guyomarch resolves the issue by declaring that mine would henceforth and forever be called “Gary’s Cocktail.”

I’m flattered. I now have a drink named after me at the bar of the historic Lutetia.

I’ve no illusions, of course; at other times, no doubt, the same drink has been or will be called Fred’s Cocktail or Janet’s Cocktail or Helmut’s or Achmed’s. But for an evening it’s mine. Here I am with a bright and beautiful woman whose daughter with Curacao blue shoelaces doesn’t mind being sent to her room; live jazz standards have been gliding in and out of the conversation; the bartender has named a drink after me; the pianist gives me a nod to let me know that I’ve come to the right place. The bar is mine. The music is mine. Paris is mine.

Three cocktails at Le Bar of the Lutetia will do that to you.

© 2012, Gary Lee Kraut

Hotel Lutetia. 45 boulevard Raspail, 6th arrondissement. Tel. 01 49 54 46 46. Metro Sèvres-Babylone. Cigarette and cigar room by the bar.

A review of the Hotel Lutetia on France Revisited can be found here.

The post “Gary’s Cocktail” at the Bar of the Hotel Lutetia, Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

* * *

By the time the Hotel Lutetia opened its doors in 1910, well-to-do visitors to Paris were familiar with the extravagance of hotel luxury in the City of Light but they hadn’t yet experienced it on the Left Bank. Palatial lodging had until then been a Right Bank affair: Hotel du Louvre, the Meurice, the Ritz, Hotel Normandy and others flourished in the triangle between Place de la Concorde, the Opera and the Louvre, Paris’s primary luxury zone of the Belle Epoque.

Wealthy visitors, including British aristocrats and the like, flocked to that Right Bank zone where, without traveling far, they could call on fellow French aristocrats (who’d had the good sense to marry the wealthy heirs of banking and industry), visit the Louvre by day, attend the Garnier Opera by night, luxuriate in tea rooms, hotel bars, high-class prostitution, see the sights, check out the latest art, fashion and jewelry and shop. There was little reason to stay elsewhere.

The Left Bank also had its shopping attraction in the name of Au Bon Marché, a temple of modern commerce created by Aristide Boucicaut. In the 1860s Boucicaut had launched the concept of the department store—all you could want in a single place—in France and well beyond. The square between Le Bon Marché and the Lutetia would eventually be renamed Square Boucicaut.

The owners of Au Bon Marché (its name was eventually changed to Le Bon Marché by the LVMH group, which has owned the stores since 1984) therefore devised a plan to further cater to the needs and whims of the crème de la crème of shoppers while also attracting members of government (the houses of parliament and most government ministries are nearby) and notables associated with the universities in the Latin Quarter: they would built a hotel unrivaled on the Left Bank.

The hotel was given the grand name Lutetia, after the town developed along the Seine by the Romans after their conquest of the local tribe of Celtic Gauls known as the Parissi. The Lutetia’s architects were Louis Hippolyte Boileau and Henri Tauzin, who designed a building that was a precursor to the Art Deco style. Boileau’s grandfather was the initial architect of Au Bon Marché beginning in 1867, a project to build Paris’s first specifically designed department store that was taken over by Boileau’s father. Boileau himself worked on an expansion of the store in the 1920s.

Though the initial exuberance at the new hotel was stopped in its tracks by the First World War, the Lutetia took off with a bang during the Roaring ‘20s and assumed its role as a purveyor of the spirit of luxury on the Left Bank.

Lutetia’s construction, however, didn’t create a major wave of top-tier hotel construction on the dense central Left Bank. Instead, luxury pursued its evolution on the Right Bank as it extended its reach to the area surrounding the Champs-Elysées. The Hotel Plaza-Athenée which opened on avenue Montaigne in 1913, served as a cornerstone for the development of high-pampering hotels to either side of the Champs-Elysées, then well on its way to becoming a new sector for Paris extravagance.

One hundred years on, the Right Bank, specifically the first, eighth and sixteenth arrondissements, remains the natural herding ground for high luxury lodging and shopping and the preferred bank for department store shopping in Paris.

With 231 rooms, including 60 suites and junior suites, plus a large plush lounge-bar, a magnificent banquet room, meeting rooms, a brasserie and a gastronomic restaurant, the Lutetia’s size makes it an oddity on the central Left Bank. Perhaps because of that the Lutetia seemed to lose its way in the 1990s and early 2000s as boutique 4-stars claimed control of the hotelscape of the 6th arrondissement and edging into the 7th (Relais Christine, Aubusson, Pont Royal, Montalembert, Bel Ami, Villa d’Estrée, Relais Saint Germain, etc.), even if some of those boutiques are quite the store.

I remember going to the Lutetia to meet friends who were staying there in the late ’90s and finding its atmosphere slightly reminiscent of 1945, when the hotel served as a repatriation center for displaced persons and concentration camp survivors. Its dark days from 1940 to 1944 when the occupying German took it over as headquarters for their military intelligence services (Abwehr), however, were long gone. It was a decent place to stay, alright, but I had come to see the Lutetia as yet another Concorde hotel: fine but soulless, on the Left Bank but no longer imbued with the exuberant intellectual spirit of the Left Bank of the 20th century, a 4-star chain mentality in a pretty body. Le Bon Marché still offered fine department store shopping but entering the Lutetia was like going to the mall.

It’s time now to reconsider that point of view.

Since 2010 the Lutetia has been the property of the Israeli Alrov Group. Though still under Concorde management, the Lutetia is in the process of reclaiming its discreet yet showy side, a duality that a hotel must master in order to garner attention in the absence of a glowing article in The New York Times, a few glossy magazine spreads, a juicy sex scandal or Starwood points.

The Lutetia has a ways to go if its owners fantasize about joining the ranks of the “palaces,” as they top-tier hotels are known in France, yet the building was designed with as much luxury in mind as the famous names of the Right Bank, so the physical potential remains. Meanwhile, 5-star status mostly requires the will do so at this point. In any case, this is a property worth keeping an eye on.

As a business destination this been a sure bet all along at the right price. It has now been successful of late in enhancing its design, art, and literary cred, which has helped shake off its chain reputation, making it more appealing for free-spirited leisure travelers.

The Lutetia is a 4-star hotel, among the city’s finest in that category, especially for such a large hotel by Paris standards. But stars alone do not make a hotel; travelers should be wary of the star inflation over the past two years as France has harmonized its categories in line with other European countries. Five-stars are not always more prestigious than four.

The Lutetia has more upgrading to do in terms of service and in some of the rooms in order to restore its wow power through and through. Nevertheless, many of the rooms are on fine footing and nearly all have have size in their favor, even the 7th floor rooms, originally reserved for chauffeurs and other personnel accompanying the fortuned clientele. And certain aspects of the Lutetia are clearly intended for a 5-star or even palace clientele. In particular, there are several drole or chic and in some cases spectacular designer suites that, along with works of art in the public spaces and the Art Deco spirit of the building, earns the Lutetia its designer cred.

The more eye-popping of those designer suites—signature suites, they’re called—are clearly intended for high-end travelers, e.g. the 1300-square-foot fifth-floor suite decorated by the sculptor Arman on the themes of music and African art; the Littéraire Suite with its own library; the shoe-themed suite with works by the artist Thierry Bisch; the filmmaker David Lynch has decorated a suite that is an ode to his adoration of Paris. The 7th-floor Hiquily Suite can only be thought of as the female nude suite since they appear everywhere: lamps, table bases, mirrors, etc.

Museum-quality photography adorns the walls of several suites that have been decorated in collaboration with Paris’s Maison Européene de la Photographie. Some of the signature suites have stunning views out to the Eiffel Tower or over the center of the capital. These suites are generally beyond the budget of 4-star travelers and even many 5-star travelers. Yet the more self-assured 5-star travelers who generally look toward the Right Bank for luxury hotel options will not feel like their slumming by considering this Left Bank 4-star option.

Space limitations on the central Left Bank ensure that smaller 3- to 5-star hotels are bound to dominate the hotelscape in the area. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see that the Lutetia is fighting for its reputation and doing a good job of ensuring a place where visitors can live large on the Left Bank.

For those staying in a 4- or 5-star hotel where boutique may be a code word for a lobby you don’t want to sit in and a receptionist who serves as bartender, it’s worth keeping the Lutetia in mind when in search for a somewhat sophisticated place for:

– a meal: Paris, a gastronomic restaurant (one Michelin star) cheffed by Philippe Renard and decorated by Sonia Rykiel, open Mon.-Fri.; Le Lutetia, a brasserie, open daily; a “jazzy brunch” served Sundays noon-2:30pm Sept-May;

– a literary event: among them, events held by the association Les Mots Parleurs, which organizes readings and literary encounters at the hotel one Saturday evening per month;

– a musical evening: in particular jazz in the lounge-bar Wednesday to Saturday evenings, 10pm to 1am, under the programming of in-house pianist Daniel Roca, and

– a drink at Le Bar du Lutetia. Did I mention that I have a cocktail named after me here? No? Well, continue to “Gary’s Cocktail at the Bar of the Hotel Lutetia” for a singular account of how that came about.

© 2013, Gary Lee Kraut

Hotel Lutetia. 45 boulevard Raspail, 6th arrondissement. Tel. 01 49 54 46 46. Metro Sèvres-Babylone. Small spa area. Stylish cigarette and cigar room by the bar. A monthly schedule of literary and jazz events and exhibitions at the Lutetia can be found here.

The post The Reawakening of the Hotel Lutetia: Living Large on the Left Bank appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.