France in the ‘60s

Presenter: Dr. Kathryn Edwards

Title: Historical Overview of Paris in the 1960s

Paris in the 1960s was a city marked by relative prosperity, an expanding consumer culture, modernist architecture, and the advent of the cinematic New Wave. It was also the site of contestation and crisis. From the October 1961 police assault on Algerians protesters to the student and labor demonstrations of May 1968, Paris was a key site of the shifting social and political landscape of the post-WWII world marked by decolonization, immigration, and challenges to conservatism.

Bio:
Katie Edwards is a historian of modern France and French colonialism at Tulane University. A New Orleans transplant from the (bilingual) Canadian province of New Brunswick, her engagement with the broader francophone world is shaped by her personal and professional experiences.

Presenter: Dr. Jean Xavier Brager

Title: French Fashion in the 1960s: The Reign of the Three Cs

This lecture explores the revolutionary transformation of Parisian Haute Couture during one of the most volatile and innovative decades in style history. It focuses on how three visionary designers—Pierre Cardin, Coco Chanel, and André Courrèges—redefined modern womanhood and reshaped the global visual landscape. From avant-garde futurism to timeless evolution to the bold architecture of Youth, let’s embark on a journey exploring the rise of prêt-à-porter and the battle of silhouettes.

Bio:

After 18 years spent in Louisiana, during which he served as cultural and linguistic attaché at the Consulat Général de France in New Orleans, taught language and culture classes (both at Louisiana State University and Loyola University), and volunteered as the artistic director of Francophilia Foundation, Dr. Brager has relocated to his hometown of Marseille in June 2019, in the heart of the Provence region. There, he resumed teaching English and drama in the French public school system. 

JeanX is more passionate than ever to create opportunities to showcase the intertwined destinies of France and the US. He believes he can finish his novel and his script before the end of the year. If Provence’s blue skies, tasty ratatouille, and Mediterranean light leave him the time to do so, that is!

Presenter: Liz Williams 

Title: The 1960s Food Revolution in France

The 1960s was a time of change, shaking up long standing traditions. French cuisine was not immune. Reputations were made by the new garde of chefs who offered an emphasis on flavor of the ingredients without masking it in cream and butter. Today we still look for that flavor. This talk discusses who and why this happened!  

Bio:

Liz Williams is a half-Sicilian New Orleanian. She grew up in two food worlds.  She is Founder, Emeritus of the Nunez Culinary Research Center. She has authored six books about food and culture and taught Food Studies for NYU and Dillard University. Her podcast and newsletter, Tip of the Tongue, appears weekly. Her recent books are Nana’s Creole Italian Table and SoFAB Cookbook, with Maddie Hayes. 

A graduate of LSU Law Center, she has judged cooking competitions and consulted internationally on the food of New Orleans. Travel is an excuse to eat.

Presenters: Anna Laura Quinn (vocalist) and Lawrence Sieberth (pianist)

Title: Chanson de l'époque du changement (Chanson in the Time of Change)

Throughout history France has always embodied change both culturally and artistically. The Chanson, or “Song” in English, has lived through centuries, with roots tracing back to the 12th century troubadours. For this presentation we will be focusing on Chansons and the vocalists that performed them in the 1960s. Alongside this genre, the decade was a musically diverse time in France when classical experimentation, opera, jazz, rock & roll and world music from North Africa and elsewhere filled the air. The Chanson remains deeply tied to French history, identity and poetry, where the lyrics and narrative weave a timeless emotional story.

Anna Laura Quinn’s Bio:

New Orleans-based vocalist Anna Laura Quinn brings sincerity, humor, and an immutable grace to her craft, leaning into the improvisational essence of the music she sings with astonishing radiance and honesty. Onstage or in the recording studio, she moves with ease between personalized arrangements of American Songbook gems, songs in French and Portuguese, surprising interpretations of popular music from the 1960s to now, and a growing number of her own compositions, beguiling audiences with what Downbeat called “the inherent delight of [her] vocal timbre.”

Anna Laura was raised in San Francisco, where her musical education began at home absorbing the work of many singers from across genres – jazz, baroque, folk, pop, and art songs. Since 2010, she has called New Orleans home, and it is in that musically charged city that her voice has found its full expression. Now with three albums to her name as bandleader and arranger, she brings repertoire out into the world that defies easy categorization and spans many eras. No matter the setting, Anna Laura brings undeniable sincerity, humor, and joie de vivre to her craft.

Lawrence Sieberth’s Bio:

Lawrence Sieberth has thrived for years in the New Orleans music scene as a wearer of many musical hats: versatile keyboard accompanist, multifaceted composer, bandleader, producer and educator. He’s at home in virtually any musical setting, unlimited by genre barriers. Though rooted in jazz, he has integrated many facets of music into an inclusive whole, drawing on classical and world music and more, composing for his own projects as well as television, film, dance and other idioms.

Sieberth’s work as a producer and composer ranges from his lyrical recordings with the modern acoustic Parisian Jazz Quartet to the cinematic sweep of Musique Visuelle: Music for Piano Trio and Orchestra (“Polished, brilliantly executed, and cohesive.” – Offbeat Magazine). He’s equally authoritative on the solo piano album New New Orleans and the ethereal jazz-electronica journey Arkipelago. Sieberth’s offerings also include Silhouettes, with his fiery New Orleans-based quartet, and two recordings Estrella Banda and Dance Of The Earth, both being a foray into Afro-Cuban and funk rhythms. His most recent recordings showcase two seemingly opposing musical styles: VooDooTek is futuristic “jazztronica,” (21st-century electronic fusion) and Standardized, an all-acoustic piano duo paired with the amazing clarinetist and saxophonist James Evans.

Presenter: Dr. Olivier Bourderionnet

Title: From Chanson to Yé-Yé: French popular music at a crossroads

The impact of the 1960s Parisian cultural production in the English speaking world is mostly associated with New Wave cinema (François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard) superstar actor Brigitte Bardot, Nobel Prizes in literature (Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre), the wider discovery of Simone de Beauvoir’s Deuxième Sexe, Haute-Couture and Nouvelle Cuisine. The diversity of the French soundtrack to this period is much less known in the US. Chanson artists, in particular, while revered at home, enjoyed little success on this side of the Atlantic. While some may remember Franco-Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel who gave a series of memorable performances at Carnegie Hall in 1965 and inspired the 1968 Off-Broadway revue (now world-famous) Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, the work of most French chanteurs and chanteuses (with a few exceptions such as Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour) remains mostly unknown here. The late 1950s and early 1960s represent a crossroads and a generational shift at a time when imported musical styles began to challenge a seemingly established order. Focusing on a few key figures of the French “music hall,” in the early 1960s, our presentation will attempt to put into perspective the specific context of French popular music of that period and analyze how its evolution mirrors drastic changes in a society undergoing accelerated economic and social transformation.

Bio:

Olivier Bourderionnet is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator for Romance Languages. He teaches courses on contemporary French literature and culture, French cinema and pop culture. His first book, Swing Troubadour. Vian, Brassens, Gainsbourg: les Trente Glorieuses en 33 tours (Summa Pub, 2011), examines the transformation of post-Second World War France through the prism of popular music and the impact of jazz on French chanson. His new book, Serge Gainsbourg an International Perspective (Bloomsbury 2024), co-edited with Olivier Julien (Sorbonne Université) is the first English-language academic study devoted entirely to French artist Serge Gainsbourg. Bourderionnet has contributed numerous book chapters to French and American volumes on the topics of French popular music and French cultural studies. His articles in academic journals—touching on a broad variety of topics such as music in the interwar period, music, and film, French Hip-hop culture, and more—have appeared in Research in African Literatures, French Cultural Studies, Volume! La revue des musiques populaires, CFFS, and The World Journal of Popular Music.