France holds a special position in the history of jazz. On can says without mistake that, after the orginal north american territory, it is the most important country for this music. For the musicians it gave, for the essential role it held in the diffusion of jazz. At last, for its fundamental role in the invention of a lettered commentary on jazz. Jazz arrived in France almost as soon as it was born, with the American army getting involved in World War I (1917). The first commentary comes from experts like conductor Ernest Ansermet, anthropologist André Schaeffner, musicologist Arthur Hoérée. From the end of the 1920s, lettered specialists turn their eyes away from the newly arrived music. Some passionate « amateurs » then take their place : Robert Goffin, Hugues Panassié, Charles Delaunay. They set up, too, structures and tools of diffusion, record labels. These passionate people become the real experts of this music, outside any institutional structure. Thus, a real tradition occurs, that perpetuates itself with newcomers who continue the initial work of development. They compile documents of all sorts, creating and preserving sources for a future historiography. That is not before the 1970s and the 1980s that an « institutional comeback » occurs, along with a new legitimation of jazz as a cultural object : beginings of jazz education in conservatories and universities, funding by public structures, creation of the National Jazz Orchestra, etc. Today, successors of the historical founders go on with the work of gathering datas, but it seems that a problem of replacement happens. Along with this decline, a first generation of scholars specialized in jazz appeared very recently, that takes a relay in the university field. It appears otherwise that no enterprise of writing a history of jazz in France, trying to consider the whole phenomena, has been initiated yet. Here more than anywhere, unity of academic disciplines proves to be indispensable. Jazz calls up musicologists, specialists of cultural history, litterary history, movie history, sociologists and anthropologists. Our project has likewise an academic outreach. Jazz touches a region that blends music, culture and political imagination. One task will be to question the possibility of a concordance. Of a series of concordances. Between what can unite an epoch sensibility and an art. It is about this interrogation about the relation between music and society that we wish to work in this project. Lead by musicologists who are also historians of culture, the goal is to fill that gap by articulating epistemological knowledges of specialized scholars and the considerable amount of historical datas amassed by the non scholar experts. This task seems to us essential for several reasons. Jazz is an object whose importance does not make question anymore now, neither the predominance of France for its influence and development. A large study on the history of this music in this country appears more necessary than ever, specially for the coming generation of scholars, who will not avoid to question this founding period. Likewise, a huge amount of datas, today scattered, is threatened of disappearing because it is held by individuals and not institutions, with all the fragilities it supposes. At last, musicology of jazz is in a profound mutation. A growing acute attention is focused on what happened outside the original territory. That is why the world outside North America becomes a huge research field and a fundamental issue for the discipline, a fact that begins to appear even in the founding coutry (for the first time in 2007, a european expert has been invited for a series of conferences about jazz in Europe at Columbia University). In this landscape, France, as it was said, holds a very special place, the first one for a number of aspects. Research on that field is still in its infancy. It needs, urgently, to lean upon a history written according to the common criterias of scientificity. French scholars, of course, are in the best position to bring this task to fruitition.