Felix E. Kudelka is one of my talented nephews who grew up in Nice, France. [Felix in Nice, 2000.] Like many of my family members, Felix is an intense person and does everything in his life with a great deal of commitment. When I first met him, he was already a young adult and he was passionate about many things, including life in Nice and the Niçart dialect. He also had the great privilege of growing up with the Nice Jazz Festival and essentially studied music from the momen

In my family, you can be a physician or a musician, but you can rarely be both. My cousin Sophie Bourgeois is extraordinary for managing the delicate balancing act of running her own dentistry business, raising two sons, and singing jazz. My family, bunch of over-achievers right there. [Sophie Bourgeois with portrait by her aunt, Hélène Baronnie, France 1969] Sophie is my cousin by my great-aunt. Her mother was a dancer and so it is no surprise that she started dancing at onl

The French embraced jazz music very early. It may have been that there was a direct pipeline from the  cradle of New Orleans to the streets of Paris that allowed the music to immediately find roots in France. The French continue to love jazz to this day and it has become an integral part of French identity. Although the French can be as bigoted as any nation, they do seem to practice color blindness when an individual has sufficient talent to “surpass” their roots and they ar