Thereafter he turned to jazz elements for his works on quite a few occasions. He was instantly engaged by the syncopated rhythms, the improvisatory freedom, the authentic character, and even the purity of the music, and he created a bit of a stir when he was quoted as saying that jazz was " the American music" - according it the same validity as classical repertoire. Milhaud first encountered jazz in London in the early 1920s, and he visited Harlem dance halls when he made a concert tour of the United States in 1922–23. For Milhaud, perhaps more so than for the others of his circle, Satie's love of the music hall, the circus, and other unelevated forms of entertainment was in tune with his own adoption of popular material - French folksong, Latin American dance rhythms, Jewish secular and sacred melodies, and one of his most important discoveries: jazz. Encouraged by Satie and his own musical models, Milhaud - together with the other composers who formed Les Six - embraced aspects of this aesthetic principle, especially with regard to simplicity, directness, avoidance of excess sentimentality, sounds related to nature and everyday life, and, perhaps above all, that attribute so prized by certain French poets of a previous era: la clarité - clarity. In the 1920s Milhaud began his association with Cocteau, whose seminal aesthetic attack on the contemporary direction of "serious" music and its high-flown "romantic bombast" made a significant impression on him. He later applied these influences to some of his pieces, and his first two ballet scores drew directly upon the Brazilian experience. From 1917 to 1919 Milhaud held a secretarial post at the French Consular Mission in Brazil, where he developed an interest in native folk rhythms and ethnic music traditions. He became profoundly affected as a composer by literature, as well as by Satie's commitment to a concept of artistic totality, exploring and including the various art forms in complementary expression. In his memoirs Milhaud wrote that when he first began to compose, he was already aware of the path of Impressionism, which he viewed as the end of an artistic current whose mawkishness he found unappealing. His other teachers included Vincent d'Indy, Paul Dukas, and André Gedalge, whom Milhaud later credited as his greatest influence. In 1909 he commenced studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where one of his teachers, Xavier Leroux, immediately recognized that his student had discovered a harmonic language of his own. Darius began violin studies at the age of seven and began composing even as a child. Both parents came from middleclass families who had been engaged successfully in respected business enterprises for generations, and both were musicians as well. This may have lent an additional perspective to his internalized Jewish musical sensibilities. Milhaud's mother, however, was partly Sephardi on her father's side. Like its Ashkenazi and Sephardi counterparts, Provençal Jewry had a distinct musical tradition that developed over many centuries. His paternal great-grandfather, Joseph Milhaud, was one of the founders of the synagogue at Aix, and he wrote exegetical works on the Torah and conducted the census of Jews who had returned to France after the Revolution.
On his father's side, Milhaud's Jewish lineage was thus neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi (i.e., stemming neither from medieval German-Rhineland nor from pre-16thcentury Spanish/Iberian Jewry), but rather, specifically Provençal-dating to Jewish settlement in that part of southern France as early as the first centuries of the Common Era.
His was a long-established Jewish family of the Comtat Venaissin - a secluded region of Provence - with roots traceable there at least to the 15th century. Milhaud was born in Marseilles but grew up in Aix-en-Provence, which he regarded as his true ancestral city. But Milhaud belongs as well to the significant number of European Jewish émigré composers who took refuge in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s from the Fascist-inspired anti-Jewish persecution that emanated from Germany and culminated in the Holocaust. That group also included Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), one of the 20th century's most prolific composers, with an opera comprising nearly 450 works, belongs historically to the coterie of French intellectuals and composers who, loosely bonded by their initial embrace of Jean Cocteau's antisentimental aesthetic ideas, as well as by their allegiance to composer Erik Satie's spiritual-musical tutelage, were known as Les Six.
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