The last decade or so has seen cultural attachés hailing from many nations produce jazz events in New York intended to celebrate and promote distinctive versions of the music — Italian jazz, Swedish jazz, Japanese jazz. Yet France has a distinct head start on the international community when it comes to Afro-American music, mostly because French musical traditions played a key role in the birth of jazz. If jazz is characterized as a blend of European and African elements that could only have taken place in America, then the French are entitled to take credit for the Old World side of that equation.

Therefore, when the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and CulturesFrance want to present an ambitious multicity musical event, no one will begrudge them the right to call it “The French Quarter Jazz Festival,” borrowing the name of the area of New Orleans that is most associated with early jazz. The festival, which is being produced in conjunction with the annual International Association of Jazz Educators conference, is being held all over the city, at various IAJE locations (including the Sheraton and Hilton Hotels) and just about every major club in Manhattan. The event is especially rich in pianists and keyboardists, among them the distinguished Jean-Michel Pilc, working with the great African bassist Richard Bona, and the legendary Michel Legrand, far better known as a composer in the states, but a remarkable jazz pianist just the same.

“My folks was all Frenchmans,” Jelly Roll Morton once bragged. Apart from the French-speaking Creoles of Color, whose most famous representatives were Morton (aka Ferdinand Lamothe) and Sidney Bechet, France also gave us the greatest of all non-American jazzmen in the legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt (although as an ethnic Gypsy, he did not consider himself a Frenchman). Yet even so, despite France’s close ties to our music, no other country can produce musicians who play jazz exactly the way Americans do. Nor, perhaps, should they want to, preferring instead to add their Gallic touch to the music.

Of the several dozen artists represented in the festival, two have recently released albums that represent a look at American music from a distinctly foreign perspective.

Coincidentally, they are both unusual combinations of the piano and the human voice: Anne Ducros’s “Piano, Piano” features a vocalist with five different pianists, most of whom are world famous, while Guillame de Chassy’s “Wonderful World” combines a single pianist with a dozen singers, most of whom are obscure and likely to remain so. In both cases, the albums function as jazz, meaning they are comparable to our own domestic product, but also, from a broader perspective, they are statements about the nature of this music.

For a foreign-born singer, attempting to sing with a swing feeling in a language she didn’t grow up speaking is no less difficult than an aspiring soprano from Dallas trying to sing Verdi in Italian. In Ms. Ducros’s case, her thick French accent already provides her with a heavy set of mannerisms before even she begins.

Ms. Ducros is most successful when she works around this problem, as on “Les Feuilles Mortes” (Autumn Leaves). She sings the classic chanson in the original French as a duo with international keyboard superstar Chick Corea, and sounds much more comfortable and assured than she does, for example, in trying to do “God Bless the Child” with Afro-American inflections. She is also compelling on two vocal treatments of famous instrumentals: “Gnossienne no. 1,” by the French classical composer Erik Satie, which she scats and hums in a Middle Eastern pentatonic mode, accompanied by a jazz rhythm section with a saz (Turkish lute), and on John Coltrane’s “Naima,” a classic that doesn’t require a 4/4 swing feeling.

On the whole, Ms. Ducros is considerably more convincing when she forges a blend of French and American jazz traditions, rather than, say, trying to sing with a blues or gospel feeling.

In dealing with the issue of approaching American music from a French point of view, these musicians must also confront racial and generational schisms. The issues are tackled head on by the pianist Guillaume de Chassy and the bassist Daniel Yvinec on the former’s new album, “Wonderful World.” The duo is able to reflect on the larger meaning of popular music by virtue of their recent trips to New York, where they interviewed several World War II survivors and asked them to speak about what the great standard songs meant to them. Their subjects often spontaneously started singing and even reciting movie dialogue, and the results were “recorded on a cheap machine on the streets of New York City.”

Back home, the two musical De Toquevilles took the tapes of reminiscences and a capella vocals and added their own piano and bass parts as a sort of complement to the commentary. They also mixed in several off-the-cuff vocals from professional singer-musicians Michael Leonhart and Andy Bey; the latter provides the most moving moment in the project with his touching treatment of Jerry Herman’s obscure “The Next Time I Love.”

The result is a high-tech sound collage focused on a sweetly nostalgic purpose, boosted considerably by the outstanding instrumental work of the producer-players. “The White Cliffs of Dover” opens with 86-year-old Milton Hoffman of White Plains (a coincidence?) talking about the song and the early days of the war, and dissolves, as if in a movie flashback, to the two principals playing the tune in their own conspicuously French and classically informed style.

Admittedly, some of the interviewees paint an overly rosy picture of mid 20th century America, overlooking the bigotry and sexism that were then very much a part of the tapestry of day-to-day life, no less than good manners and chivalry. But this is sentiment, not sociology. Mr. Hoffman and his fellow old men describe an America that might as well be a total fantasy, like the Land of Oz. Yet at the same time, this bygone America is — to them at least — as Dorothy says, “a real truly live place. I remember some of it wasn’t very nice, but most of it was beautiful.”

The French Quarter Jazz Festival continues over the next two weeks at venues throughout city. For more information, visit www.frenchculture.org.