Ray Ventura (Raymond Ventura) was a Paris-born bandleader and pianist whose orchestra, Ray Ventura et ses Collégiens, was one of the best-known dance bands in France in the 1930s and 1940s. English Wikipedia, citing The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, calls him a jazz pianist and bandleader who helped popularize jazz in France in the 1930s. His fame with the public rests as much on comic and topical French songs as on jazz, such as "Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise", so he is a borderline figure: the records below show a real swing and dance-band side beside the novelty hits. He was born on April 16, 1908, and passed away in Palma de Mallorca on March 29, 1979.

French Wikipedia says that while still a schoolboy he formed a jazz band with friends from the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, which first played at society receptions, and names Paul Whiteman, the Comedian Harmonists and Jack Hylton as the models for the group he built. English Wikipedia has him as the pianist of the Collegiate Five in 1925 and the leader a year later, when the band became a dance orchestra resembling a big band. The earliest dated record under the group's name on Discogs is a Columbia single of 1928, "I'm Afraid of You" and "Sweet Ella May", billed to Ray Ventura and His Collegians; its credits list Bob Vaz at the piano and a front line that includes the clarinettist and saxophonist Danny Polo, so on records he is the leader rather than the keyboard player. The band recorded American dance and hot numbers for Columbia and then Odeon in 1928 and 1929, among them "Can't We Be Friends", "Louise" and "You're the Cream in My Coffee", which were collected on the LP Hot Dance Music from Paris 1928-29 (Wolverine, 1979) and on the first volume of a chronological CD edition (2003). In 1929 the band played the casino at Deauville and was offered a return cruise to New York in exchange for playing on board.

From 1931 the group worked as the Collégiens, with concerts at the Salle Gaveau in 1931 and, from 1932, at the Empire, Bobino, the Olympia and the Casino de Paris, then tours of France; in 1936 Ventura opened his own cabaret on the Champs-Élysées. The sidemen named on English Wikipedia are the tenor saxophonist Alix Combelle, the trumpeter Philippe Brun and the trombonist Guy Paquinet; French Wikipedia adds the pianist and arranger Paul Misraki, the guitarist Loulou Gasté, the singer and drummer Grégoire Aslan (Coco Aslan), the arranger Raymond Legrand and, in later years, the singer Henri Salvador, the saxophonist André Ekyan and the bassist Louis Vola. The repertoire was split. Misraki and the lyricist André Hornez wrote most of the hits that made the band famous with a mass audience, "Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise" (recorded in 1935 and a hit in 1936), "Ça vaut mieux que d'attraper la scarlatine" (1936) and "Qu'est-ce qu'on attend pour être heureux" (1938), while the band also recorded "St. Louis Blues" and "St. James' Infirmary" for Decca, "I Got Rhythm" and "Margie" in 1938, "Mama, I Wanna Make Rhythm" for Pathé in 1938, and, on a Columbia single of 1939, "Bugle Call Rag" and "After You've Gone".

Ventura was mobilised in September 1939 and, after the defeat of 1940, withdrew to the unoccupied zone. He toured Switzerland in 1941 and in November 1941 left France with part of the orchestra, among them Henri Salvador, Grégoire Aslan, Paul Misraki and Louis Vola, fearing persecution as a Sephardic Jew. They toured Brazil and Argentina and recorded there; the Frémeaux CD L'aventure sud-américaine 1942-1944 gathers twenty of the sides, including "Tico Tico No Fubá", "As Time Goes By" and "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To". Vola's own profile has him joining the orchestra about 1940 and staying in Argentina until 1948.

The band returned to a triumphant reception at the Liberation and ran a new formation from 1945 to 1949 that had hits with "Maria de Bahia" (1947) and "La mi-août" (1949). Ventura's nephew Sacha Distel, the son of his sister the pianist Andrée Ventura, and Salvador both started out in it. Among the singles billed to his orchestra, Discogs lists a Polydor coupling of "In the Mood" and "Undecided" (undated), a 1946 single of "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" and a 1948 one with the title "Armstrong - Duke Ellington - Cab Calloway". In 1947 he co-founded the film company Hoche Productions with Bruno Coquatrix, which produced Nous irons à Paris (1950) and, with Raoul Lévy, Et Dieu... créa la femme. By the 1960s the large sketch orchestra had become too costly to keep on the road; he left the stage for music publishing and helped launch Georges Brassens, and an Atlantic LP of 1958, Hi-Fi Sounds for Young Parisians, has his orchestra playing Brassens songs in arrangements by the trombonist Billy Byers. He is buried in the Batignolles cemetery in Paris. A 1977 revival by Le Grand Orchestre du Splendid brought the old repertoire back, and Distel recorded a tribute album of his uncle's hits around 1993.

The Collégiens were a showband, with sketches, vocal numbers and parodies on stage beside the playing, and French Wikipedia counts them among the first French sketch orchestras. French Wikipedia names the dance and show orchestras of Whiteman and Hylton, and the Comedian Harmonists, as the models. The jazz content is nonetheless real: Discogs files most of the releases billed to the Collégiens under jazz, with swing and big band as the leading styles beside chanson and music hall; the Frémeaux publisher's note describes him as one of the great promoters of jazz in France; and Codamusic names Combelle, Brun and Paquinet as the band's star soloists. A 2013 anthology puts "I'm Afraid of You" (1928) and "I Got Rhythm" (1938) in the same set as the comic hits. The Subgenres above describe that dance-band and swing side only; the humorous songs, the film work and the later publishing are variety rather than jazz and are not tagged.