A Woman's Paris ~ Joie de Vivre

Reprinted with permission from Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960, by Andy Fry. Published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2014 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and marks an important intervention in the growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France. (Purchase)

INTRODUCTION: Part Two (Part one)

Despite the persistence of rose-tinted accounts, I am far from the first to seek to bring a more critical perspective to the study of African Americans in Paris. At least since James Clifford provocatively compared bodies sculpted in flesh with those in wood (the African artifacts known as art nègre that became fashionable in the early twentieth century), the black presence in the city has looked newly complex. Railing against the aesthetic autonomy that had seen, for example, Western and non-Western objects aligned according to formal resemblance alone at the 1984 “Primitivism and Modern Art” show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Clifford observed incredulously, “One would be hard pressed to deduce . . .that all the enthusiasm for things nègre . . . had anything to do with race.” Juxtaposing three examples of the archetypal protruding rear—Josephine Baker’s, an Angolan statue’s, and a Fernand Leger design’s (fig. I.4)—Clifford argued otherwise: “Archaic Africa (which came to Paris by way of the future—that is, America) was sexed, gendered, and invested with ‘magic’ in specific ways.” [27] In short, Clifford saw French négrophilie as a weighted historical phenomenon whose assumptions and implications need to be assessed with critical distance, not naively celebrated.

Since then, a substantial literature has grown up, across several disciplines, concerned with such “modernist primitivism.” [28] Among authors who were quick to take up the task was musicologist Glenn Watkins whose Pyramids at the Louvre offers a thought-provoking reappraisal of African Americans and their music in France. [29] Where this discipline has traditionally viewed jazz in Paris through the eyes of composers—and as a short-lived, frivolous engagement soon thrown off in pursuit of a “purer” neoclassicism—Watkins relocates the phenomenon within a broad primitivism in the arts. [30] Connecting the taste for jazz and ragtime, via Stravinsky, to an older exoticism and Russian primitivism, he encourages readers to consider even Debussy’s jazzy (rather, raggy) piano pieces in the wake of Le Sacre du printemps (which postdates them). Most important, Watkins proposes jazz as a “tardy but powerful ally” of African art: at last a viable musique nègre to join its sister art. [31] Situating Milhaud’s La Création du monde alongside sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s ovoid Beginning of the World, and Josephine Baker’s La Revue nègre with Ernst Krenek’s “jazz-opera” Jonny spielt auf, Watkins adroitly reveals the blurring of “high” and “low,” black and white, perhaps even self and other that occurred under the sponsorship of primitivism. Unlike Clifford, he finally retreats from its most troublesome implications, however: while Watkins finds the reason for Baker’s “later deconstruction . . .  not difficult to determine,” for example, he insists, “It is no myth that in Paris she escaped. . . racial prejudice.” [32]

Art historian Jody Blake pursues Clifford’s lead still further in Le Tumulte noir, making African Americans central in the dialogue between“primitive” and “modern” in this period. If authors such as Watkins placethe reception of jazz within the context of artistic primitivism, Blakeboth extends and reverses the formula. Backdating the French discoveryof musique nègre from jazz to ragtime and cakewalk at the turn of thecentury, she proposes that American performance arts preceded—andframed—the artists’ reactions to African art; she locates them at theheart of artistic movements from the early primitivism of Picasso andothers through various versions of futurism to Dada and surrealism. Shethus emphasizes the subversive, countercultural quality of modernism’sreferences to popular culture, showing how the impact of an imaginedAfrica far exceeded formal parameters. After the First World War, however,the influence of African American popular culture on modernismwas, Blake argues, transformed if not removed. In the Call to Order, asthis period of retrenchment is often called, conservatives reacted againstblack music and dancing, seeking to promote new French dances such asthe neo-traditional française; iconic modernists such as Leger and Picassonow composed nostalgic depictions of the bal musette. In turn, purists likeLe Corbusier reinvented their interest as a primitivism of form in orderto mark it as a classicizing project. Thus, the exclusion of context thatClifford bemoaned as late as the 1980s is, for Blake, cause rather than consequenceof art history’s formalism.

An admirer of her work, I have pointed out elsewhere what seem to me some chronological distortions in Blake’s argument. [33] But my concern in this book is not with high culture’s appropriation of African American music, whether in visual arts, literature, or “art” music. Taking interest in popular culture only in so far as high culture took interest in it under modernism is, I fear, an academic project that often perpetuates the cultural hierarchy it means to question. Important, though, is an awareness of the historical narrative into which Blake strains to fit her case. For she, like many, accepts a familiar way of parsing the interwar period: ebullient and cosmopolitan at first, France becomes more conservative and insular as the years roll on toward the collaborationist Vichy regime of the Second World War, whose cultural politics are anticipated. [34] I intervene in this discussion, among others, in my first chapter by considering one of the genres that bridged the period, black musical theatre.

In 1925, Josephine Baker was famously launched to Parisian stardom by La Revue nègre. This show has come to be seen as an end rather than a beginning: the Call to Order supposedly reined in taste for “primitive” art nègre, and a revival of French folk traditions accompanied neoclassicism in an era anticipating Vichy. Chapter 1, by contrast, traces a tradition that extends almost the length of the interwar period: far from a single event, the imported “revue negre” became a genre, embracing such groups as Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds (1926, 1929) and Louis Douglas’s Black Flowers (1930); they continued, albeit less frequently, into the late 1930s.

The reception of these shows was anything but straightforward, however; I pursue connections to racial theories, both from that time and more recently. Of particular concern were the troupes’ apparent hybridity—not always the heuristic concept its prominence in postcolonial theory might lead one to suppose. In “savage” Josephine Baker’s wake, other female performers, Florence Mills, Adelaide Hall, Aida Ward, and Valaida Snow, were believed to embody different modes of black womanhood, even varying degrees of civilization. But subtle differences can be found, I argue, between (black) Douglas’s presentations of his troupe and that of his white counterpart, “Papa Plantation” Leslie. This reveals a complex negotiation with white expectation—a process that continues today, as I explore in a reading of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which frames chapter 1. Thus I challenge the French press’s obtuse insistence at the time of the film’s release that race and racialized representation are of no bearing in contemporary France.

Recent scholarship on jazz in France has increasingly taken on board the unstable formulations of fear and desire located in its early reception. Narratives such as Shack’s of the rapturous reception of African Americans tend therefore to be replaced by stories of jazz’s gradual and contested assimilation: a tale of progressive integration, in other words, that runs in contrary motion with Blake’s account (and others) of increasing opposition. This is, broadly speaking, the approach taken both in Jeffrey H. Jackson’s Making Jazz French and, most recently, in Matthew F. Jordan’s Le Jazz (although tellingly they disagree on when assimilation was achieved). For example, Jordan writes: “Today, there is a widespread belief that ‘the French love jazz.’ But as in all stories of passion, love, and betrayal, this love has been a rocky affair. After jazz was first experienced as a foreign threat to traditional French culture, the initial hostility of listeners and critics waned and, as the French modernized their sense of self, jazz became an accepted and important form of expression that was compatible with most notions of Frenchness and visions of true French culture.” [35] This process of integration takes place over a series of “historically situated conversations,” ones he reconstructs from the press and particularly the jazz journals. [36] While Jordan frames this assimilation primarily in terms of “modernity,” Jackson’s keyword is “cosmopolitanism.” [37] Both are useful concepts but neither captures the range of meaning jazz was able to signify, nor indeed that these authors discuss. For example, in Jackson’s interpretation, interest in jazz throughout this period indicates a continual vein of cosmopolitanism, albeit one that is sometimes constricted. However, a counternarrative emerges just as strongly: a strain of bigoted insularity if not xenophobia that was running almost as fast after the First World War as it was prior to the Second.

While these new conceptualizations of the period thus serve an important function in moving attention away from the 1920s as the highpoint of cosmopolitanism (and the concomitant notion of an ensuing conservatism), I am cautious about some of their effects. One, they slant the narrative progressively away from contest and toward assimilation. Two, they tend to assume that integration is necessarily a progressive move, rather than one that may itself be directed toward quasi-nationalist or colonialist agendas. Thus Jackson’s premise—that “making jazz French” signals an openness to outside influences rather than, say, a desire to absorb and hence defuse them—does not always seem sound. And I am not convinced that the issue of jazz’s potential “Frenchness” was settled in the affirmative as soon as Jackson and Jordan think it was (one side or the other of World War II).

For the story of African Americans and their music in France is a process of cultural mediation caught, like French society itself, between conflicting desires: to be “authentic” to racial and national roots, but at the same time to assimilate threatening differences. Throughout the period, otherness fostered both superficial appeal and deep-seated fears about race and nation: “ambivalent desire,” as Brett A. Berliner has succinctly captured it. [38] Rather than narrating the story, with Blake, as one of an exotic appeal that subsides and is then rejected, or, with Jackson and Jordan, of an early hostility that progressively gives way to assimilation, I prefer to think of the reception of African American music and musicians as always encompassing multiple contradictory positions. There is change, of course, as the discussion focuses and refocuses on differing musics and issues, but there may also be greater continuity in French reactions than is often suggested. [39] 

I take up themes of sameness and difference in chapter 2, in which I turn my attention away from singers and dancers and toward show and dance bands. If the presence in the flesh of performers from the revues nègres represented one aspect of jazz in interwar Paris, the circulation of mainly white jazz-band recordings on 78 rpm discs represented quite another. This chapter focuses on the unlikely “King of Jazz” in 1920s and 1930s France, British bandleader Jack Hylton, beginning with his 1931 concert at the Paris Opera. Re-embodying, then assimilating, Paul Whiteman records, Hylton and “His Boys” toured Europe to great acclaim—a success lost to most research, which focuses on black musicians in the name of authenticity. Mistaken for Americans, however, the band’s popularity began to wane as resistance to US dominance mounted. They were then often criticized for their “standardization” of a “dehumanized” musical “formula”—language borrowed from a pervasive anti-Americanism.

Two seemingly paradoxical alternatives conspired to dethrone Hylton, I argue. On the one hand, bands such as Ray Ventura et ses Collegiens offered a “national” jazz with great nostalgic appeal. On the other, African American musicians found support from the influential critic Hugues Panassie and his—more or less racial—distinction between “hot” (black) and “straight” (white) jazz. Audiences learned to perceive in both new models a depth and authenticity in contradistinction from the Hylton “product”: an ironic turn given his constant shadowy presence as performer or impresario (for example, when Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington visited). In chapter 2, I thus seek to understand how an increasingly international recording industry was experienced at the local level, in a complex interaction with both live performance and French tradition. Its impact, I suggest, was neither all pervasive nor altogether resistible (thus a form of what is sometimes now called “glocalization”).

There has, of course, been increasing interest in recent years in the history of American musics outside the United States. I can only give a hint of the diverse literature here, but this diasporic approach is proving powerful in analyzing both the musical transformations that take place across borders and the unexpected significations the music sometimes takes on. [40] Coming in quite large part from outside musicology or ethnomusicology, these studies typically consider jazz in terms of Americanization and modernity, whether experienced by people around the world as liberating forces or imperialistic ones. Closer to my disciplinary base, a utopian impulse is sometimes witnessed in writings on global jazz, one I find difficult to reconcile with even a cursory examination of economic and political power relations. [41] Other scholarship on popular music and dance has been more incisive in its analysis of the transatlantic relationship, and specifically in theorizing ideas of black internationalism and modernism. [42] In the French context, such work naturally intersects with research in colonial arenas, particularly in terms of readings of literature and film. Here, France’s unusual proclivity to cast its imperial aggression in cultural rather than religious, political, or capitalist terms has been tested (and usually found wanting). [43] 

An almost constant point of reference in this work, bridging African American contexts and French colonial ones, is Josephine Baker: the performer from St. Louis, Missouri, who first visited France, then stayed, and finally adopted French citizenship, while often playing roles as colonial subjects. Her fascinating career—and the large literature already devoted to it—motivates a change of pace in chapter 3. Although contrasting performances from as many as fifty years apart, I focus above all on her unlikely 1934 revival of Offenbach’s La Créole. Wrapping original and revised texts, reception, and biography together in the operetta’s plot, I consider how the same tensions that characterize French reactions to “others” and their music in the previous two chapters play themselves out on the level of theatrical narrative. La Créole, I argue, at once completed the construction and tested the limits of a complex redefinition of Baker as French.

If most observers saw Baker’s transformation as an affirmation of France’s “civilizing mission,” the few dissenters paradoxically risked insisting on her difference in terms of an essentialized blackness. A comparison with other musical treatments of a similar story (Carmen, Madama Butterfly) and contemporary Baker films (Princesse Tam-Tam, Zouzou) revealthe unhappy logic of their argument. Recognizing both “savage” and“civilized” personas as witty performances relocates Baker’s agency. Hervirtuosity may even help to move beyond fixed racial categories towarddynamic cultural processes: “creolization.” While Baker was highly skilledat mediating audience expectations, however, she was never wholly ableto escape them. To this day, celebrations of Baker as an African Americanheroine contrast with perceptions of her as a sign of successful Frenchassimilation: a tension that may be witnessed in a recent restaging of La Créole, presented both in mainland France and in one of its overseas territories,with which I conclude chapter 3.

African American music in France in the middle years of the twentiethcentury has, rather surprisingly, received less sustained attention thanthat of the interwar years. (This is in part, no doubt, because composersof art music—for a long time the only ones able to smuggle jazz into musicology had by this time ceased to engage it so overtly.) Nevertheless,Ludovic Tournes’s extraordinary New Orleans sur Seine, while ostensiblycovering the whole century, is rooted in the 1940s and 1950s. As a historian,Tournes, like Jackson, is particularly attentive to the infrastructureof French jazz (venues, media, education, etc.) and looks past anecdoteto match cause with effect. He also provides some quantitative analysis,sharing invaluable statistics (about concert attendance, for example) onwhich I occasionally draw. Tournes’s survey of the development and ideologiesof French jazz criticism provides a superb map of the territory,some of which I cover closer to the ground in the pages that follow. Inthis sense, his strength is also his weakness: Tournes’s attention to institutionaland critical factors, combined with his sheer scope, constrainsthe possibility for nuanced musical discussion. Nevertheless, his remainsthe most profound study of jazz on French soil, and in the latter stages ofthis book in particular, I owe a huge debt to it. [44]

Tournes’s discussion of the “diffusion,” “acculturation,” and “legitimation”of jazz in France broadly supports Jackson’s and Jordan’s views of asteady naturalization. The three authors differ on the moment such assimilation is supposed to have been achieved, however, in part because Tournes concentrates on institutional and critical factors, where Jordan in particular pays more attention to an assessment of public sentiment. The turning point, Jordan argues, was the war, after which opposition to jazz became virtually impossible for right-thinking French. I disagree on this point, as it happens, for reasons that will become apparent in chapter 4. But more importantly, I disagree with the premise that this assimilation could ever be complete, or that it would be a sign above all of modernity among the French. (Indeed, there’s a certain irony in Jordan’s description of Jackson’s isolation of the interwar period as a “historical fiction,” while he apparently takes as axiomatic himself that the post- WWII world was fundamentally different from the prewar one.) [45] Apart from anything else, the hypothesis of jazz’s postwar assimilation is impossible to test, since it soon cedes its place in popular culture to rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll, so the discussion about the influx of (African) American culture simply moves elsewhere.

I tackle aspects of the war, in chapter 4, by means of a sideways glance at France’s most celebrated jazz export, Django Reinhardt. I view him first via his surrogate, Emmet Ray, in Woody Allen’s “mockumentary” Sweet and Lowdown (1999). This movie helps me to unpick one of the riddles of Reinhardt’s life: how his greatest success could come during the Nazi occupation of Paris. I borrow a narrative device from the film to present three conflicting versions of jazz’s fate at this time: that the music was expelled tout court; that it survived on the margins as the sound of resistance; and that it was tolerated, thanks to careful positioning by critics, but covertly contested the regime. None hold up under scrutiny, I find, linked as they are by what Henry Rousso has called France’s “Resistancialist myth.” [46] Rather, jazz prospered in wartime France, and the terms in which it was defended evolved naturally out of prewar discourse.

If the nationalistic language that framed Django Reinhardt’s success was scarcely original, however, paradoxically his wartime music often sounded newly brassy and American. Some might locate resistance in that gap; others would, on the contrary, recognize a collaborating opportunist. This dispute, I argue, is anachronistic. After France’s collapse, jazz was often associated with “national regeneration,” a phrase that had no firm political affiliation. Django Reinhardt, then, became an unlikely herald of a reinvigorated New France. The only question was, under whose regime would it be?

Across chapters 4 and 5, I become progressively more engaged in how the story of jazz itself is remembered and retold. Jazz studies’ important ongoing work on historiography and criticism is too big a field to survey here. [47] But it bears restating that the international dimension of early jazz writing has yet properly to be explored. [48] A partial but prescient exception is James Lincoln Collier’s controversial The Reception of Jazz in America, which does require brief discussion. “The history of jazz,” he stated as long ago as 1988, “has been plagued by two myths”: “The first . . .says that the American people, until relatively recently, have ignored or despised jazz, . . . the second . . . that it was first taken seriously by Europeans.” [49] Collier goes on to complain that he had not found a single comment post-1940 on the popularity of jazz in the States, and nothing since 1935 suggesting that jazz was better treated at home than abroad. As such, he calls attention to the one-sided nature of accounts of jazz in Europe, a characterization that still largely stands twenty-five years later, as I’ve indicated above.

While recuperating early American critics, however, Collier ignores or brushes over European articles of the early years. For him, there simply was no real jazz in Europe from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s tour of 1919 to Louis Armstrong’s first visit in 1932—a restrictive definition that is not only essentialist but ahistorical. Collier’s endeavor to explain the “myths” he addresses, then, takes a strange turn: he denounces some of America’s most important jazz critics—including John Hammond, Otis Ferguson, and Rudi Blesh—as Communist sympathizers, who promoted the story of the United States’ lack of interest in its cultural resources to political ends. Meanwhile, Collier’s handling of race issues witnesses a cultivated naivety. [50] I intervene in this discussion in chapter 5, less by adjudicating between American and European writers than by revealing the broader views and influences behind some critics’ positions. I also seek to understand what—contrasting—purposes French writers and African American musicians may have had in perpetuating the idea of European prescience about jazz.

Chapter 5 concerns the unusual career of Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans reedman who occupies a special position among emigre musicians in France. Appearing first in 1919, he is a focus of Ernest Ansermet’s celebrated review of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra; in 1925 Bechet helped to launch Josephine Baker to international stardom. Iconic moments in retrospect, but Ansermet’s text is not, I show, as trusty a symbol of Europeans’ acute perceptions of jazz as historians have long assumed, and Bechet’s true rise to fame came not until a Gallic version of the New Orleans Revival Movement in the 1940s and 1950s—“Bechetmania” as it has been called.

No straightforward revivalist, Bechet played versions of old Creole folk songs—or their ur-type—that divided critics. But these tunes struck a chord with French audiences, generating nostalgia for a common past that may never have been. Bechet, too, was busy reshaping history: appropriating an old folktale to write himself into the very foundations of jazz. In the end, though, it is the gap between the musician’s and his audience’s perspectives that proves most illuminating: Bechet was not reliving the past for its own sake but rather remaking it for the current day—even, in his crazed reception by French teenagers, anticipating the popular music of the future. It is appropriate that Bechet should play the last chorus of Paris Blues: bridging my period, his story best exemplifies the range of experience of African American musicians in France, and in turn reveals some of the paradoxes of their music’s historiography.

Praise for Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960

“Fry has combined meticulous research with careful and creative use of sources from the worlds of music, film, history and popular culture more generally to produce an account that might, finally, bury the perennial (and perennially misguided) idea that Europeans and especially the French understood and appreciated jazz before Americans did. The story is false not only because African American and other U.S.-based supporters of jazz seem not to be ‘Americans’ in that version of history, but also because, as Fry eloquently argues, the French at times tried to claim jazz as their own creation, because ethnocentrism and paternalism were rarely absent from what they wrote, because the music and the musicians were often proxies in debates over national culture, and because musicians had reasons for living in France that previous scholars have failed to describe completely.” — Travis Jackson, University of Chicago

“Andy Fry’s ardently interdisciplinary set of historical analyses of the ongoing importance of African American music in the cultural life of France introduces innovative perspectives on Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and other major musical figures.  This book incontrovertibly confirms the power of the new critical improvisation studies by affirming the centered place of music in any understanding of the human condition.” — George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

Andy Fry joined King’s College London in 2007 having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, and as a visiting professor at Berkeley, He completed his graduate studies at Oxford, D. Phil., and has also studied at the Universities of Lancaster, California (Berkeley), and Pennsylvania.

Paris Blues: Notes to pages 1 – 23

[27] James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and Modern,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard) University Press, 1988), 189–214 (quotes on p. 197) [originally published in Art in America (April 1985): 164–77]. The parallel Cliff ord observes between Baker’s familiar posture and art nègre had long before been made explicit; see the cover of Josephine Baker and Marcel Sauvage, Voyages et aventures de Joséphine Baker (Paris: Marcel Sheur, 1931) [also reprinted in Jody Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 98].

[28] See, inter alia, Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1995); Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1990).

[29] Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 1994).

[30] For a solid if traditional musicological account, see Nancy Perloff , Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1991); see also James Harding, The Ox on the Roof: Scenes from Musical Life in Paris in the Twenties (London: Macdonald, 1972).

[31] Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre, 100

[32] Ibid., 138.

[33] Fry, “Beyond Le Boeuf.”

[34] There are several eloquent spokespersons for this position. For example, Romy Golan traces the return to landscape painting and organic forms in Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), arguing that the avant-garde began forsaking Paris for New York as early as World War I; far from embracing modernity, the French endeavored to recover land lost to bombs and foreigners and to ward off mechanization. In True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), Herman Lebovics argues that the first half of the twentieth century saw the invention of a powerful myth of French tradition that simultaneously denied the recent—and ramshackle—establishment of the nation and sought to exclude people and modes of cultural expression now deemed to emanate from outside of it. Lebovics more than Golan, however, is clear that he is telling only part of the story: the myth of true France, if powerful, was not all pervasive; it sometimes met spirited resistance.

[35] Jordan, “Introduction: The Meaning and Function of French Debates about Jazz,” in Le Jazz, 1–15 (quote on p. 2).

[36] Ibid., 11.

[37] Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). See also Denis-Constant Martin andOlivier Roueff , La France du jazz: Musique, modernité et identité dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Marseille: Parenthèses, 2002), which includes a useful selection of articles from the period.

[38] Berliner, Ambivalent Desire.

[39] Both Jackson and Jordan also have a slightly more abstract sense of discourse than I do. While a belief in the life of written texts beyond their authors and immediate context is obviously essential to a historical study of reception, I try here to keep in quite close contact with specific performers and performances (to the extent that these can be reconstructed). This is why I prefer tracing localized performance histories to surveying broad categories such as “jazz.” As well as giving more attention to specific performers and their music, a spotlight helps to reveal how production and reception were involved in a reciprocal relationship. (On the other hand, both Jackson and Jordan pay rather more attention than I do to how and where the music was typically heard: their studies of cultural geography and technologies of transmission in particular reward close attention.)

[40] Among this literature are E. Taylor Atkins, ed., Jazz Planet ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003); Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer, eds., Eurojazzland: Jazz and European Sources, Dynamics, and Contexts (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012); Bruce Johnson, The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2000); Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); and Neil A. Wynn, ed., Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

[41] For more on this point, see my review of Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity by Paul Austerlitz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), Music and Letters 88 (2007): 335–40.

[42] See, inter alia, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); and Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

[43] Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Dina Sherzer, ed., Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone World (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, 1996); and David Henry Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths (Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2001).

[44] Ludovic Tournes, New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France (Paris: LibrairieArtheme Fayard, 1999). For a more detailed consideration, see my article“Beyond Le Boeuf.” Among other books on this period, see Gerard Regnier, Jazz et société sous l’Occupation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), which is the most detailedstudy of jazz during the war (and is discussed in chap. 4 below); and Colin Nettelbeck, Dancing with DeBeauvoir, which focuses on the postwar period from a literary perspective.

[45] Jordan, “Introduction,” 13.

[46] Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

[47] Many issues were initially brought to light by Scott DeVeaux in “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 525–60 [also reprinted in Robert O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 485–514]. Recent, extended studies include John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Bruce Boyd Raeburn, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

[48] As acknowledged by Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool, 15–16.

[49] James Lincoln Collier, The Reception of Jazz in America: A New View (Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1988), 1–2. See also Laurent Cugny, “Did Europe ‘Discover’ Jazz?,” in Cerchiari, Cugny, and Kerschbaumer, Eurojazzland, 301–41.

[50] As Pete Martin has said: “Anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the Ronald Reagan school of historiography is likely to get quite angry” (Pete Martin, “Essay Review,” Popular Music 9 [1990]: 139–44 [quote on p. 144]). John Gennari similarly describes Collier’s as a “quasi-McCarthyite reading” (John Gennari, “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideology,” Black American Literature Forum 25 [1991]: 449–523 [quote at p. 514n27]). And Amiri Baraka complains that Collier’s “various writings give off a distinct aroma of rotting mint julep” (Amiri Baraka, “Jazz Criticism and Its Effect on the Art Form,” in New Perspectives on Jazz, ed. David N. Baker [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990], 55–70 [quote on p. 65]).

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Text copyright ©2014 University of Chicago Press. © Andy Fry. All rights reserved.
Illustrations copyright ©Barbara Redmond. All rights reserved.
barbara@awomansparis.com