Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960 by Andy Fry (2014)

For the last several years or so, a new trend in some of the published studies on jazz focusing on historical way points has surfaced. While just some 15 years ago the usual way of opening, exploring and detecting a particular feature or trait of jazz music was to refer to the “classics,” both scholarly work on jazz, as well as the solid number of musicians’ memoirs and “autobiographies” and then to offer specific conclusions, the recent years have brought up a different approach to jazz historiography.

The fresh start is basically supported by a modern way of looking at a) the seriousness or authenticity of the standard works, while b) the emphasis now on other sources, such as statistics, press coverage, discographies or even radio or TV footage that open new ways of experiencing and interpreting special parts in the history of jazz either in the USA or abroad.

Andy Fry’s book takes a good look at jazz abroad. To escape racist and violent living conditions at home and being able to perform at concerts for an audience hungry for American jazz, France for African Americans ever since the 1920s was considered a pleasant place to be, especially if you were in show biz, and in particular, if you were a jazz musician. His book is focused on early jazz and swing music, leaving out mostly the 1950s and 1960s.
In the early days of the 19th century, many American artists left the US to start a new life and career in Paris. So did Bricktop (Ada Smith, legendary dancer and nightclub owner), Josephine Baker, and many others. Later in the 1950s and 1960s African American authors also spent years in exile there, among them literary giants like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Chester Himes. (The authors are not referenced in the study, but many texts on how it felt to be abroad and being equipped with actual civil rights and dignity for the first time in life can be found in Baldwin’s excellent essay collection Notes of a Native Son; many of the essays were written in his Paris exile.)

The early jazz men who arrived in Paris may have felt just the same and sometimes the stay was altogether successful and resulted in packed concert halls, recordings and eventually marriage. However, sometimes life abroad was accompanied by other forms of racism and European forms of segregation, too. And while Paris was under German occupation, black artists were sent to prison. What author Andy Fry, music teacher at King’s College London, presents us with  on almost 300 pages is an almost entirely new picture of the jazz scene. He offers a new survey of what it was like to be a jazz man in Paris, 1920 to 1960 and focuses mostly on African-American artists, simply because they represented the majority of the American musicians around. Their reports of life in Europe led many other musicians to Paris.

The accounts, however, not always were entirely objective, often leaving out the awful sides of the city and prejudice that were part of French society for decades. Nevertheless, the nation then had colonies in Africa and was known for its sometimes extremely brutal and bloody ways of keeping the upper hand there. So to many French, those black jazz men were as much target of racism as were the colored people of the French colonies then living in France.

Hence the story of jazz and jazz reception in France seemingly is not a story of progressive integration of the music and art form into French culture. On the contrary, depending on the point of view of the earlier researchers on the topic, jazz was either mostly embraced by the French or simply seen as a threat to traditional French culture and morals. So Fry’s five chapters here give way to different approaches. He enters the discussion in the 1920s with the revue nègres and white show bands (with a lengthy part devoted to white British bandleader Jack Hylton who caused an uproar when he played the Paris Opéra house in 1931.) This period was the basis of all later involvement of African Americans in Paris jazz bands.

Chapter three is devoted to Josephine Baker and the following texts deal with the influence of French guitar genius Django Reinhardt on the Paris jazz scene, Sidney Bechet, jazz during the occupation years and finally the reinvention, or the myth of a “Paris of the past,” glorifying the 1930s. And Fry does not fail to mention the many changes that jazz brought to Paris like the jazz writings of Boris Vian, the youth culture of “Les zazous,” the influence of Hugues Panassié and Charles Delauny.

Same as in other countries at this time, the public discussion and the intellectual debate about jazz as either primitive form of entertainment or an art form that underwent several stages, did not hide the core questions behind the discussion: mostly, definitions of race, national and traditional values, the power of popular culture, and the difficult nature of modernity were the actual subjects that were in need of “protection,” as some people thought.
(Even so, the same book borrows its title from another product of the same popular culture, namely the 1961 movie Paris Blues (dir. Martin Ritt), inspired by the novel of Harold Flanders that featured Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman and Louis Armstrong. The plot evolves around two jazz musicians in early 1960s Paris.)

Fry cites almost no record or memoir of the musicians themselves, but relies more on the comments of audiences or on the press coverage in French media. Such an approach tries to stay away from simple glorification and the myth of a European paradise for creative artists of African American descent.

And such is his intention: “Pulling together the various strands set out above, [the study] Paris Blues offers an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond a few familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. … Thus [in Paris Blues] familiar figures feature prominently, but in unfamiliar contexts: Josephine Baker singing Offenbach, Django Reinhardt in occupied Paris, Sidney Bechet swinging through the fifties.”

What stands out in this book is the approach to a “true” (or a new) perception of how audiences and circumstances fostered or slowed down the spread of jazz in France during the period at hand.

Anybody interested in jazz and jazz culture outside the US will enjoy Paris Blues, for there actually is some news here.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2015

Andy Fry. Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960. University Of Chicago Press, 2014, 304 p.