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"African American jazz musicians -- France"
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Jazz diasporas : race, music, and migration in post-World War II Paris
\"At the close of the Second World War, waves of African American musicians migrated to Paris, eager to thrive in its reinvigorated jazz scene. Jazz Diasporas challenges the notion that Paris was a color-blind paradise for African Americans. On the contrary, musicians--and African American artists based in Europe like writer and social critic James Baldwin--adopted a variety of strategies to cope with the cultural and social assumptions that greeted them throughout their careers in Paris, particularly in light of the cultural struggles over race and identity that gripped France as colonial conflicts like the Algerian War escalated. Through case studies of prominent musicians and thoughtful analysis of personal interviews, music, film, and literature, Rashida K. Braggs investigates the impact of this post-war musical migration. Examining a number of players in the jazz scene, including Sidney Bechet, Inez Cavanaugh, and Kenny Clarke, Braggs identifies how they performed both as musicians and as African Americans. The collaborations that they and other African Americans created with French musicians and critics complicated racial and cultural understandings of who could play and represent \"authentic\" jazz. Their role in French society challenged their American identity and illusions of France as a racial safe haven. In this post-war era of collapsing nations and empires, African American jazz players and their French counterparts destabilized set notions of identity. Sliding in and out of black and white and American and French identities, they created collaborative spaces for mobile and mobilized musical identities, what Braggs terms 'jazz diasporas.'\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Paris blues : African American music and French popular culture, 1920 - 1960
The Jazz Age. The phrase conjures images of Louis Armstrong holding court at the Sunset Cafe in Chicago, Duke Ellington dazzling crowds at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and star singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But the Jazz Age was every bit as much of a Paris phenomenon as it was a Chicago and New York scene.
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. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France's complicated jazz history from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, among others—what he asks is how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and contributes greatly to a growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France.
eBook
Gypsy Jazz
Michael Dregni expertly traces the development of Gypsy Jazz not through straight musical history, but instead in a fascinating travelogue and detective story, following its birth with Django and its subsequent legacy, including all of the famous guitarists who have followed in Django's footsteps-Biréli Lagrène, Boulou Ferré, Dorado Schmitt, and others.
eBook
Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris
This article shows that African American jazz performers created a cosmopolitan diasporic network through transatlantic touring during the interwar years. Successful black musicians and dancers lived in large international cities, or \"cosmopolitan pleasure centers,\" to quote singer Florence Mills, and they performed in the international space of the nightclub. Most of them retained a strong sense of identity as black Americans and invoked their international experiences to criticize narrow racial practices in the United States. Collectively, these men and women forged a practice of black American cosmopolitanism that was transmitted back to America by way of the black press. Examining their experiences serves to interrogate and expand the idea of cosmopolitan practice, and understanding their experiences as cosmopolitan explains why the \"jazz migration\" was an important political and cultural phenomenon for the larger black American community at the time.
Journal Article
Free Jazz and the French Critic
From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, free jazz was the subject of considerable public interest in France. The present article examines the conditions that fueled enthusiasm for American avant-garde jazz, focusing on the politicization of discourse surrounding the ‘new thing.’ Critics hostile to the movement felt that it undermined jazz's claim to universality, a cornerstone of postwar attempts to valorize the genre in the French cultural sphere. Yet the tendency to identify free jazz with various forms of African American political radicalism presented no less of a challenge for the movement's advocates. By constructing an image of free jazz that stressed its irremediable difference from the norms and values of European culture, writers were compelled to find alternative ways of relating it to contemporary French concerns. A reading of Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli's textFree Jazz Black Powershows how the authors' attempt to reinscribe African American cultural nationalism as an expression of transnational anticolonial struggle not only helped bring free jazz closer to the French experience, but also served as a way of working through the unresolved legacies of colonialism.
Journal Article
The South-Grappelli Recordings of the Bach Double Violin Concerto
Among the earliest known jazz interpretations of Bach's music are two 1937 recordings of the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor featuring the American Eddie South and the Frenchman Stéphane Grappelli as soloists. Recorded in Paris with an accompaniment by guitarist Django Reinhardt, the discs represent not only an intersection of musical genres, but furthermore an encounter between performers of diverse nationalities and ethnicities.
A classically trained African American artist who turned to jazz out of economic necessity, South continued occasionally to perform classical works, often presenting them while adopting a consciously exoticized \"gypsy\" persona. Reinhardt's cultural trajectory was in some respects the reverse of South's: the guitarist was a Manouche gypsy who gravitated toward American jazz, only rarely acknowledging his own ethnic identity explicitly, though it was reflected in his musical language.
The Bach recordings were planned and overseen by the record producer and jazz critic Charles Delaunay, son of the post-cubist painter Robert Delaunay and raised among France's elite high-art community during the inter-war period. In this intellectual milieu, Bach's music was the focus of two distinct aesthetic ideologies (
Taruskin
\"Back\"), both of which, I argue, are manifested by the South-Grappelli recordings. At one level, the recordings present an artisanal Bach whose music can readily be assimilated into vernacular musical idioms like jazz or European gypsy music. But, at the same time, they reflect a conception of Bach's art as a transcendent, universal site where disparate other musical traditions could be engaged on neutral terms.
Journal Article
