Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.

Profiles forty-five lithographs by Paul Colin which portray the uproar African-Americans created in music and dance in Paris after World War I.

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.

An innovative look at the dynamic role of sound in the culture of the African Diaspora as found in poetry, film, travel narratives, and popular music. Black Soundscapes White Stages explores the role of sound in understanding the African Diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, from the City of Light to the islands of the French Antilles. From the writings of European travelers in the seventeenth century to short-wave radio transmissions in the early twentieth century, Edwin C. Hill Jr. uses music, folk song, film, and poetry to listen for the tragic cri nègre. Building a conceptualization of black Atlantic sound inspired by Frantz Fanon's pioneering work on colonial speech and desire, Hill contends that sound constitutes a terrain of contestation, both violent and pleasurable, where colonial and anti-colonial ideas about race and gender are critically imagined, inscribed, explored, and resisted. In the process, this book explores the dreams and realizations of black diasporic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, and it poses questions about their legacies for us today. In the process, thee dreams and realities of Black Atlantic mobility and separation as represented by some of its most powerful soundtexts and cultural practitioners, such as the poetry of Léon-Gontran Damas—a founder of the Négritude movement—and Josephine Baker’s performance in the 1935 film Princesse Tam Tam. As the first in Johns Hopkins’s new series on the African Diaspora, this book offers new insight into the legacies of these exceptional artists and their global influence.

In Le Jazz, Matthew F. Jordan deftly blends textual analysis, critical theory, and cultural history in a wide-ranging and highly readable account of how jazz progressed from a foreign cultural innovation met with resistance by French traditionalists to a naturalized component of the country's identity. Jordan draws on sources including ephemeral critical writing in the press and twentieth-century French literature to trace the country's reception of jazz, from the Cakewalk dance craze and the music's significance as a harbinger of cultural recovery after World War II to its place within French ethnography and cultural hybridity. Countering the histories of jazz's celebratory reception in France, Jordan delves in to the reluctance of many French citizens to accept jazz with the same enthusiasm as the liberal humanists and cosmopolitan crowds of the 1930s. Jordan argues that some listeners and critics perceived jazz as a threat to traditional French culture, and only as France modernized its identity did jazz become compatible with notions of Frenchness. Le Jazz speaks to the power of enlivened debate about popular culture, art, and expression as the means for constructing a vibrant cultural identity, revealing crucial keys to understanding how the French have come to see themselves in the postwar world.

Illuminates the expatriate African American community of jazz musicians that thrived in the Montmartre district of Paris in the '20s and '30s and helped turn the "city of lights" into the major jazz capital it remains today.

Contributions from Christopher G. Bakriges, Sean Creighton, Jeffrey Green, Leighton Grist, Bob Groom, Rainer E. Lotz, Paul Oliver, Catherine Parsonage, Iris Schmeisser, Roberta Freund Schwartz, Robert Springer, Rupert Till, Guido van Rijn, David Webster, Jen Wilson, and Neil A. Wynn This unique collection of essays examines the flow of African American music and musicians across the Atlantic to Europe from the time of slavery to the twentieth century. In a sweeping examination of different musical forms--spirituals, blues, jazz, skiffle, and orchestral music--the contributors consider the reception and influence of black music on a number of different European audiences, particularly in Britain, but also France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The essayists approach the subject through diverse historical, musicological, and philosophical perspectives. A number of essays document little-known performances and recordings of African American musicians in Europe. Several pieces, including one by Paul Oliver, focus on the appeal of the blues to British listeners. At the same time, these considerations often reveal the ambiguous nature of European responses to black music and in so doing add to our knowledge of transatlantic race relations.