Paris Jazz, A Guide: From the Jazz Age to the Present

For centuries, France has cast an extraordinary spell on travelers. Harvey Levenstein's Seductive Journey explains why so many Americans have visited it, and tells, in colorful detail, what they did when they got there. The result is a highly entertaining examination of the transformation of American attitudes toward French food, sex, and culture, as well as an absorbing exploration of changing notions of class, gender, race, and nationality.

Levenstein begins in 1786, when Thomas Jefferson instructed young upper-class American men to travel overseas for self-improvement rather than debauchery. Inspired by these sentiments, many men crossed the Atlantic to develop "taste" and refinement. However, the introduction of the transatlantic steamship in the mid-nineteenth century opened France to people further down the class ladder. As the upper class distanced themselves from the lower-class travelers, tourism in search of culture gave way to the tourism of "conspicuous leisure," sex, and sensuality. Cultural tourism became identified with social-climbing upper-middle-class women. In the 1920s, prohibition in America and a new middle class intent on "having fun" helped make drunken sprees in Paris more enticing than trudging through the Louvre. Bitter outbursts of French anti-Americanism failed to jolt the American ideal of a sensual, happy-go-lucky France, full of joie de vivre. It remained Americans' favorite overseas destination.

From Fragonard to foie gras, the delicious details of this story of how American visitors to France responded to changing notions of leisure and blazed the trail for modern mass tourism makes for delightful, thought-provoking reading.

"...a thoroughly readable and highly likable book."—Deirdre Blair, New York Times Book Review

The new preface for this paperback edition draws on documents discovered in a French archive since the book was first published. Author Craig Lloyd notes that the new archival material confirms Bullard's suspicions that it was an American military officer, Edmund Gros, who ended Bullard's career as a combat pilot flying for France in World War I. Letters among the archival materials also affirm Bullard's contention in All Blood Runs Red, his memoir, that he was a close friend of Edmund Genet, a then-famous white American pilot flying for France.

He began his livelyhood as a theatre performer and boxer; two opposing and similar avocations. He joined the military and became the first Black American and Black Frenchman aviator and was awarded medals for his bravery, dedication and skills. Very well liked, he had a contagious personality and started working at a famous Paris club later in life and eventually became a club owner himself. He met the famous of the day like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Bricktop and many others. This biography also got me interested in Jazz age Paris to request both autobiographies of Hughes and Bricktop.

Slowly (too slowly) more is being known about this man and his acomplishments and contributions to the human race.

You won't be able to put it down. Jack Johnson's autobiography "In the Ring and Out" is another good bio of that era too.

Following the Great War's devastation, innovative movements in France offered competing visions of a revitalized national body and a new world order. One of these was the postwar Catholic revival or renouveau catholique. Since the church had historically been the dominant religious force in France, its turn of the century separation from the state was especially bitter. For many Catholics, the 1914-18 sacrifices made on the Republic's behalf necessitated its postwar `re-Christianization.' However, in their attempt to reconcile Catholicism with culture, revivalists needed to abandon old oppositions and adapt religion's rigging to the prevailing winds of modernity.

Stephen Schloesser's Jazz Age Catholicism shows how a postwar generation of Catholics refashioned traditional notions of sacramentalism in modern language and imagery. Jacques Maritain's philosophy, Georges Rouault's visual art, Georges Bernanos's fiction, and Charles Tournemire's music all reclothed ancient tropes in new fashions. By the late 1920s, the renouveau catholique had successfully positioned Catholic intellectual and cultural discourse at the very centre of elite French life. Its synthesis of Catholicism and culture would define the religiosity of many throughout Western Europe and the Americas into the 1960s.

Blake discusses the reception of ragtime-era and jazz-age entertainment, as well as other African visual and performing art forms, to provide new ways of understanding the development of modernist primitivism, from Matisse and Picasso to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Purism. But the influence of art négre went well beyond the avant-garde art world. Starting with the cakewalk of the 1900s and culminating with the Charleston of the 1920s, the book studies the African-American idioms that were involved in larger cultural, social, and political developments. As an illustration, Blake argues that performers such as Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet of Revue négre fame were thought to affect the political balance between Africa and Europe during the colonial period.

Le Tumulte noir is divided into six chronological chapters, each a well-researched, well-conceived, and well-written synthesis of the histories of art, literature, music, and dance. Because of its cross-disciplinary character, this book is not reserved for specialists, but is open to a larger audience.

Music Musique: French & American Piano Composition in the Jazz Age

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Music Musique: French & American Piano Composition in the Jazz Age
Barbara Meister
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Considerable attention is paid to the social and political worlds in which these artists lived and created. Of particular interest is the community of Afro-American jazz musicians who settled in Paris after World War I, and their influence on the likes of Ravel, Milhaud, Satie, and other artists with New Orleans-based styles. Meister also discusses the more famous coteries of American writers who lived and worked in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The stories of these two groups of Americans in Paris form a fascinating background to the main topic of the book.

Music Musique is intended for amateurs and experts alike; it provides ideas about repertoire as well as information about compositions that are likely to be heard in performance. The emphasis of the text is always on the piano solo literature or other piano music—song accompaniments, piano duets, or internal orchestral piano parts.

Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France

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Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France
Brett A. Berliner
Manufacturer: University of Massachusetts Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

French | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1558493565

Through a careful analysis of popular imagery, exotic fiction, travel writing, and other cultural texts, Berliner shows how the representation and reception of blacks in post-World War I France embodied competing, at times contradictory, perceptions. On the one hand, African and Caribbean blacks were depicted as a source of cultural renewal and a means for celebrating life and sexuality. On the other hand, interracial relationships were seen as a threat to French civilization, a notion reinforced by grotesque advertisements, ethnographic exhibitions, and other aesthetically repulsive images of "primitive" blacks.

On balance, Berliner concludes, negative representations of the exotic black "other" overshadowed more positive constructions in the French social imagination of the 1920s. Although negrophilism may have infused jazz-age France with new cultural energy, the focus on racial difference served another purpose as well: to define the boundaries and meaning of French identity after the horrific experience of World War I.

Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age.(Review) (book reviews): An article from: Canadian Journal of History

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Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age.(Review) (book reviews): An article from: Canadian Journal of History
David R. Farrell
Manufacturer: University of Saskatchewan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital