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  • Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960 by Andy Fry
  • Rashida K. Braggs
Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960. By Andy Fry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13881-7. Paper. Pp. 282. $30.00.

In Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960, Andy Fry time and again complicates grand narratives and commonly held myths about African American musical production in France between 1920 and 1960, leaving readers to question these former “truths.” Throughout the book, Fry’s assertive, critical stance pinpoints and contests arguments in prominent contemporary musical discourse and present-day scholarship, including the notions that French critics and producers played a key role in privileging jazz as a valuable music before Americans; that French critics perceived black music as primitive and racially determinant rather than modern and hybrid; and that African American performers played into the signification of black music as primitivist without resistance.

Fry’s critique begins with the eponymous 1961 film Paris Blues, starring Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, and links the film to the modern-day work of anthropologist William Shack (Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars, 2001) and French historian Tyler Stovall (Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light, 1998). Fry argues that these texts reify a problematic myth of Paris as a colorblind safe haven where African American performers could thrive irrespective of their skin color. Fry immediately and in detailed fashion challenges these works, suggesting they present oversimplified, nostalgic perspectives. But he also builds upon these works and a wealth of rich scholarship in jazz studies, film studies, African diaspora studies, and French history. In doing so, he makes a welcome and necessary addition to scholarship on African American performance in France and Europe more broadly. Fry makes clear that his study is not meant to “survey the history of black music and musicians in Paris over these forty-odd years” (10). Instead, his goal appears to have been to shed light on those underlying signs of stereotype, racism, and racial uplift that prevailed in African American musical performance and discourse in early and mid-twentieth-century France and that still make an impact on perceptions today.

Covering the years between 1920 and 1960, Paris Blues offers a key contribution with its approach to periodization. While a rich array of books exists on jazz in interwar France (what many call the jazz age), only recently have scholars begun to investigate the post-World War II era. By choosing case studies across such a large span, linking the interwar and postwar eras, and looking at other genres in addition to jazz, Fry identifies trends, changes, and overarching issues that connect two key moments of African American musical production in France. His attention to multiple types of texts also contributes to existing scholarship on jazz in France. Authors such as Colin Nettelbeck (Dancing with de Beauvoir: Jazz and the French, 2004) have drawn on literature, film, and photography to [End Page 131] investigate the impact of jazz on French popular culture, but Fry’s multitextual approach is still rare. The book’s case studies feature everything from films like Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (whose protagonist is vaguely reminiscent of Django Reinhardt) to cartoon representations of Sidney Bechet. Fry shifts between different types of texts, always demonstrating consistently deep reflection and critique no matter the source; his ease with interdisciplinary analysis departs from and expands on his training in music.

Fry demonstrates this interdisciplinary approach from the outset. In the first chapter, he sets the stage for one of the most distinctive features of the book: his use of contemporary popular culture texts as frames for his chapters and as lenses into historical moments. He commences with a description of his French viewing of the American film Bamboozled, directed by Spike Lee in 2000. The film is a modern-day critique and satirical reenactment of the blackface minstrel tradition in the United States. Fry’s choice of Bamboozled to introduce a discussion about black musical theater in France is unexpected, given the film’s different...

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