Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe

7. “Un Saxophone en Mouvement”?: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE PRIMITIVIST RECEPTION OF JAZZ IN PARIS IN THE 1920S

106 The metropolis of Paris was particularly receptive to the influence of African American jazz in the arts and popular culture in the 1920s for two reasons that are integral to its history as a center of transatlantic modernism: French consumer culture was, on the one hand, increasingly shaped by American entertainment culture, a result of increasing commercial exchange in the postwar period, and on the other hand, by cultural forms to which one attributed African origins, a result of colonialism. “Jazz” was associated with cultural modernity, such as an urban lifestyle, technological progress, mobility , etc., and, at the same time, cultural primitivism—as it was considered a black musical tradition with past African origins. However, jazz as it was played and represented to a French audience at first and predominantly by AfricanAmerican performers,drew different responses from different groups. There was, according to historian Jeffrey H. Jackson, great liberty among French recipients of African American performers and the dance styles they imported to Paris as to what was defined and interpreted as “true” jazz. As 7 “Un Saxophone en Mouvement”? JOSEPHINE BAKER AND THE PRIMITIVIST RECEPTION OF JAZZ IN PARIS IN THE 1920S —IRIS SCHMEISSER 107 JOSEPHINE BAKER AND JAZZ IN PARIS IN THE 1920S Jackson argues: “what people meant when they used the term jazz depended on who was using it—just as in the United States, where the term was also being used to describe a wide variety of dance music.”1 In other words, if certain cultural and aesthetic properties indicative of jazz could be partially identified, those parts were quickly projected upon the whole, thus making the label “jazz” a broadly and loosely interpreted category. As a result, the focus of this essay will not be on the types and variations of jazz in Paris in the 1920s, but rather on its aesthetic representation and cultural imagination in French visual culture. Inspired by a number of recent contributions contextualizing the reception of African American jazz and its dance styles in general, and of singer/ dancer Josephine Baker in particular within a diasporic framework, this essay seeks to accomplish two things. First, to read Josephine Baker’s performance in the all-black musical revues La Revue nègre (1925) and La Folie du jour (1926) and subsequent representations of Baker in French art and popular culture as a case study regarding the primitivist reception of jazz in Parisian visual culture in the 1920s, a culture shaped by the consequences of colonialism. And second, to problematize an either/or perspective in critical approaches to Baker that a) either represent her as a figure of cultural power and influence who resisted a racist power structure or b) that identify her as a perpetrator and even victim of white primitivist stereotypization. The very complexity of her figure, to use a jazz metaphor applied to Baker by the French critic Pierre de Regnier in his review of La Revue nègre, might be comparable to “un saxophone en mouvement” and as such incredibly fascinating yet impossible to pin down into one single frame.2 This doubly moving complexity of Josephine Baker’s (self-)representation was, as I will argue, the main ingredient of her lasting originality. Seeking to answer the difficult question why “American black music had so much greater a capacity to conquer the Western world than any other,” Eric Hobsbawm proposes two answers that well illuminate the major cultural coordinates that constituted the historical context of Baker’s primitivist reception: first, the fact that African American jazz was perceived not only as primitive, but also as modern, and second, because “[j]azz made its way and triumphed, not as a music for intellectuals, but as a music for dancing.” Significantly, Hobsbawm uses the term “dance revolution” to account for its broad social and cultural consequences, namely its impact upon class and 108 IRIS SCHMEISSER gender structures: Baker’s popularization of the Charleston, for instance, and its eager adaptation not only by the French middle-class but also the French haute-bourgeoisie, well illustrate Hobsbawm’s argument concerning the dissolution of class and gender conventions as a result of this“dance revolution.”3 Whether this“dance revolution” triggered by the import of African American jazz also resulted in a loosening of race-based structures will be problematized in light of Baker’s primitivist reception. If, as Jack Sullivan optimistically concludes that...