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.
This file is intended only for preview!
I ask you to delete the file from your hard drive after reading it.
thank for the original uploader
No comments:
Post a Comment