Introduction
As a reviewer for Gramophone Magazine put it, “most films about jazz and jazz musicians turn out to be more than a trifle silly. ‘Paris Blues’ is no exception.” Directed by Martin Ritt, this 1961 film won Duke Ellington “Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture” at the Academy Awards and featured Sidney Poitier as expatriate jazz saxophonist Eddie Cook, Paul Newman as trombonist Ram Bowen, and Louis Armstrong as “Wild Man” Moore. Despite this formidable array of talented actors and musicians, the film never gained much notoriety. The plot line is rather corny (Poitier’s and Newman’s characters fall in love with two American school teachers vacationing in Paris, played by Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward). Some of the dialogue between Diahann Corroll’s and Poitier’s characters is revealing, nonetheless. “Look. Here nobody says Eddie Cook, Negro musician; they say Eddy Cook musician—period,” Poitier explains during one such exchange, referring to the degree of color blindness many American expatriate jazz musicians experienced in Paris throughout the 20th century.
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The 1987 movie ‘Round Midnight certainly fared much better. Time magazine movie critic Richard Corliss lauded it: French filmmaker Bertrand “Tavernier has dared to find his new film’s style in the cool, dark colors and loping harmonics of bebop, and especially in the laconic tempo of [tenor saxophone giant Dexter] Gordon’s speech and walk. Gordon, whose only previous movie gig was a stroll-on in the 1955 melodrama Unchained, commands the screen with the dignity of an exhausted emperor.” The film won Gordon a nomination for a “Best Actor” at the Academy Awards. Set in Paris in 1959, the film closely mirrors the tragic life of Bud Powell. Like Powell, Dale Turner (Gordon’s character) is an expatriate, alcoholic, decrepit, jazz legend, under the thumb of his overbearing manager “Buttercup” (Powell’s real-life manager-guardian’s name, as it turns out). Turner is rescued by adoring fan Francis Borier, played by actor Francois Cluzet. Borier’s character is based on Francis Paudras, Bud Powell’s real-life French benefactor, friend and author of Dance Of The Infidels: A Portrait Of Bud Powell (1986), a book that inspired the film. Similar to the real Powell-Paudras relationship, Borier nurses Turner back to health. Turner eventually regains his musical prowess, culminating in a triumph return to New York City, where he plays to thunderous applause, only to return to Paris where he lives out his last days in relative contentment.
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Both films–Paris Blues and ‘Round Midnight–captured an important chapter in the story of jazz and the decades-old love affair between black American jazz musicians and the French people. Both underscore the acceptance and adulation black jazz musicians found in Paris in the decades after 1917, when The United States entered the First World War and black American troops (with many jazz musicians among them) joined in the Allied cause. What these films leave to the imagination, of course, were the conditions in the United States that compelled successful musicians to live their lives far away from home, often leaving family behind in the process. Clearly, the story of jazz and the enthusiastic acceptance of black performers in Paris is one of both push and pull, one that provides a unique window on the history of American race relations, particularly when seen against the backdrop of European attitudes regarding race during the same time period. Why did internationally recognized names such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis consider their Paris performances liberating and transformative? What compelled lesser-know jazzmen such as Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, Don Byas, Kenny Drew, and Johnny Griffin, to name a few, to take up permanent residence in Paris, adopting the expatriate life, as it were? Answers to these questions highlight the severity and debilitating effects of America’s long obsession with race.
Experiencing the stark differences between racial taboos and attitudes in the United States, on the one hand, and the tolerance and appreciation black musicians found in France, on the other, drove great talent across the Atlantic. Many jazz critics, for example, consider Powell to have been the piano equivalent of alto saxophone genius Charlie Parker and certainly a co-founder of the bebop style of jazz. The victim of police beatings in New York and electro-shock treatments after being admitted to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in 1947, Powell lived out most of the last seven years of his tragically short life in Paris (he died at age 41 of cirrhosis of the liver). Moreover, a close look at black jazzmen in Paris reveals a certain irony, as racial attitudes in the United States may have precluded a wider acceptance of jazz in the land of its birth (a denial of America’s original art form), meanwhile jazz has found widespread acceptance in other countries around the world, but no more so than in France, a country that escaped the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, and their long shadows.
