Paris Blues

Introduction

John Murnane — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:34:31 +0000

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.

Push: The Conditions Black Jazz Musicians Faced in the United States

John Murnane — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:32:11 +0000

Will Marion Cook’s bitter experiences in the concert world had cut short his promising career as a classical violinist. Born in Washington D.C., in 1865, the son of a professor of law at Howard University, Will Marion went to Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music at thirteen years of age. His outstanding studies won for him a scholarship to study in Berlin under the famous German violinist Josef Joachim. After five years of study abroad, Cook returned to the Unites States in 1895 and studied composition at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, then headed by Antonin Dvorak. Cook was the first violinist with the Boston Symphony when the orchestra’s soloist died; Cook assumed he would automatically take over the role. But though he could sit in the first chair, the orchestra committee told Cook, as a black man he would not play the solos. Angered by the racist decision, he stamped on his violin and walked out (Shack, 46).

This passage from William A. Shack’s Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars illustrates the atmosphere black musicians faced in the United States—the frustration of talent denied, subordinated under the humiliating strictures of Jim Crow. Cook’s musical training was never in question—just his skin color. Cook would go on to retrain himself as a jazz musician and, along with New Orleans born clarinetist Sidney Bechet, set out for Paris in 1919. Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra played in Europe for the next four years to great success. Bechet would spend the next four decades on and off living between New York and Paris, dying in Paris in 1959. Cook and Bechet were part of the first generation of jazz expatriates in Paris —along with others such as Josephine Baker, Eugene Bullard, Louis Mitchell, and Ada “Bricktop” Smith. Cook’s frustration seemed to be sparked by the psychological pressure of living in a racist society and despite obvious talent, hitting a racial “glass ceiling.” It was a feeling described by James Baldwin in a famous interview for Essence magazine in 1970. Baldwin left America in 1948 and again, in 1970, despite worldwide fame as a writer. He did so to avoid death, he said. “The death of working in the post office for 37 years; of being a civil servant for a hostile government. The death of going under and watching your family go under.”

Humiliation like Cook’s was common even for famous jazz musicians. Duke Ellington biographer John Hasse explains a telling incident when the Duke Ellington Orchestra made its first film appearance in 1930:

Check and Double Check was an RKO feature starring Amos ‘n’ Andy, played by wildly popular white radio comedians wearing blackface makeup and speaking in exaggerated black dialect. Amos ‘n’ Andy play bumbling taxicab drivers in this dreadful movie. Due to the movie studios strictures bandmember Juan Tizol, a Puerto Rican, and Barney Bigard, a Creole, were forced to put on black makeup so they would appear to be Negro. Racial mixing, even on a bandstand, was opposed by some whites, especially in the South (Hesse, 129).

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Blacks faced more than psychological pressures. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is a testament to the horrors of lynching in the United States. (“Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”) Over 3,000 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968, as University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law Professor Douglas Linder graphically illustrates on his Famous Trials website. Linder’s “The Trial of Sheriff Joseph Shipp et al., 1907“ includes statistics and James Allen’s gruesome postcard images of lynchings given as souvenirs in the 1930s and 40s. (See Allen’s website called Without Sanctuary.)

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Great Migration northward blacks faced brutal and humiliating circumstances elsewhere in the United States. The Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles during World War Two saw both blacks and Mexican immigrants targeted by white mobs. The Northeast was no haven for blacks either. Famous black jazz musicians such as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Miles Davis were the victims of police harassment and police brutality in postwar New York City, Philadelphia and other major cities in the northeast. Miles Davis gives a graphic account in his autobiography:

Miles Davis at Birdland

I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bull… I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis.” I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights. He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.”

After a scuffle, a second police officer cracked Davis’s head open with his billy club. Davis was charged with resisting arrest; at the trail all charges were dropped. Ironically, the year was 1959—the year Bud Powell left for Paris, driven out by many years of much worse abuse.

Trying to defend Thelonious Monk from rough treatment by police at a nightclub in Philadelphia in 1945, Powell was hit over the head. Arrested, Powell went without treatment for several days, before being released into his parents’ custody. He was 20 years old. Suffering severe headaches, he was admitted to Bellevue and later Creedmoor State Hospital in 1947. After a little over a years, where he was fed sleeping pills, tranquilizers, experimental drugs and electroshock treatments, Powell was released. He would never be the same.

By the late 1950s Rock and Roll and a generational shift made jazz gigs scarce; many jazz musicians left for Europe simply in search of work. The fact that so many of the expatriate jazz musicians in Paris were black, however, suggests other forces at work. To put it bluntly, fame and success were no protection against racism in postwar America. Tenor Saxophonist Johnny Griffin, who left for Paris in 1963, put it this way: “You know we [black musicians] have been trying to find someplace to go and live. I’m over here because I’m trying to save my life. God bless [tenor saxophonist Paul] Babs Gonzales. He lent me the money and we caught the Rotterdam, and I thumbed my nose at that false Statue of Liberty sitting in the harbor.”

Pull: Respect and Acceptance

John Murnane — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:28:49 +0000

The idea of a color-blind Paris is an exaggeration. Witness Dexter Gordon’s arrest in 1987 for a twenty-year misdemeanor, at the height of his fame. Still wearing his Dale Turner hat from the movie Round Midnight, Gordon and his wife, Maxine, were held for questioning, as an apologetic French customs agent blamed his racist boss for the drawn-out process. Gordon joked about how Klaus Barbie had recently benefited from the statue of limitations running out on some his crimes (Barbie was a Nazi war criminal, his trial filled the headlines in 1987). And many Parisians who accepted jazz in the 1920 and 30s, in particular, saw it as part of the fad of “primitivism” –a racist outlook at its core. Proponents from Picasso and Erik Satie to French musicologist and music critics shared the belief expressed by music critic Emile Vuillermoz, that “the black race possesses a musical sense of a rare subtlety and an instinct of rhythmic suppleness . . .. “ (Jackson, 88). Like the artistic movement négrophilia, which found inspiration in African sculpture and masks, Parisian intellectuals saw the celebration of the “primitive” as an antidote to a “stifling and civilizing bourgeois modernity” (Archer-Shaw, 10).

Nevertheless, Paris—long a Mecca for artists, writers and intellectuals—became a center of jazz studies and performance. One of the first and longest running Jazz magazine Jazz-Hot began in Paris in 1939 under the direction of Hugues Panassie. Panassie’s brainchild, the Jazz Hot Clubs, sprang up and featured American jazz musicians along with famous French stars Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, and others. Avante-garde and Classical musicians such as Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel and Darius Milhaud studied jazz as well. Moreover, French music critics and scholars wrote some of the most important works about jazz. Andre Coeuroy published a book entitled Jazz in 1926 and Histoire Générale du Jazz Strette – Hot – Swing, in 1942. And as the New York Times explained “the first noteworthy exploration of jazz techniques was Hughes Panassie’s Hot Jazz” in 1937. André Hodeir began writing about jazz in the 1940s. As editor-in-chief of Jazz Hot, he was an early proponent of bebop. Downbeat called Hodeir’s first compilation of jazz writings, written in the early 1950s, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, “the best analytical book on jazz ever written.” Postwar existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Vian embraced jazz music as well, using it as a backdrop for poetry and other readings along the lines of the Beat poets in the 1950s in New York City.

Jazz extended beyond the elite in Paris, however. By the end of World War Two it took on a deep psychological significance in France. During Nazi occupation, for example, jazz continued to thrive—the Zazous, similar to the “Swing Kids,” vested it with new meaning. As historian Jeffrey Jackson explained:

Jazz became a central part of the wartime counter cultural aesthetic of the Zazous, teenage hipsters whose name was derived from the sound of scat singing . . . The men among these young rebels usually sported long hair and a version of the American zoot suit or other outlandish dress; the women wore lots of makeup, platform shoes, and short skirts. Linking jazz—which flourished in secret dance halls and dancing schools—with resistance to the occupation (Jackson, 192).

By the end of the Second World War, jazz had taken on a new meaning among the French people. As William A. Shack put it, the return of Louis Armstrong’s gravelly voice over the airwaves became as much a symbol of freedom as Charles De Gaulle’s famous march down the Champs-Élysées.

American expatriate jazz musicians relished the appreciative climate in Europe and France in particular. Drummer Kenny Clarke told Charlie Parker “Bird, you’re slowly and surely committing suicide in America. Come over here and live. Here you will be treated as an artist—the French understand these things” (Russell, 272). Dexter Gordon echoed Clarke:

I had no idea of the European love for jazz—and jazz fans. I heard that it was beautiful. All the cats that came over spoke about it. But I really had no idea of how much it was appreciated. It was such a great revelation. And to feel all this respect, as a musician, as an artists. It was quite a new thing for me and, I would say, for most American musicians (Britt, 93).

Appreciation was only half the story. Many black jazz musicians noticed a dramatically different racial climate in France as opposed to the United States. Josephine Baker put it bluntly: “Why did I leave America? Because one day I realized that I lived in a country where I was afraid to be black. In Paris, I feel liberated” (Jackson, 85). Louis Armstrong biographer Scott Allen Nollen explained, referring to Armstrong’s first visits to Paris in the 1930s, “he enjoyed being respected as an artist for the first time. He was (at worst) a “nigger” and (at best) a “colored entertainer” in the States; in Europe he was followed by jazz critics who hailed him a genius” (Nollen, 47). When Duke Ellington toured France in 1939, he met with overwhelming enthusiasm. One French writer declared that Ellington’s music revealed “the very secret of the cosmos.” Trumpet player Rex Stewart, a member of Ellington’s orchestra at the time, recalled “such adoration and genuine joy that for the first time in my life I had the feeling of being accepted as an artist, a gentleman, and a member of the human race” (Ward, 146). A decade later, Miles Davis explained similar feelings: “Paris was where I understood that all white people weren’t the same, that some weren’t prejudiced and others were. I had kind of known this after I met [composer] Gil Evans and some other people, but I really came to know it in Paris,” (Davis, 128). James Baldwin put it in stark terms: “Every Negro in America carries all through his life the burden of race consciousness like a corpse on his back. I shed that corpse when I stepped off the train in Paris.”

CONCLUSION

Jazz holds an ambivalent place in American life. It is a reminder of the stain of racism that blots the pages of American history; it also represents the power of the black community to overcome, to survive and transcend horrific conditions. Gerald Early, a professor of African-American studies, explained:

A certain kind of paradox is built into jazz music. You had people who created a music that’s really celebrating democratic possibilities: liberation, freedom of the spirit, a soaring above adversities – who really hadn’t experienced everything that democratic society had to offer, but you could look around and see the promise embedded in the society. Jazz is a kind of lyricism about the great American promise and our inability to live up to it.

The flow of black jazz expatriates amplifies and highlights the paradox. The promise of America rang hollow for these musicians—“the false Statue of Liberty sitting in the harbor,” as Johnny Griffin put it. That jazz was first recognized as an art from in Europe, and in Paris in particular, adds to this ambivalence, particularly when contrasted with the attempts to denigrate it in the United States as Maureen Anderson convincingly argues in “The white reception of Jazz in America” African American Review, Spring, 2004. Anderson explains how “in striving to analyze and to understand the concepts of jazz music white critics often hid behind black stereotypes in order to explain the increased fascination the world had with jazz.” The fact that jazz greats like Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell, et al. lived most of their professional lives away from the United States, more comfortable in Paris, is a reminder of the many costs of racism in America life. In short, France’s gain was America’s loss.

Works Cited:

Petrine Archer-Shaw, Negrophila: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000).

Stan Britt, Dexter Gordon: A Musical Biography (1989)

Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis (1990)

John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (1993)

Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (2003).

Scott Allen Nollen, Louis Armstrong: The Life, Music and Screen Career (2004)

Francis Paudras, Dance Of The Infidels: A Portrait Of Bud Powell (1986),

Ross Russell, Bird Lives!: The High Life And Hard Times Of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker (1973).

William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (2001)

Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music (2002)

Mike Zwerin, The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir (2005)