Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris

THE GEORGE GUND FOUNDATION

IMPRINT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

The George Gund Foundation has endowed

this imprint to advance understanding of

the history, culture, and current issues

of African Americans.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the African American Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the George Gund Foundation.

Jazz Diasporas

MUSIC OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Editor

Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Editor Emeritus

1. California Soul: Music of African Americans in the West, edited by Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje and Eddie S. Meadows

2. William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions, by Catherine Parsons Smith

3. Jazz on the Road: Don Albert’s Musical Life, by Christopher Wilkinson

4. Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars, by William A. Shack

5. Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West, by Phil Pastras

6. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, by Eric Porter

7. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

8. Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans, by William T. Dargan

9. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba, by Robin D. Moore

10. From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz, by Raul A. Fernandez

11. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad, by Timothy Rommen

12. The Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams, Sr.: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy, edited with an introduction by Mark Clague, foreword by Samuel Floyd Jr.

13. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, by Amiri Baraka

14. Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the New World, by Martin Munro

15. Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music, by Timothy Rommen

16. Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene, by Travis A. Jackson

17. The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop, by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

18. Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post–World War II Paris, by Rashida K. Braggs

Jazz Diasporas

Race, Music, and Migration in Post–World War II Paris

RASHIDA K. BRAGGS

University of California Press

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Braggs, Rashida K., 1976–.

    Jazz diasporas : race, music, and migration in post–World War II Paris / Rashida K. Braggs.

        p.    cm.—(Music of the African diaspora ; 18)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27934-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-27935-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-96341-2 (ebook)

    1. Jazz musicians—France—Paris—20th century.    2. African American musicians—France—Paris—20th century.    3. Jazz—France—Paris—History and criticism.    4. African American authors—France—Paris—20th century.    5. Paris (France)—Race relations—20th century.    I. Title.    II. Title: Race, music, and migration in post–World War II Paris.    III. Series: Music of the African diaspora ; 18.

ML3509.F78P36    2016

    781.65089’96073044361—dc23

2015026558

Manufactured in the United States of America

25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Mom,

who saw great promise in me

and who passed down the strength to fulfill it

Distinctive as it is, U.S. Negro music, like U.S. Negro life, is, after all, or rather first of all, also inseparable from life in the United States at large. Thus, as an art form it is a direct product of the U.S. Negro sensibility, but it is a by-product, so to speak, of all the cultural elements that brought that sensibility into being in the first place.

ALBERT MURRAY

Encounter on the Seine underscores the transatlantic structure of the African American Subject, pointing to the ways in which geographic displacement brings to the fore the meanings and meaninglessness of modernity and its civilizing project.

MICHELLE WRIGHT

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: MIGRATING JAZZ PEOPLE AND IDENTITIES

1. PERFORMING JAZZ DIASPORA WITH SIDNEY BECHET

2. JAZZ AT HOME IN FRANCE: FRENCH JAZZ MUSICIANS ON THE WARPATH TO AUTHENTIC JAZZ

3. INEZ CAVANAUGH: CREATING AND COMPLICATING JAZZ COMMUNITY

4. BORIS VIAN AND JAMES BALDWIN IN PARIS: ARE WE A BLUES PEOPLE, TOO?

5. KENNY CLARKE’S JOURNEY BETWEEN BLACK AND UNIVERSAL MUSIC

CODA: BEYOND COLOR-BLIND NARRATIVES: READING BEHIND THE SCENES OF PARIS BLUES

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

1. Sidney Bechet plays two horns

2. Claude Luter and Sidney Bechet perform in post–World War II Paris

3. René Urtreger plays piano for a recording session in 1959

4. Inez Cavanaugh performs at the Club du Vieux Colombier

5. Inez Cavanaugh’s letters to pianist Mary Lou Williams

6. The cover of Mary Lou Williams’s notebook

7. LeRoy Neiman’s drawing of James Baldwin, 1961

8. Boris Vian plays the trumpet at Club Saint-Germain, 1949

9. Kenny Clarke at a Barclay Studio session in 1959 Paris

Preface

Jazz Diasporas reforms and expands a concept that I first touched on in my dissertation, when I recognized the influence of French jazz critics and musicians on the development and dissemination of jazz. At the time jazz scholarship had for the most part ignored this topic. Years later, and with the outcropping of books that build on the foundation Jeffrey Jackson set with Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris, jazz studies is transnational these days. There is no limit to the places that scholars have located and investigated the music. So I no longer feel the impetus to take on this battle, which has largely been fought and gloriously continues.

Jazz Diasporas has taken a different turn but still remembers its dissertation roots. In those early days I felt the danger of conducting research that would ignore the creation of the music in the United States and fail to recognize the contributions of African Americans. The more that I study, the more a potential erasure of jazz’s racialized history threatens. This threat has made me question whether this history need remain attached to the music, which was always already hybrid. For, as jazz scholar Burton Peretti argues, jazz is a creolized music: Jazz holds special importance as a model of créolized culture among once-colonized ‘folk’ (Peretti 94). Jazz has always commingled elements of West African, European, and Caribbean instrumentation, rhythm, and harmony. But the power and identity associated with and achieved through jazz have made an impact on individual and collective, racial and national, and musical and cultural politics. These struggles over identity and power exchange have created tensions over who can claim this music. How did French jazz musicians and critics claim the music, and to what ends? How might African American jazz musicians and jazzophiles gain racial and national belonging through this music?¹ Music cannot really belong to anyone. But jazz critics, musicians, and fans have created narratives of belonging throughout jazz history. In answer to these questions Jazz Diasporas illustrates tension between states and narratives of belonging. Even the concept of a jazz diaspora assumes a state of tension between both and and, for jazz is both black and white, both American and global.²

Acknowledgments

I have written much of this book in transit or while settling into different locales. As I travel, it has occurred to me that movement not only reflects the subject of this book but also the process of its writing. During the years that I have mulled over and teased out ideas, I have moved to and from many new spaces and ways of thinking. With each move forward I have had a great deal of help. While it would take another book to document it all, there are several people and institutions I will take this opportunity to thank.

First and foremost I thank God and my family. My mother, Dorothy F. Garrison-Wade, held my hand throughout this process and continually encouraged me to believe in myself. Her never-ending support has been my bricks and mortar; furthermore, she has reviewed most of this book without complaint. Everlasting thanks go to my dad Earl S. Braggs for consistently giving me a high standard to reach with his own writings and for always encouraging me not to follow but to carve my own path. Also, I am grateful for my dad Anthony Wade; I have stayed on course with the help of his open arms, always listening regard, and consistently sound advice. My grandparents stood by my side the whole way. They unwittingly spurred me to finish by asking the seemingly harmless question, So when will I get my copy of the book? I count friends within my family. A stalwart few held me up against obstacles and challenges in completing this book. Many heartfelt thanks go to Tamara Roberts, Ray Gilstrap, Pamela Throop, Jennifer Vargas, Yveline Alexis, and Pia Kohler for their support, which showed itself in multiple forms from listening and offering encouragement to brainstorming ideas and reading my work.

I could easily envisage a cheerleading tour, wherein I shouted out my gratitude for my series editor Guthrie Ramsey and editor Mary Francis. Guthrie’s enthusiasm for my project and methodology and his in-depth knowledge of music of the African diaspora propelled and helped shape this project in so many large and small ways. Mary’s attentiveness, accessibility, and experience provided the perfect guidance for this project. A mere thanks for their work seems insufficient. I am also grateful for the feedback from the anonymous external readers; their comments helped expand my thinking and offered tough questions to address that strengthened the book.

My dissertation committee propelled and sustained this book in its infant stages. In academia it is not a given to have an adviser who is an excellent mentor and great advocate, so I have always been thankful for E. Patrick Johnson’s patience and guidance—more so for its constancy long after the dissertation. Dwight McBride has presented me with multiple opportunities to grow as a scholar; most apparently, he propelled me down the path to explore more of James Baldwin’s oeuvre. I also thank my other dissertation and qualifying exam committee members, Margaret Drewal and Jennifer Brody.

I thank several other scholars for exemplifying the type of scholar I aspire to be. For their profound research contributions, their accessible and engaging articulation of knowledge, and, above all, their constant and continual professional guidance and mentorship, I heartily thank Harry Elam, Trica Keaton, Maurice Wallace, Brent Hayes Edwards, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, and the senior scholars of the Black Performance Theory group.

Many have helped by offering beneficial feedback on my work and writing process. Several groups stand out in this regard: the Paris Critical Theory Dissertation Writing Group; Jean Jamin and Patrick Williams’s Jazz & Anthropology class at EHESS in Paris; the IHUM writing group; the HCA PhD colloquium; the ATHE and ASTR book proposal workshops; the ASTR mobility working group; the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity; my Williams College writing roundtable and writing date partners; the Oakley Seminar on migration and my Africana Studies Colloquium at Williams College; and the CIMMA working group at Université Paris-Est Créteil. I am grateful for several scholars who have been on standby to read and edit works in progress. Of particular note are Jürgen Grandt, Jenny James, Marie Loeffler, Perrine Warmé-Janville, and Paul Merrill.

I also take this opportunity to thank a wealth of other professors and scholars, who through courses or through discussions, conferences, and invited lectures have enriched this project: Michael Borshuk, Donald Clarke, the late Dwight Conquergood, Renee Alexander Craft, Tracy Davis, the late Michel Fabre, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Fradley Garner, John Gennari, Jacqueline Goldsby, Stephen Hill, Mischa Honeck, Wolfram Knauer, Anne Legrand, Susan Manning, Jeffrey McCune, Robert O’Meally, Frances Paden, Sandra L. Richards, Jean-Paul Rocchi, Francesca Royster, Margaret Sinclair, Ludovic Tournès, Sam Weber, Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Tony Whyton, Harvey Young, and Mary Zimmerman.

The process of writing a book is just as much about tracking down leads, following up on suggested contacts, and exploring tidbits of information. So I would like to thank those who connected me with others. Family member Bendt Arendt introduced me to the correspondence of Inez Cavanaugh and bassist Peter Giron, while filmmaker Joanne Burke and writer David Burke first connected me (and continue to do so) with a wonderful community of artists in Paris. I am heartily grateful to the jazz musicians and fans who graciously allowed me to interview them: John Betsch, Jean-Louis Chautemps, Laurent Clarke, Bobby Few, Salim Himidi, Nancy Holloway, Sylvia Howard, Archie Shepp, Hal Singer, Almeta Speaks, René Urtreger, Benny Vasseur, the late Claude Luter, and the late Mike Zwerin.

This book would not have progressed as far or as quickly as it did without the aid of expert staff at the following research institutions: the Northwestern University Library; Special Collections at Northwestern’s Deering Library; the Chicago Jazz Archive and Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago; Woodruff Library at Emory University; the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the New York Public Library; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Francois Mitterand and Richelieu sites; and the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt.

Throughout this research project I have benefited from financial support from multiple sources. The following departments and fellowships were instrumental in supporting various trips for archival research and conferences: Northwestern University (the department of Performance Studies, the Graduate School, the Center for International and Comparative Studies Conference, the French Interdisciplinary Group, and the Paris Program in Critical Theory); Stanford University (Introduction to Humanities program); Heidelberg Center for American Studies (The Ghaemian Junior Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship); Williams College (the Hellman Faculty Fellowship, Class of 1945 World Fellowship Program, Division I and II Summer Research Program, Writing Roundtable, and supplemental funding for additional research and book subvention).

Last, I wish to thank other family members, friends, colleagues, and faculty who helped in a major way during the journey of writing this book: Tish Anderson, Glenn Baldwin Jr., Jay Bonner, Anya Braggs, Natalie Strelnikova Braggs, LeRhonda S. Manigault Bryant, Bryan Carter, Katy Chiles, Giridhar Clark, Kathy Coll, Gail Derecho, Stephanie Dunson, Doc Embler, Cynthia Garrison, the late Teddy Gossett, the late Elijah Hansley, Mark Harrison, Ann Holder, Jake Lamar, Bishupal Limbu, Carol Ockman, Emmett G. Price III, Pam Reid, Marilyn Root, Toni Salazar, John Schulz, the late Alan Shefsky, and a wealth of others whose support has been a guiding force.

Introduction

Migrating Jazz People and Identities

At ninety-five years old Hal Singer could still seduce with his saxophone. The measured steps to the raised stage . . . the near misses when sitting on his stool . . . the misheard shout out of the next tune . . . nothing could alter his firm hold on the saxophone. On that fifth day of October in 2014 Singer’s saxophone blurted just a bit off sync, though still lilting. But it did not take long for him to mesmerize the audience.

As this master of rock ’n’ roll, R&B, and jazz performed, visions of poodle skirt–laden girls flipping and spinning with intricate steps took over my imagination. His music transported me back in time. In 1948 Singer recorded Cornbread on the Savoy label. The song quickly hit number one on the R&B charts. Riding the waves of his success, he turned down the opportunity to retain his spot in Duke Ellington’s reed section; even though he’d only just secured this esteemed role, Singer had enough recognition then to lead his own band (B. Dahl; Felin).

On that still summery day in October 2014 Hal Singer created a mood of nostalgia and blood memories in the cozy community center of Belleville, Les ateliers du Chaudron (The studios of Chaudron).¹ The lucky ones were sitting upright in chairs against the wall and beside the stage. Most of us were crouched on wooden bleacher-like levels, holding our knees in, sitting on our jackets, and trying not to take up too much space so that everyone could fit in. We were a mixed crowd: Singer’s family; Americans long having resided in France; international tourists just passing through; French residents of the tenth arrondissement (neighborhood); and their accompanying friends. We were white, black, and mixed; teens and elders; men and women. Despite the differences, everyone sat in awe as Singer created a bond among us. For he connected us and transported us to times past.

Easing into his flow, Singer led the band with Freddy Freeloader—a twelve-bar blues tune that is recognized on one of the best-selling and most well-known albums of all time, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. The 1959 album became a pinnacle point in jazz history, an epic contribution from Columbia Records and its 30th Street studio, and one last spark of bop coolness before free jazz spawned a new avant-garde jazz scene. Based in New York City since 1941, Singer enjoyed plenty of opportunities to collaborate there. He played with saxophonist Don Byas, trumpeter Roy Eldridge, and pianist Wynton Kelly, and that was after he had made his way across the country from his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma (B. Dahl). In a 2005 interview he described the intensity of jazz production in postwar New York to me: . . . the Fats Wallers and Charlie Parkers. They had more musicians working in one block than any other city. New York was the messiah for jazz.

But Hal Singer migrated to Paris in 1965—despite his success, forthcoming job opportunities, and potential for collaboration with so many great jazz musicians working in New York. Having settled in Chatou, a western suburb of Paris, he had resided in Paris for nearly fifty years by the time of his 2014 concert. Marrying a French woman, one of his fans in those early days of playing at clubs like Les Trois Maillets (The three mallets), he raised a family with two girls (Felin). His daughter Stéphanie recognized the sacrifices he had made and his desire for them to have a better life: In any case, he lived in the United States at a time when it wasn’t good to be black; that affected him enormously, I think. And compared to his education, it was like a tiny bit of revenge: ‘I couldn’t do it, but my girls, they will do it’ (Felin).² Singer’s perspective was not so different from many a parent’s, but he migrated across the ocean to remake his life for himself.

His songs did not hit the pop charts much after his migration, but he kept jazz alive in France—one mentee, band, and audience at a time. He mentored French kids on the bandstand and veterans who became well-known musicians in France, like Steve Potts. On that day in 2014 Steve Potts and The All Stars accompanied Singer. Potts organized this birthday concert, just as he had five years before in celebration of Singer’s ninetieth birthday. Potts reminded the audience of the impact of Hal Singer and so many African American jazz musicians who had played in France, the United States, and beyond. For me Singer’s vamp that kept going and going and his still urgent vibrato after more than seventy-five years of performing symbolized the enduring journey of jazz and African American jazz musicians in the United States and France.

Hal Singer represented a critical mass of African American artists that constituted a recurring artistic presence in Paris from the early 1900s until the present day (Stovall, Paris Noir xv). Termed Paris Noir (Black Paris), the groups of African Americans residing in Paris were small but influential. Their presence in Paris demonstrated the French desire for African American cultural expression and forged continued connections between their experiences in Paris and the music, literature, art, and politics growing out of U.S. metropolitan hubs like New York City and Chicago. The community of African American artists in the 1920s may be the most well-known. Performers such as Josephine Baker resided in Paris then and created the community that William Shack calls Harlem in Montmartre (Shack 10). The group of African American jazz musicians who migrated to Paris after World War II added to this history of Parisian migration. By 1964, more than fifteen hundred African American artists (including other prominent artists like writer Richard Wright and artist/writer Barbara Chase-Riboud) had migrated to Paris (Fabre, Cultural 45).

In Jazz Diasporas the postwar migrations of vocalist Inez Cavanaugh, saxophonist Sidney Bechet, drummer Kenny Clarke, and the community of artists with whom they collaborated take center stage. This book explores reasons for the migration of African American jazz musicians, strategies they used to thrive in Paris yet maintain relations with the United States, their mentorship of and collaboration with white French musicians, and their transformations in personal identity that paralleled the music’s own evolving racial and national identity. In this period jazz helped forward illusions of Paris as color-blind, and some African American musicians willfully but not blindly made use of jazz to achieve success in Paris. Some musicians and jazzophiles subtly used jazz as a tool to critique racialized oppression prevalent in the United States and blur racial boundaries in France.

The 1999 documentary film Hal Singer: Keep the Music Going, compared Singer’s life in the United States and France. Singer identified differing perceptions and treatment of African Americans as a deciding factor for staying in France:

I made a good living in America, and I didn’t, I wasn’t never happy with the system. But when I came here I found that, my life was a little more relaxed. I was given more respect. I found people that had read about this music, knew the history of it, liked it very much. In America, I had not had people that really knew the history of this music and neither were giving the musicians the respect. . . . This is some time the thing that you don’t always get being a black musician in America, is respect. (Felin)

Singer’s comments reaffirm an oft-asserted narrative that privileges Paris as a place that is more accepting of racialized difference. As we will see, this narrative of Paris as a haven for African Americans builds on exoticized perceptions of and desire for African art, a nostalgic passing down of stories from those who had once lived in Paris, and experiences of African American soldiers stationed in France in World War I and World War II.

The testimonies from musicians touring Europe also portrayed Paris as offering more creative freedom and respect for jazz. Hal Singer described this mystique of European appreciation to me: A lot of people here read books and knew the life of the people. . . . European fans could recite to you all the records a person had made. In his opinion European fans showed not only appreciation but also intellectual awareness of jazz.³ The attention French jazz fans paid to his music demonstrated the respect he believed was lacking in the United States. In France Singer felt respected and valued for the contribution he could make to French culture.

Many African American jazz musicians shared Singer’s perspective of Paris, but some musicians’ feelings of welcome and respect were challenged in the period from 1945 to 1963. Two influential veterans of this period, Sidney Bechet (the French-adopted king of jazz) and writer Richard Wright (the head of the Paris Noir community), died in 1959 and 1960 respectively. Mainstream jazz, in many countries, was on its way out—giving way to rock ’n’ roll and the newer free jazz genre ushered in by saxophonist Ornette Coleman in 1960. Civil rights tensions exploded in the United States, and the reverberations were felt in France, prompting supportive protests and dialogue, particularly in 1968. Still, the French had their own complexities of race and ethnicity to address. The French republic’s universal policy did not recognize difference but purported to include all. A midcentury influx of citizens from French overseas departments in the Caribbean and former African and Asian colonies put this policy to the test.

In response some African Americans returned home, despairing over racial prejudice they saw against French of African descent or motivated by a responsibility to join civil rights protests at home. A steady stream of African Americans flowed through Paris despite it all. The Paris they entered was a much more racially mixed, tense, and threatened city. The opportunities for jazz, and for African American jazz musicians in particular, prevailed for a time in France. By the time Hal Singer migrated in 1965, the perception and the experiences of African American jazz musicians in Paris had begun to take a big turn. Still, traces and hauntings of those post–World War II days remained.

Kenny Clarke had settled down in Paris in 1956 and remained there until his death in 1985. Clarke was one of the key African American jazz veterans who had become too local (Zwerin, Jazz in Europe 541). He began to tour more outside of France, while French jazz bands increased their performance opportunities, exposure, and confidence in their own land. In fact, I first interviewed Hal Singer to learn more about Kenny Clarke’s life and musical production in Paris. Singer and Clarke shared similar reasons for staying, and both fully assimilated into France, raising their families there and never returning to live in the United States.

Listening to Hal Singer in this modern moment, I could hear the blood memories of civil rights injustice and strife he had left behind in the 1960s. While Freddy Freeloader ushered in waves of nostalgia for a bygone, jazz-rich era of production in New York, Singer’s concluding song spoke of the segregated world of prejudice he’d lived through in the United States. He sat down, held his horn close, and picked up the microphone with his other hand. Georgia, he spoke-sang out. Even at ninety-five years old, the standard’s lyrics came quickly to him. Georgia on My Mind was written by Stuart Gorrell (lyrics) and Hoagy Carmichael (music) in 1930, but the interpretation by Ray Charles on his 1960 album The Genius Hits the Road is the most popular version. Though it is now the state song of Georgia, Georgia on My Mind stood for more than fifteen years as a symbol of Charles’s refusal to perform for a white, segregated audience in 1961 Augusta, Georgia (Charles and Ritz 164–65). The state would not apologize to Charles until 1979, when it invited him to perform in honor of naming Georgia on My Mind the state song.

I could almost imagine Singer’s gravelly yet rich voicings of Georgia tracing along grooves and pits of a bumpy journey to equal rights in the mid-twentieth-century United States. He performed jazz to express that condition of life. In Hal Singer: Keep the Music Going, he said: But all of the hardship, but all of the lack of respect that were received, we still kept a positive attitude. We played good and we enjoyed life. And I think that’s something that people couldn’t understand, you know—how we could get on the bandstand and still make beautiful music (Felin). As Singer walked off the stage, I recognized jazz as his tool to survive that very existence and to create new opportunities.

Jazz diasporas offer just such possibilities. I have conceived this phrase to describe geographically, historically situated cultural spaces that support and spur flexibility, negotiation, and shifting of racial and national identities for migrating African American jazz musicians and communities of jazzophiles with whom they collaborate. There are two types of jazz diasporas: in one sense jazz diasporas involve those who thrive and shape individual identity through musical collaboration outside of their homeland. In the second type of jazz diaspora the music travels and through its interactions alters who performs, represents, and claims the music. I explore both types here. The case studies of Sidney Bechet, with his negotiation of subjectivities as a survival strategy, and Inez Cavanaugh, in her role of nurturing local and global jazz communities, exemplify the first perspective. The relationships between French sidemen like Claude Luter and René Urtreger with African American musicians and my analysis of Kenny Clarke as a connector between perceptions of jazz as black and universal music illustrate the second type. Chapter 4 represents both types as it puts in dialogue French and African American literature as sites of articulation of African American identity, protest, and liberation through the marriage of music and word.

WHY JAZZ DIASPORA? JAZZ AND JAZZ PEOPLE AS TRANSNATIONAL AND HYBRID

Jazz Diasporas commences with two epigraphs that encapsulate the two types of jazz diaspora. Presenting two epigraphs hints at the equal weight and coexistence of both points in the structure, research, and writing of this book. In the first, Albert Murray portrays black music as representative of American life and culture and of African American culture within it. He describes African American people as inherently linked to the music. Murray’s link claims jazz as black and American music.

With Blues People: Negro Music in White America Amiri Baraka, formerly known as Leroi Jones, extended and distinguished this claim on black music.⁴ Fueled by black art and nascent Black Nationalist motivations, Baraka cautioned against the white appropriation of music originated by African Americans and promoted the contributions African Americans have made to U.S. culture. He described the migration of African Americans from south to north, from countryside to urban center, and from underground to mainstream culture. Baraka detailed how the music grew out of struggle, migration, and assimilation. What he ignored, however, was the signal contribution to black music by nonblacks and non-Americans.

This is where I intervene. I conceive jazz people as influenced by the transnational and interracial trafficking of music first originated and primarily developed by African Americans. Jazz Diasporas extends Amiri Baraka’s community of blues people to a jazz people who thrive on cultural interrelation just like jazz’s melding of African, Caribbean, and European elements. I do focus primarily on African Americans in this book and discuss jazz as black music. To me jazz will always be connected to people of African descent and the American land on which it was created. But my position is also founded on an expanded notion of black, American, and jazz cultures. Jazz is both black and global music. Jazz Diasporas demonstrates how this refashioning of jazz’s identity (as French and universal) and musicians’ identities (as potentially global citizens, transnational negotiators, and exiled rather than American-identified and -situated people) commences and takes shape after World War II. In this way Jazz Diasporas continues the work of Paul Gilroy and others who have followed him. The book considers music of the black Atlantic as not racially essentialized and pure but rather hybrid and evolving (The Black Atlantic 80, 101). Alongside this attention to African American jazz musicians as case studies, Jazz Diasporas presents collaborations and relationships forged with non-African Americans; it analyzes how these bonds affected the identities of African Americans and jazz.

In his essay The Jazz Diaspora Bruce Johnson tracks the globalization of jazz (33). His essay provides one of the rare uses of the term jazz diaspora. By exploring the evolutions and new forms created out of jazz’s travels, Johnson’s work illustrates the recent turn toward investigations of jazz outside the United States in Anglophone jazz scholarship. Books like Jeffrey Jackson’s Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris, Colin Nettelbeck’s Dancing with DeBeauvoir: Jazz and the French, Jeremy Lane’s Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, Race and Intellectuals in France, and Tom Perchard’s After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France continue to educate the Anglophone jazz public on the participation in and representation of jazz by French musicians and jazzophiles. My focus on jazz diasporas, with emphasis on African Americans and their interracial and international interactions, differs from (but is very much in conversation with) these French jazz texts.

Jazz Diasporas also rests on the premise that jazz and jazz people are inherently transnational. The second epigraph of the book hints at this overarching claim. Michelle Wright analyzes the work of the African American writer James Baldwin, who spent decades living in and in-between France and the United States. Wright argues that James Baldwin and African Americans at large were always already transnational. Her analysis revolutionized my ideas about African American identity. Certainly the journey through the Middle Passage resonated in blood memories, folklore, and African American cultural expressions. But a long line of key African American intellectuals and artists had also migrated to Europe, from writer William Wells Brown in England to activist and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois in Germany. The impact of their migratory experiences was felt back in the United States. Their travels offered education, artistic experience, and a sense of global consciousness that contributed to African American culture and society.

In the transatlantic journeys of African Americans Paris has been a recurring hot spot. It has served as an intellectual meeting place in which French leaders, writers, and artists of African descent would come and dialogue. As Brent Hayes Edwards has discussed in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Paris was a site at which campaigns, propaganda, and literary initiatives were built to forward black solidarity. Meetings for