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Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris Author(s): RACHEL GILLETT Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 3, COSMOPOLITANISM IN WORLD HISTORY (September 2010), pp. 471-495 Published by: University of Hawai'i Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40985026 Accessed: 04-08-2019 18:31 UTC

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Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris

RACHEL GILLETT

Northeastern University

1925 George H. Evans, one of the many black American jazz per- formers living in Paris in the interwar period, penned a chatty

"Letter from Paris" to the "World's Greatest Weekly," the Chicago Defender, a popular African American newspaper. First Evans assured his "friends" - namely anyone reading this open letter in the Chicago Defender - that he was well.1 Many of his colleagues were touring other countries during the summer, but those who remained could be found at a nightclub managed by his fellow African American Ada "Brick- top" Smith. Hers was a center where "artists of both races" congregated to sip whiskey and water and "do their stuff" once their paid gigs were finished. Evans ended his letter by expressing sympathy for "Prince" Kojo Touvalou, a black French society figure who had been denied ser- vice at a Chicago hotel because of his race:

* Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the History Department at Northeastern University and at the Transatlantic Studies Association conference, 2007, who heard ear- lier versions of this paper, and special thanks to Laura Frader and Glenda Sluga, and the reviewer, for their guidance and suggestions in the development of this article. Much of the research was done with the generous assistance of a Chateaubriand grant and the assistance of archivists in the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

1 George H. Evans, "Letter from Paris: American Express Co., 1 1 Rue Scribe, Paris France, June 18 1925," Chicago Defender, Saturday, 18 July 1925. The incident occurred when Kojo Tovalou-Houenou, who claimed to be of royal Dahomean descent, had finished giving a lecture to members of the Women's International League in Chicago and entered a restaurant at the Astor hotel for dinner but was refused service because he was black. He protested, and the police were called. The Chicago Defender reported the incident. "Prince Kojo Beaten by Policemen in Café: Royal Guest Given Sample of True Americanism," Chicago Defender (National Edition), 30 May 1925.

Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 3 © 2010 by University of Hawai'i Press

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All of the gang over here were shocked to hear or read through the W. G. W. (World's Greatest Weekly) of the humiliation Prince Kojo received at the Astor hotel in Chicago and we sincerely hope that those guilty shall be brought to justice as the prince is a great friend of ours, having played a special engagement for him on my arrival in Paris in the famous Latin quarter, where he received from his associates there, esteemed courtesy according to a man of his title, regardless of his color. Long live Prince Kojo.2

Evans, Smith, and "the gang" of black entertainers in Europe con- stituted a diasporic network of hundreds of black American perform- ers who left the United States to tour and live in Europe during the interwar years. Their experience of Europe was cosmopolitan in that they lived and moved freely throughout a variety of nations and com- munities. Evans and his fellow entertainers traveled internationally, sipped whiskey with entertainers of every race on equal footing, and shared in the condemnation of the Astor Hotel's racist treatment of a black French "friend" for whom they had performed. However, this was a very pragmatic cosmopolitanism. Many performers enjoyed their European experience so much that they failed to register or report upon the racial exclusions operating in Europe. This omission was reflected by the black press in America, which parlayed the entertainers' suc- cess in Europe into a powerful rhetorical tool with which to critique racial practices in America. The reportage in the black American press thus exploited the myth of "color-blind France" and pursued a vision of "black cosmopolitanism" in their portrayal of a European world in which all black men and women could move freely, act with dignity, and feel like members of a universal human community.

The distinction between a "practice" and a "politics" of cosmo- politanism implied raises an important question about the nature of "cosmopolitanism." One definition argues that lived or "practice" cos- mopolitanism occurs wherever individuals "have thought and acted beyond the local."3 The strength of this definition is that it circum- vents "triumphalist notions of cosmopolitical coexistence" that posit each and every human as the bearer of universal rights.4 Such notions

2 Evans, "Letter from Paris." 3 Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Charkrabarty,

"Cosmopolitanisms," Public Culture, 12 (2000): 586. Collection later published as Carol Appadurai Breckenridge et al., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 586.

4 Breckenridge et al., "Cosmopolitanisms, p. 581.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 473

have frequently been framed by the ideal of national sovereignty - an ideal that is necessarily exclusive and thus not inclusively cosmopoli- tan.5 The danger of such a broad definition, however, is that it reduces the potential of the cosmopolitan experience to serve as a call to polit- ical action and an argument for inclusion. More recent attempts to grapple with what constitutes cosmopolitanism have considered large "world" cities that bring people together as a site of cosmopolitanism or, alternatively, diasporic networks that link various localities across the globe as inherently cosmopolitan.6 Black entertainers performed in large world cities and formed a loosely entwined diaspora. They defi- nitely "practiced" cosmopolitanism through travel and through social- izing with a diverse range of fellow entertainers in a variety of locales. Whether they became "cosmopolitan" in that they felt like members of a wider world community that transcended class and race and linked men and women of various races into a common humanity is less cer- tain. The following discussion, however, illustrates the emergence of a black cosmopolitanism based upon the link between black entertainers engaging in cosmopolitan practices of travel and overseas living, and the way the wider black community - led by the press - perceived such practices as evidence of the promise that every black person could be recognized as a bearer of universal rights.

"Plying Back and Forth across the Ocean": Travel as a Precondition for Black Cosmopolitanism

The jazz migration into Europe between World War I and World War II forged a network of performers who flowed freely across and around national boundaries.7 For many players it was the culmination of a

5 Ibid.

6 Henk Driessen, "Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered," His- tory and Anthropology , no. 16 (2005): 136. His definition emphasizes the role of the port city as a place where cosmopolitanism happens. For a definition that focuses more on networks of people, see Evridiki Sifneos, "'Cosmopolitanism' as a feature of the Greek Commercial Diaspora," pp. 97-1 1 1, in the same volume.

7 It is important to acknowledge that African Americans had traveled either individu- ally as intellectuals and artists, or with earlier tours, dating from the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1 873-1 874 to James Reese Europe, who accompanied Irene and Vernon Castle's pre- World War I tour, or Louis Mitchell's jazz group, which was in London in 19 14. However, the scale of what I have called the "jazz migration" of 191 9-1 925 was unprecedented. For the Castles, see Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Dur- ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 17. For Fisk Jubilee Singers, see Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (New York: Oxford

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series of moves that brought them from their local towns or from New Orleans into the North, specifically Chicago and New York, in a musi- cal version of the "Great Migration": "Musicians moved north for the same reasons that motivated other groups: the search for a better life, for greater opportunities to work, to support a family, [and] to enjoy a modicum of personal freedom."8 The Great Migration was aggres- sively championed by the black popular press, in particular the Chicago Defender y which waged a fierce campaign to critique the racial restric- tions operating in the South and promote full citizenship rights for African Americans. It is no wonder that when black musicians took

the Great Migration another step and pursued fame and fortune over- seas, the Chicago Defender seized every opportunity to publicize their success and boast of the many freedoms enjoyed by these peripatetic black performers in Europe.

In 1925 the newspaper proudly recorded that a "growing group of internationally famous stars" was "plying back and forth across the ocean as if they were merely making trips back and forth to Harlem on the subway."9 The press report, in this case, accurately recorded a significant movement of African Americans that created a "jazz diaspora" of black Americans in Europe.10 The jazz craze provided the opportunity for black Americans with even a modicum of musi- cal talent to find employment in Europe. Hundreds of them took that opportunity. The number of African American jazz musicians living in various European cities boomed between 191 7 (when black service- men and military bands introduced jazz to Europe) and 1929 when the onset of the Great Depression began to affect employment oppor-

University Press, 1999), p. 13. See also Geneva H. Southall, "Jubilee Singers," and How- ard Rye, "Mitchell, Louis," in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://o-www .oxfordmusiconline.com.ilsprod.lib.neu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/14522 (accessed 18 February 2009).

8 Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 45. 9 "Lottie Gee Sailed for Europe Oct. 3, Chicago Defender, 10 October 1925. 10 See Tyler Stovall's work Paris Noir, in which he considers the various groups of Afri-

can Americans who ended up in Paris: artists, novelists, public figures, and businessmen in addition to the jazz performers. Stovall mentions the various groups of black diasporic men and women in the capital from places other than America. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). For a full consideration of these groups, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Block Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). See also "But I Ain't African, I'm American," in Blackening Europe, ed. Heike Raphael Hernan- dez (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004), pp. 201-215, which offers a brief discussion of the differences in the way black Americans were treated in France versus black Francophone diasporans.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 475

tunities.11 There is no official census recording the scale of the black musical migration to Europe between the wars, and figures in different accounts vary considerably. Bricktop, one of the first women to settle in Paris and best known by only her nickname, claims that when she arrived in 1924 there were no more than "eight to ten negro enter- tainers in all of Paris." 12 However, Tyler Stovall lists the permanent community of black Americans in Paris as numbering several hundred, although many of these were not performers.13 By 1927 the Chicago Defender claimed that Paris boasted "over a hundred dark Americans now employed as musicians and entertainers in the resorts in Paris." H Joel Rogers, the Paris-based correspondent for the black press, claimed that in 1926 "colored Americans in this city could be numbered in hundreds." 15 An examination of evidence from newspaper reportage, memoirs, archival collections of program notes, and discographies that list jazz recordings made in Europe suggests that the musical migration into Europe between 191 9 and 1931 numbered between five hundred and a thousand performers.16

These players enjoyed an access to independent travel and mobil- ity that was one of the attributes of black cosmopolitanism vaunted by the black press and one that made a deep impression upon the per- formers themselves. For black Americans - a group of individuals who historically had been denied freedom of movement and whose previous experience of large-scale Atlantic travel had been through the forced migration of the slave trade - travel took on profound significance.17

11 Tyler Stovall does an exceptionally good job of charting this in Paris Noir, and Jeffrey Jackson has also explored the phenomenon in Making Jazz French, although he concentrates on the cultural exchange and transfer that occurred.

12 Bricktop and James Haskins, Bricktop (New York: Atheneum, 1081), p. 81. 13 Stovall, Pans Noir, p. 46. 14 Morgan Blakley, "Georgia Bully Whipped in Paris: Legion Vets Find France Is Differ-

ent," Chicago Defender, 1 October 1027, p. 1. 15 He comments, "Five years ago colored Americans in this city could be numbered in

the hundreds." J. A. Rogers, "Bottom out of Montmartre's Nightlife," circa October 1931, Tuskegee Clippings file, p. 779.

These figures are preliminary results from a database that records African American (jazz) performers who traveled abroad. The database draws on a variety of sources: biog- raphies, discographies (which list recording venues and performers), newspaper articles, archival sources, jazz journals, scholarly monographs, and The New Grove Dictionary ofjazz- It records names, birthdates, dates of presence in Europe, birthplace, instrument, venues played, and marital status. It will appear as appendix A in Rachel Gillett, "Crossing the Pond: Jazz, Race and Gender in Interwar France" (PhD diss., Northeastern University, forthcoming).

17 Some sense of the significance of travel is evident in the dominance of the theme of movement in blues songs of the second and third decades of the twentieth century.

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This point is more compelling given that many performers who "crossed the pond" were born within twenty years of emancipation.18 By the mid 1920s, however, black jazz performers were traveling the world, and they described the process as one of unprecedented opportunity that expanded their horizons dramatically.19 Singer Florence Mills, for example, recalled that as a girl she had learned about London in her "history and geography lessons" but at that stage "it seemed as far away as the moon, and I felt like the small boy whose mamie laughs when he whispers he'd like to go to the moon."20 She couldn't believe it when she got the chance to go to "London, that city of my dreams, 3000 miles away across the ocean."21 The self-professed "normally unexcit- able" singer Bricktop recalled in her memoirs that the call to Paris sur- prised and excited her, and she became "quite a celebrity to [her] New York friends" because in those days a trip to Europe meant that "you had money - unless you were one of those eccentric writers."22 Inter- national travel was still a novelty for most black men and women in the 1920s, and it represented a dramatic freedom from the restrictions on movement that had accompanied slavery and racial oppression.

Many jazz performers evinced a clear sense of excitement about travel and the freedom they experienced outside of America. Earl Granstaff, a trombone player who spent years in Europe, wrote to his friend Mills with a sense of astonishment and agency about his experiences playing in various European cities. He exclaimed at the fact that since leaving

18 The database compiled for the longer work of which this is a part shows that the oldest performer for whom we have a birthdate was born in 1869, just six years after eman- cipation. Furthermore, of the seventy-seven musicians for whom we have reliable birth- dates thus far, fourteen were born before 1880, and forty-six before 1890. These preliminary results suggest about half the performers who traveled were within one generation of slavery, and travel was a visible demonstration of their access to a basic human right, to be "cosmo- politan" as never before.

19 This particular discussion concentrates on Europe, but black musicians traveled the globe. In 1927 the Harmony Kings were busy "raising cain" in "far off Sydney, Australia." In the same year Teddy Weathersford, the "demon pianist," was being "likened unto a king" in China. For Harmony Kings, see "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender, 8 October 1927. For Teddy Weathersford, see "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender, 26 November 1927.

20 Florence Mills, "Magic Moon That Brought Me Money: Colored Star's Romantic Rise to Fame," unattributed clipping, box 1 , folder 9, Florence Mills Collection, Schomburg Centre for Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter Mills Collection). This is authored (or at the very least ghost authored) by Mills, but it is clearly written for the British public as she notes that "you do the dances I know so well" and "I like London, I feel more at home here" (than in Paris).

21 Mills, "Magic Moon." 22 Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, p. 83. See also the interviews conducted by Chris

Goddard, which reiterate the point that at the outset of the interwar era, the journey to Europe was seen as a very big deal. Chris Goddard, Jazz Away from Home (New York: Pad- dington Press, 1979), pp. 281-303.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 477

New York in 1924 he had "seen a lot" and "lived the life of O'Reilly."23 His letter is full of glee at negotiating good contracts, enjoying the freedom from American prohibition laws, and actively choosing which cities to visit and how long to stay. His trip began when he "grabbed an armful of boat" and went to work in Paris. Before long he moved to Budapest, where he stayed for eight months, after which he joked that he had absorbed so many "brain-racking words" that he thought he'd "jump to London."24 Opal Cooper, a popular tenor and banjo player, managed to live and work in Europe for the whole interwar era, dur- ing which time he enjoyed a trip to Bombay to promote a new song.25 Sidney Bechet, a stunningly talented soprano sax player and clarinet soloist, arrived in Europe in the 1920s.26 Between 1925, when he was featured in the Revue Nègre, starring Josephine Baker, and 1929, when he was expelled from France for his involvement in a gunfight, Bechet toured Europe and the Mediterranean extensively.27 In the year prior to his expulsion, Bechet was living with a German woman, Elizabeth Birgler, and had filed for a carte d'identité in May of 1928.28 He clearly wanted to stay in Europe, and in the 1950s he managed to return for the rest of his life.

One precondition for cosmopolitanism is the ability to move beyond the local, to travel, to become part of a wider group of humans than that in which you were born, raised, and socialized. The jazz craze in the 1920s provided exactly that precondition so that the possibility of black cosmopolitanism was extended to a wider black community than those who "had money" or were "eccentric writers," as Bricktop put it. Travel, in turn, made other aspects of cosmopolitanism available to black performers and the journalists and readers who followed their exploits with excitement. These were the chance to socialize beyond the boundaries of any given local community or "race," and an engage- ment with and contribution to cosmopolitan "spaces" in the European métropoles.

23 Letter from Earl Granstaff to Florence Mills, 3 June 1926, Constantinople, Turkey, Mills Collection.

24 Ibid.

25 Opal Cooper Files, folder 1 , Box 6, Helen Armstead Jones Collection Schomburg Centre for Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter Opal Cooper Files, HAJ Col- lection).

26 "Sidney Bechet" file, Série G/a étranger, Archives de la Préfecture de la Police (Paris; hereafter APP).

27 Ibid. Bechet visited the Netherlands, Berlin, the Czech Republic, Austria, Budapest, Frankfurt, Bulgaria, Istanbul, Greece, Egypt (Alexandria and Cairo), Belgium, Algeria, Por- tugal, and Italy.

28 "Sidney Bechet" file, G/a, APP

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47$ journal of world history, september 2oio

Diasporic Networks and International Settings:

Black Jazz "Cosmopolitanism" in Practice

The members of the jazz migration from America to Europe formed a loosely knit diaspora through which players could find information, get work, and enjoy fellowship and camaraderie even when far from home. If a cosmopolitan is a member of a diasporic network that both reflects a local identity and yet connects many locales, as Evridiki Sifnios sug- gests in relation to the Greek commercial diaspora, or Mamadou Diouf does in his discussion of the Senegalese Murid trade, then black jazz performers clearly qualify.29 The jazz migration enfolded within it a chain migration process in which players wrote letters and returned home to recruit others. Opal Cooper, for example, had performed with an army band during the war, and once it was over he returned to New York just long enough to assemble a group of colleagues and name them the "Red Devils" before hotfooting it back to Paris.30 Eugene Bullard, a black American fighter pilot and war hero, opened a club after the war and sent Sammy Richardson, a black American pianist, to employ Bricktop as a hostess and resident singer for his nightclub.31 Once Bricktop arrived in Paris she, like Bullard before her, became a per- sonal and institutional resource for numerous bands and singers. She hired Fats Waller to play at her club, she gave Josephine Baker advice about how to deal with sudden and overwhelming popularity, and she noted that "[American] musicians and singers were always showing up at Bricktop's and if they were good I'd hire them."32 These interactions illustrate the way that black performers fanned out through Europe but maintained links with each other and with the folks back home.

29 Sifneos, "'Cosmopolitanism' as a Feature of the Greek Commercial Diaspora" and Mamadou Diouf, "The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism," in Breckenridge et al., Cosmopolitanism, pp. 679-702.

30 Opal Cooper Files, HA] Collection. See also the players description ot being lured to Europe by word of mouth, positive reports, and recruiting activities of other performers, in the interviews transcribed in Chris Goddard, Jazz Away from Home.

31 Craig Lloyd, Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in jazz- Age Pans (Athens: University ot Georgia Press, 2000), p. 91, confirmed in Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, p. 81; Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, Dolan Hubbard, and Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 145.

32 Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, p. 120. For advice to Josephine Baker, see p. 108, and see also Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989). For Fats Waller, see "To Grant Fisk, From Thomas 'Fats' Waller with Best Wishes, Bricktop's 1932," Ada "Bricktop" Smith Photograph Collection, Schomburg Center for black Culture, New York Public Library.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 479

Clearly performers did form a diasporic network that linked many different locales, but there is some doubt as to whether they were major figures in the emergence of "black cosmopolitanism." Tyler StovalPs seminal work on black Americans in Paris explicitly claims that in the interwar years the African American community in Paris "not only embraced the spirit of black cosmopolitanism, but itself became a potent symbol of that spirit."33 He argues that this was due to the various diasporic African groups in that city, and Brent Edwards offers a compelling explanation of how interactions between these groups produced a Paris-based black internationalism that "came to represent certain kinds of crossings, certain extensions of the horizon, even for populations that did not travel."34 Yet Edwards is articulating an intel- lectual and cultural phenomenon or network within which interna- tionalism signified the transnational exchange of ideas and attempts at constructing a pan- African discourse rather than commenting upon how travel affected the individuals he describes. Stovall does engage with this aspect of the black experience in Paris, and he claims that black intellectuals and writers had a more "cosmopolitan" experience in Paris than did the jazz musicians because they saw more of the city and met more diasporic Africans.35 There is evidence to suggest, how- ever, that black performers did forge cosmopolitan social networks, although their black cosmopolitanism was not recorded in intellectual literary works. Furthermore, the "black cosmopolitanism" represented by these musicians may have seemed relevant to a wider cross-section of the black community than the pan- African international rhetoric of black writers and intellectuals and thus "extended collective horizons" further than pan- African intellectuals.

Many black performers in Europe worked with colleagues from a variety of different ethnicities and nationalities and traveled with them, learning to communicate and share living and working spaces amicably. Granstaff, for example, "met a fellow named Eric Borchard," a bandleader, who employed him and "carried him all over Deutsch- land" in his mostly white band.36 Sam Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra took on the white British trombone player Ted Heath and

33 Stovall. Paris Noir. n. t2o. 34 Edwards, Practice of Diasbora, d. a. 35 Stovall, Paris Noir, p. 08. 36 Granstaff to Mills. Granstaff describes Eric Borchard as a "German Paul Whiteman."

Whiteman was a popular and celebrated white American band leader who employed mostly white musicians to play a "Europeanized" symphonic jazz. See Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French, pp. 94-95. See also Chris Goddard, Jazz Away from Home, pp. 76-78.

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his friend Tommy Smith, a trumpet player. Heath later remembered the collegiality of the band members, who were "a pretty rough crowd" but "very helpful," and one of whom, Buddy Gilmore, "went out of his way to teach us about the different approach and technique needed for jazz."37 Jazz Williams (aka Alphonse Kane), a Senegalese French colonial subject, had tried to make his way in Paris after the war. After trying several jobs, he defaulted to playing in a jazz band - one of the most lucrative options for anyone who could pass for a black American at the time.38 He was taught to play the bass drum by an American band in Paris, and by 1929 he was leading his own band, comprised mostly of Senegalese, but the banjo and the ukulele players were Amer- ican. They socialized freely with Jazz Williams and a diverse group of black entertainers in Marseilles.39 French musicians, such as Andre Ekyan, apprenticed with African American bands, and black Ameri- can bandleaders, such as Arthur Briggs and Willie "the Lion" Smith, put together bands including players of various nationalities.40

In addition to incorporating non-American players into their bands, black American jazz players participated in a cosmopolitan entertainment culture in which musicians of diverse nationalities were

employed at the same venues. The dance hall, nightclub, or cabaret was a microcosm of the larger global city where most of these venues were located. Paris was not only inundated with tourists at the time, but it also played host to large numbers of exiled "white Russians," immigrant Polish, Italian, Spanish, and North African inhabitants, in addition

37 Goddard, Jazz Away from Home, p. 60. 38 Eugene Bullard realized this and taught himself to play drums before accepting the

job of managing a nightclub, Langston Hughes couldn't find work as a writer so he worked as a dishwasher at Bricktop's club, and Jeffrey Jackson tells the story of a breach of contract trial for a black jazz band who employed a white musician. See Lloyd, Eugene Bullard; see also Hughes et al., Collected Works of Langston Hughes, pp. 130-132. For a white player in blackface see Jackson, Making Jazz French, p. 26.

39 The article describes them jamming together with the Senegalese after the club is officially closed although theirs is not an ethnically inclusive cosmopolitanism as they get into a fight with some Chinese patrons at the club. Andre Demaison, "Jazz Williams," Coupures "Jazz," reel R 98531 (Dept des Arts et Spectacles, Richelieu, BNF, Paris). André Demaison, who wrote the article about Jazz Williams, was a well known apologist for colo- nialism, who also wrote the Guide Officiel for the Colonial Exposition of 1931, and this may affect his portrayal of the situation. He characterizes the Americans as "recrossed the breadth of the Atlantic after two centuries" thus emphasizing a link between them and the Senegalese.

40 For French players learning with American bands see Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French, p. 131, and for Willie Lewis and Arthur Briggs employing non- Americans in their bands see Edgar Wiggins, "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender (National Edition) , 21 January 1939, p. 18, and 29 July 1939.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 481

to smaller groups of diasporic Africans.41 These inhabitants fueled the interwar demand for "exotic" music and thus foreign musicians. Jazz bands often alternated sets with bands that played the ever-popular Argentinian tango, and after 1931 clubs also employed Martinican musicians to play the biguine.42 Several Parisian nightclubs added a third band to their nightly offerings. The "Ermitage Muscovite" and the Embassy employed a jazz band, a tango band, and also a tzigane band, while the Lido featured an orchestre Napolitains along with its tango and jazz bands.43 Most of these bands contained a mix of foreign and French musicians but with a high concentration of étrangers ("for- eigners").44 These musicians worked together in the same places, and the tone of camaraderie in the trade journals, in addition to the nightly "jams" with "artists of both races" at Bricktop's in the mid 1920s, sug- gests that there was a musical cosmopolitanism that transcended some barriers of race and nationality.45

41 Clifford D. Rosenberg examines police attempts to control these populations in Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), while Mary Dewhurst Lewis traces patterns of immigra- tion in Marseilles and Lyons that applied to Paris as well in The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). Gary Wilder looks at the connection between the French state and French colonies and offers a comprehensive treatment of the encounter between black subjects and the state in interwar Paris in The French imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Stovall, Paris Noir, p. 40.

42 See Maurice (Wa-wa) Bedouc-Ermenchy, "Main d'oeuvre étrangère," Jazz-Tango, 2eme Année, No. 6 (i March 1931), pp. 3-4. The author, a conseiller syndicale, or union organizer, for French musicians published a table listing employment statistics for foreign labor, which provide a useful insight although he may exaggerate slightly the employment of foreign musicians to demonstrate his concern with their domination of the entertainment scene at the expense of French citizens. Of all the establishments employing bands that were surveyed, thirteen out of fifty (slightly under a third) employed multiple bands, most often a jazz band and a tango band. Of the clubs that used orchestras with "foreign" directors, the number was much higher - eleven out of twenty-nine (38 percent). See also Pierre Rame- lot, "le Jazz et la Crise," Le Canarde, 17 February 1929, from "Jazz" Coupures, BNF. See also Andre Demaison, "Jazz Williams," "Jazz" coupures, BNF, which mentions the break between the jazz set and the Argentinian set at the club in Marseilles. See also Jeffrey Jackson, Mak- ing Jazz French, p. 42. Once the biguine won popularity as a result of the Colonial Exposition it was added to the musical mix in many of these spaces. See Andrée Nardal's comments on the growth of its popularity in "Notes on the Biguine Créole/Etude sur la biguine créole," La Revue du Monde Noir (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 193 1), p. 121.

43 Bedouc-Ermenchy, "Main d'oeuvre étrangère," pp. 3-4. 44 Within the bands led by "Etrangers" the Jazz-Tango survey recorded that the total

number of musicians employed was 277, of whom 236 were non-French citizens (étrangères) and 41 were French. For French-led bands the numbers changed, with 1 01 of 146 musicians employed being French.

45 Jazz-Tango, for example, published chatty news and gossip about both black and white bands, led by and employing both French and "foreigners." As the economic depres-

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The audiences and clients who came to listen to and dance to the

bands, furthermore, required that bandleaders and nightclub managers display "international style and wit."46 The very locale of the jazz per- formance - a nightclub, or music hall - was itself a multicultural space, "un établissement cosmopolite par excellence" catering to a "crowd of peo- pie from every nation."47 A bandleader or a nightclub host "must sing in English, in French, in Italian - with the wit and charm of Cheva- lier" to be truly successful.48 Band leaders, singers, and members made efforts to learn the language and idioms of the cultures in which they played. Joe Turner, for example, an "eminent pianist," learned to speak "very good German and Italian" and "a little Czech and Hungarian," and he made good use of his linguistic abilities to court his future wife, a "beautiful Hungarian violinist."49 Granstaff, as noted above, absorbed his fair share of "brain-racking" words while in Hungary, and Bricktop "fractured the audience" with her "fractured French," when she started incorporating her perfectly adequate spoken French into her American jazz and cabaret songs. 50 Learning another language involves absorbing the concepts and even some aspects of the mode of thinking of another group of humans from a different cultural and ethnic background. It is a cosmopolitan action that encourages men and women to recognize a shared humanity across linguistic and cultural divides.

sion worsened, the tension between black American players and French citizens increased, and the sense of solidarity I have identified as characterizing the mid 1920s seemed to wane. But Jazz-Tango still published "work wanted" advertisements of bands containing "foreign- ers." The Revue du Jazz published columns and "Gossip from the Tabac" about both black and white musicians in Paris, London, and America, and interviews with musicians of a variety of different nationalities - usually as they passed through Paris. So in these trade journals at least there was a spirit of jazz camaraderie that lends credence to the idea that black American jazz musicians in Europe felt part of a cosmopolitan jazz network.

46 ]. B. interviewing M. Conti, "Coeurs Nouveaux, Musiques nouvelles; le leader Intransigeant, 10 September 1927 microfilm reel, R 98531 (Dept des Arts et Spectacles, BN- Richelieu, France). Conti is French actually, as the reporter takes pains to point out, but his remarks reference the general role of all band leaders, regardless of race.

47 Kevin Mumford, Interzones: BlackPwhite Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), discusses this phe- nomenon in America. Sonjah Niaah's article on dance halls and diasporic African culture offers some useful insights into dance halls as political and cultural spaces. Sonjah Stanley Niaah, "Mapping Black Atlantic Performance Geographies: From Slave Ship to Ghetto," in Black Geographies and the Politics of Piace, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Adrian Woods (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2007), p. 193.

48 "II faut plaire à un public de toutes les nations, dans le même moment. Un plaisanterie mal compase par un étranger et tous les incidents sont possibles. H faut un gaite internationale, si Ion peut dire, et surtout n'être jamais vulgaire," ]. B., "Cœurs Nouvelles," Intransigeant, 10 September 1027.

49 Edgar Wiggins, "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender, 18 March 1939. 50 Granstaff to Mills; and Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, p. 121.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 483

Many black performers also met and forged social connections with very diverse individuals through their work and their networking with audience members. Bricktop was comfortable hosting the diverse individuals who congregated at her bar: Picasso, Man Ray and Kiki, the Hemingways, Cole Porter, the Prince of Wales, Salvador Dali, and even black French intellectuals such as "Prince" Kojo Touvalou-51 Singer Florence Mills was a hit in London, and she impressed indi- viduals from every sector of London's diverse international population when she toured there. The graceful, slender, and elegant star was feted in high society circles and asked to judge the dance competition at a local charity ball in Regent's Park.52 A "white poor man" wrote an admiring fan letter to Mills, advising her to "be true to yourself, and then, you will reach the hearts of the Real White Men."53 She met the Liberian consul in Liverpool, who was so impressed with her he gave her a letter of introduction to the president of Liberia (then holiday- ing in Paris). The consul praised Mills for her "sheer force of talent," which had "gained her worldwide commendation" and was positive the Liberian president would be pleased to meet her.54 Jazz performers on the European circuit thus performed with, met, entertained, and talked with a diverse range of fellow musicians and audience mem- bers. Extending one's experience and one's empathy beyond the local, beyond one's immediate cultural and linguistic background, was thus part of the jazz world and the performers' role in it. The practitioners of jazz had to be versatile and internationally savvy to please crowds in different cultural settings as they moved from country to country, city to city, and audience to audience.

And yet despite this glowing picture of a cosmopolitan process at

51 Numerous sources mention her guests, principally her memoirs, Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, pp. 94-99, 102-103, 172-173, and those of Cole Porter, William McBrien, Cole Porter: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 106-109; see also Jack O'Brian, "The New Bricktop: Hymn and Her," King Features syndicate, 235 East 45th St., New York, 1 November 1974, Ada "Bricktop" Smith Collection, and the Ada "Bricktop" Smith photo collection, which records many of her guests.

52 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 193-197, although a fictional account, closely resembles her experience at elite parties such as one hosted by Nancy Cunard, described in Bill Egan, Florence MiUs: Harlem Jazz Queen, p. 93. For charity ball see William Warshawski to Florence Mills, 17 November 1026, Mills Collection.

53 The letter is quite astonishing, all written in rhyming stanzas and/or couplets, and full of advice to Mills to be "natural," "good," and womanly and innocent in order to retain her hold on male fans. Mills did not, as far as we know, meet this "poor white man," but she kept his letter in her personal files. A Sincere Admirer, A white poor man to Florence Mills, 19 November 1923, Blighty (Britain), in the Florence Mills Collection.

54 The Liberian Consulate C. E. Cooper to His Excellency C. D. B. King President of Liberia, 10 August 1927, West Africa House, Liverpool, Mills Collection.

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484 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SEPTEMBER 2OIO

work in the jazz migration, it would be naïve to ignore the fact that the jazz craze enfolded highly racist and sexist discourses related to black performers. The postwar European vogue for African and African American cultural forms spearheaded by the avant-garde was due to a set of assumptions about race, exoticism, and primitivism, and it did not necessarily represent unqualified acceptance of all humans regardless of racial distinctions.55 Players themselves were not slow to realize this, which was precisely the reason Bricktop chose to keep her professional and private life very distinct. Her romantic liaisons ranged from taxi drivers to jazz musicians to a nameless "colored French boy." But she "never fooled around with any of those big clients," because she "didn't want to be a backstreet mistress" and knew "that's all [she] could have been."56 Mills was commended by the Liberian consul partly because she had "done well in her field of activity to bring about a better under- standing between the races," a clear reference to racial prejudice.57 Mills "smiled to herself" when she saw the British doing the Charles- ton and commented that it represented "a common tie linking all the races which make up mankind."58 In the same breath, however, she noted that there were "strange gulfs separating the races of mankind" and that "the coloured peoples have a long road yet to travel before they level up with the white peoples."

Mills may have thought it was a "long road" to go, but others in Liberia, London, and America saw a more immediate hope for racial equality in the international success of jazz performers - particularly Mills. Madame Davis, of Holborn, London, expressed her hopes in a fan letter to Mills: "Last night I saw your 'show' and never was there a heart prouder than mine, being one of yourselves: I think you are wonderful - yes wonderful indeed ... I write this to tell you (as a color woman like yourself) I do thank your whole company for being able to show the white people, who think we are nobody - because we are 'colour' that we can stand side by side and beat them at their own game. Well done, daughter of the Mother land."59

55 Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900-1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and Brett Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz- Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), have very good analyses of this cultural context.

56 Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, p. 132. With typical humor she adds, What would we have talked about when we got out of bed? I don't know anything about polo!" pp. 130-132.

57 Cooper to His Excellency. 58 Florence Mills, "Magic Moon." 59 Madame Davis to Florence Mills, 12 September 1926, 12 Featherstone Buildings,

Holborn, WCi, Mills Collection.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 485

These examples illustrate that the practice of black cosmopoli- tanism in Europe was limited even though at first glance conditions seemed more liberal than the oppressive racial restrictions operating in the United States. Despite these limits, jazz players who migrated into global cities were brought into direct connection with the wider world beyond America, and their experience created their own form of cosmopolitanism. Jazz enabled travel, and travel enabled a wider world perspective. Through the black press in America, moreover, "race art- ists" became a vehicle for the cosmopolitan aspiration of journalists and thousands of their readers.

The Black Press in America and the Dissemination of a Black Cosmopolitan Image

The migration of African American performers like Granstaff, Bechet, Bricktop, and Baker initiated a transnational process that linked black communities in America to the cosmopolitan jazz experience in Europe through an "imagined racial community."60 The Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier all carried numerous reports of black musical success in Paris that formed a common source of pride among their readership. These publications referred to Brick- top, Mills, and men such as Noble Sissle as "race artistic celebrities," and their experiences were transmitted to thousands of working-class Americans who read about them in the black press.61 The wide circula- tion of newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, in conjunction with the fact that they were read aloud in social environments such as the barbershop, indicates that black musical success in Paris really did per- colate through to an "imagined community."62 Some black American performers even wrote to the Chicago Defender while abroad as though the paper itself were a friend, sending their news, and including a for- warding address in Paris, thus symbolically including all of its readers

60 Here I have adapted from the concept articulated in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Otón and Strread of Nationalism (London: Verso. 1001).

61 Who also consumed the LPs that served both as entertainment and as physical arti- facts of internationalism, recorded and marketed across a shrinking Atlantic.

62 For the way in which the black press served and created an "imagined racial commu- nity," see Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935- 46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior; The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: H. Regnery Co, 1955); and Charlene B. Register, Black Entertainers in African American Newspaper Articles (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002). At the height of its popularity, scholars estimate that each copy of the Defender sold was read by four or five people, putting its readership at over 500,000 people per week; http://www.pbs .org/blackpress/news.bios/defender.html (accessed 18 July 2009).

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486 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SEPTEMBER 2OIO

in their social networks,63 Alberta Hunter, the jazz legend, wrote to the Defender from Paris in 1927, asking to be "remembered to her host of American friends," and reminding them that she "would receive mail from them in care of the American Express, Paris, France."64 Further- more, the reporters consistently referred to performers by diminutive affectionate terms such as "popular little dancer," or "clever comedian." The sense of intimacy and almost familial pride in these performers is very clear as is the appropriation of their experience as an extension of the collective horizon.65

The stories and articles that emerged in the black press in the decade following World War I therefore disseminated the narrative of black cosmopolitan experience in Europe to readers in America. It may not have made them black cosmopolitans, but it made them conver- sant with the notion that an African American could be one. Drum-

mer Sonny Greer reminisced that when he traveled to Europe in 1933 with Duke Ellington, he and the band were "very fortunate to carry the banner to foreign lands for American kids."66 And Bricktop's biogra- pher James Haskins spells it out: "Blacks who had made it were a com- mon topic of discussion and though my small town in Alabama was light years away from the great cities of Europe - and the lives of my parents equally as alien to the life of a cosmopolitan nightclub opera- tor - it was a peculiar fact of existence for the average American black to be on intimate terms with the stories of the few of us who had man-

aged to burrow out from under."67 This quotation illustrates the role popular reportage played in promoting the Atlantic journey as a route to success, and a source of possibility to black American communities that represent a completely different social sphere than that of W. E. B. Dubois and the literary movers and shakers who populate the early chapters of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic,68

In 1926 the Chicago Defender introduced a column titled "Across the Pond" that followed the exploits, gigs, and lucrative contracts

63 See also George H. Evans, "Letter from Paris," Chicago Defender, 31 January 1925. And Willie Gauze, "Gauze writes," in the same edition.

64 "Alberta Hunter in Europe," Chicago Defender, Saturday, io December 1927. 65 For other re interpretations of the Atlantic in black popular culture, see Alan J. Rice,

Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum, 2000). 66 Sonny Greer Interview, Sc Audio C-475 Side 1 (New York: Duke Ellington Society,

New York Chapter, 1061), Schomburg Centre for Black Culture, New York Public Library. 67 James Haskins, "The Last Dawn for the One, the Only, World Queen of Nightclubs,"

Rolling Stone, 29 March 1984, pp. 124-125. 68 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 487

being signed by black American musicians "on the other side."69 Brick- top, Mills, Lottie Gee, Granstaff, and the myriad of others "plying back and forth across the ocean" thus contributed to a transformation in

the popular black American consciousness from viewing the Atlantic as the site of the middle passage, the voyage into slavery, to viewing it as an almost neighborly space, a "pond" and an entry point into inter- national success. Of course practices on the ground differed from the discursive ideals of cosmopolitan success, as put together in the black American press. And they were further complicated by class and gen- der. Performers simultaneously represented working-class origins and were held accountable to a race uplift rhetoric owing to their success as "race artists" performing on the international stage.70 But their trans- atlantic welcome and success presented a contrast and a challenge to contemporary race relations in the United States.

The performers' experience of travel, expanded horizons, and suc- cess abroad led to greater consciousness of the injustice and inequi- ties black men and women faced in America in contrast. The point is most clearly illustrated by the discussion of a practice that was seen to be more possible in cosmopolitan Paris than anywhere else - that of socializing, flirting, and even engaging in sexual relationships across the "color line." Cross-racial relationships represented a chance to escape from America's racial Puritanism, and a number of these rela- tionships resulted in marriage rather than the more customary casual fling.71 Bricktop commented later on the fact that such relationships were not unusual in interwar Paris or for her personally: "Woman's Wear interviewed me once and I told them I could dispel the myth about Negro men being the only ones who knew how to make love."72 Bricktop's photograph collection, along with that of the black Welsh singer Mabel Mercer, contain numerous images of the two of them in the middle of groups of men like this one, in which the white patron is perched on Bricktop's knee (see Fig. i).73 Bricktop's comments were

69 The earliest formal "Across the Pond" column appeared in July 1926, and it became a fixture thereafter, appearing sometimes weekly and sometimes fortnightly.

70 I tease these aspects of the jazz migration out further in my forthcoming doctoral dissertation.

71 Stovall, Paris Noir, pp. 74-76. Notably, Eugene Bullard married a Frenchwoman, Sidney Bechet was living with a German woman, and, as mentioned above, Leon Crutcher had a violent argument with his white French lover that resulted in a gunfight. Arthur Briggs and Willie Lewis both married Belgians. "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender, 4 March 1939.

Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, p. 131, also cited in Ebony, December 1982. 15 Tony Delano, "Mabel Mercer," Photograph, Paris 1 932, SC-CN-97-0240, Ada "Brick-

top" Smith photograph collection.

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488 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, SEPTEMBER 2OIO

Figure i . Bricktop's club, showing her with patrons and fellow singer Mabel Mercer.

echoed by other performers with a collective tone that suggests that the freedom and glamour associated with travel and the sophisticated jazz lifestyle was also represented by the seeming freedom with which rela- tionships could develop across the "color line."74 And such freedoms served as a basis for critiquing America.

The cartoon strip Bungleton Green, popular in African American newspapers in the United States in the 1920s, features the eponymous "everyman" character meeting and dating a French girl, Jacqueline. In one strip Bungleton Green and his "girl" are insulted by a white Ameri- can visiting Paris, upon which Green batters the white American over the head with a walking stick.75 The cartoon parodies an experience that was reported upon as a frequent occurrence in interwar France -

74 The significance of this is partly that even the suggestion of such alliances, particu- larly marriage, were still seen as incredibly threatening in the United States in many areas/ communities. And even educated black men and women had reservations about marrying outside "the race." See, for example, Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, pp. 130-132.

75 Cartoon printed in Stovall. Photographic insert, unnumbered page.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 489

the consternation of white Americans in Europe as they were con- fronted by the complete absence of state-sanctioned segregation laws.76 It reflects a common theme in social commentaries of the day, in both black and white press, that praised France's "color-blind" society, and used this perception of France to lambast the United States. The claim emerged very clearly in a much publicized incident in which a white American was arrested for instigating a fight in a Parisian café.77 The Defender used the incident as the perfect opportunity to mount a cri- tique of racial boundaries in the United States:

Southern whites now visiting Paris as members of the American Legion are attempting to establish race hatred among the French . . . but Frenchmen will not pay heed to their prejudicial appeals

owners requested additional police protection to avoid racial clashes. This action was hastened when it was learned that over a hundred

dark Americans now employed as musicians and entertainers in resorts here held a secret meeting and discussed plans by which they could offset American prejudice

week when James Parrish, a white man, entered a restaurant in the Rue Monsart and objected to the presence of four dark Americans. His pro- test went unheeded by the management of the café but to impress his point he went outside and summoned five of his compatriots. A free- for-all fight ensued in which Parrish used a knife on a policeman who interfered. Parrish . . . was unmercifully beaten and when he arose from the floor his face bore the imprint of a black man's heels ... A "leading French writer " was reported as saying "we love our black citizens while Americans despise theirs; we want them to love France and enjoy all the freedom and happiness it has to offer." 78

This incident had great symbolic value for the black community. The "Georgia Bully," as the headline describes him, emerged from his attempt to instill racist practices in France with a face that "bears the imprint of a black man's heels." He was quashed, not only by Eugene Bullard and Sidney Garner, the black men in question (of whom there were only two according to the official police report), but also

76 See also Robeson's comments from meeting at Farringdon Memorial Hall, 13 June 1 93 1. Robeson recites stories of ill treatment at hotel, although it was due to white Ameri- can guests rather than English. "Race Problems, 1931," Tuskegee Clippings File, reel 39 (Microfilm, Newspapers collection, Colindale, British Library), P. 622.

77 Police report, 27 August 1927, incident no. 1 196 Folios 33 32 (Arrests St Georges), Série C/b, APP, Paris. The police report also records that James Parrish was from Virginia, not Georgia, and there is no mention of his five comrades, but Parrish did use a large kitchen knife, and he was arrested for the use of arms and disturbing the oeace.

78 Blakley, "Georgia Bully Whipped in Paris."

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by the state apparatus by way of the police.79 The incident occurred in part because of the encounter of two groups from the same nation, who were divided by race, upon the soil of a third nation, where the rules and social structures within which the groups operate in their own nation were in suspension. The cosmopolitan experience, in this instance, allowed for a radical reframing of racial relations that had applied back in the home nation, such that the customary relations of power and race were reversed. And the possibility of that reversal was then extended beyond the participants involved in the actual fight described here. The rumored "secret meeting" of musicians in France determined not to let American racial practices filter into the French métropole probably never took place. But the idea that it might show how the musicians were thought of as a community that represented black Americans abroad, and that could act politically on the basis of their racial identity even when based outside the nation-state - and in fact precisely because of their status as temporarily beyond the reach of the American nation-state. 80

Many French reporters, public figures, and instruments of state (such as the police) seized upon such incidents to articulate the official rheto- ric that France did not observe the "color line" and, as the article states, "loved her black citizens." This characterization ignored the existence of racially discriminatory practices such as the active surveillance and exploitation of black colonials in France in the interwar era.81 But it was a popular rhetorical trope in interwar France. Reporter Marcel Pays compared the mixed dancing at the bal nègre - a dancehall established by and for Paris's black colonial communities - with social segregation in the United States. He claimed that in America you'd never see such a thing as "the colored man who risked such audacity faced the baston- nade of the Ku Klux Klan."82 In France, "Our liberal and hospitable"

79 Police report, 27 August 1927. 80 Ironically the African Americans based in Paris were not very involved in various

anticolonial groups and activist associations. While using the French state's supposed racial tolerance to further their own careers and to point out America's shortcomings, they were somewhat willfully blind to the plight of exploited colonial communities in France or racial prejudices that operated in a more subtle fashion than overt segregation and violence.

81 For an overview of immigration and French colonial and racial discourse, see wilder, French Imperial Nation-State; Lewis, Boundaries of the Republic; Sue Peabody and Tyler Edward Stovall, The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Laura Frader and Herrick Chapman, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspec- tives on the Politics of Difference (New York: Berghahn, 2004); Marianne Amar and Milza Pierre, V immigration en France au Xxieme siècle (Paris: Colin, 1990).

82 "qui aurait cette audace risquant la bastonnade du klu Klux klan." Marcel Pays, Un Bal Nègre," Information, 23 July 1928 (microfilm, R 98531, Dept des Arts et Spectacles,

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 491

country on the contrary, wrote Pays, "le nègre isn't limited to the jazz band but is welcomed on the dance floor as well, and men and women of a variety of skin colors and nationalities dance together freely."83 The Guadeloupean deputy Gratien Candace warned French citizens against American nègrophobie in 1927 and lamented, "America, alas! In coming here they have contaminated us with a racist virus; the majority have reacted against it."84 Candace then stated that France, as the daughter of the revolution, struggled against slavery, and she must remain true to her universalist republican ideals. The color-blind promise was a myth - as many recent monographs have shown - but the American jazz artists served as the perfect vehicle for promoting this myth precisely because of their "outsider" status in French society. They ultimately presented no threat to France's colonial power and thus could be embraced with few repercussions.

In their turn the jazz performers and the reporters who covered their every movement were entranced by the myth of color-blind France, and they used the trope of racial equality constantly in their collective narrative of the jazz migration. A succinct little entry titled "Adopt European Customs" in the Chicago Defender's theatre news section of 5 November 1927 noted: "London. England. Nov. 4 - Henry Johnson, who will be remembered as a member and manager of the once famous quartet the Black Diamonds is doing an act with William H. Goodrich, who came over a year ago. Mr. Johnson has lived in Europe for many years and seemingly has no desire to return to America. This is the case with a great number of our people who find comfort in the freedom and fellowship found abroad."85

Johnson is claimed as "one of our people" by the paper, and the emphasis on freedom and a network that offers "fellowship" rather than segregation illustrates the use of the jazz experience in Europe to draw an implicit contrast with the realities of racially bound existence in the United States. The paper frequently reported on performers who were enjoying the camaraderie and freedom to be found in Europe, and who had vowed not to return to the more restrictive conditions found in

BN-Richelieu, France). Marcel Pays is not quite accurate; Kevin Mumford's work shows in Interzones, but his perceptions are telling.

83 Of course he doesn't think about why Francophone black diasporans might have wanted to establish such a dance hall in the first place, or what that implied about a de facto sense of segregation in France.

84 R. Archambault, "L'Envers du Jazz," Paris Soir, 3 January, 1927, microfilm, R 98531 (Dept des Arts et Spectacles, BN-Richelieu, France). Mv translation.

85 "Adopt European Customs," Chicago Defender, 5 November 1927.

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the United States. J. A. Rogers, a Paris-based correspondent for numer- ous black newspapers, made a comparison between racial attitudes in America, France, and England - and France won out. He concluded that "in one respect France is greater than any other country on earth. There is no color line. . . . All hail the power of France's name! Here's to France the 'white hope' of the colored races of the world!"86

Paul Robeson expressed a different opinion in his 1931 address to the newly formed Colored Persons' Association in London.87 He warned that the English should beware of being corrupted by American racism and engaged in a thoughtful but pointed comparison of Britain, France, and America that reveals the way black men and women abroad were using the experience to piece together a cosmopolitan critique of the treatment of racial difference. Robeson stated that in England, "He had been taken at his full value, treated as a human being and without sentimentality. He felt at home in England which was more than he had ever done in France and America. There was something exotic in the French attitude. They seemed to think that fundamentally he was a savage, (laughter)."88 The reservations expressed by Robeson had a basis in fact and his thoughtful comparison and later political activism set him apart from some of the jazz performers who romped around Europe "just out for fun" who "wasted the freedom," they found there.89 Such players nevertheless mounted a cosmopolitan critique of their own in that they spread the word to other black American musicians that in Europe "nobody's bothering you," and as far as race relations were concerned, "you have no problems over there."90

As the interwar period progressed, black musicians in France were affected by the economic depression and the rise of conservatism in politics with the result that diasporic African individuals from Africa and America were drawn closer together. George H. Evans offers an early example of this when he extended Tovalou the commiserations

86 Tuskegee Clippings File, p. 768. See also p. 772, column dated 19 August 1931, in which he argues in favor of France and against England vis-à-vis the color bar, and offers personal anecdotes for his integrated social experiences in France. This particular column was printed in the Amsterdam News and in black papers in Baltimore and Chicago.

87 "Race Problems, 1931, Tuskegee Clippings hile, p. 622. m Robeson cited the dangers ot U.b. racial prejudice when stating he had been treated

badly at an English hotel by visiting Americans - in contrast to his usual experience in Britain. Of course this is early in his career, before his turn to communism (and anticolonial- ism?). "Race Problems, 1931," Tuskegee clippings, p. 622.

89 Elliot Carpenter interviewed by Chris Goddard, transcribed in Chris Ooddard, Jazz Away from Home, p. 302.

90 Doc Cheatham, interviewed by Chris Goddard, Jazz Away from Home, p. 295.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 493

of all of "the gang" in Europe for the incident at the Astor Hotel in Chicago in 1925 and noted that many of them had played for Touvalou at a pan- African concert. By 1927 Joe Alex, a black French actor, dancer, and director, commented that work for jazz musicians was get- ting scarce, and characterized those in the "jazz nègre" or the black jazz bands who, like him, were losing work as "compatriotes."91

By 1939 the black American musicians still active in Paris were making a point of attending and promoting the performances of non- American men and women of color. Edgar Wiggins was now the author of "Across the Pond" and an active member of the French jazz network in Paris. His columns reported more and more frequently upon "French colonials" and entertainers such as "Bingo and Bungo, African duo."92 Clearly the black American entertainers still felt a sense of national difference from these "French colonials," but they were included in the reports of "the gang" across the pond. By July 1939, when the political situation was clearly deteriorating, Wiggins wrote a column promoting and reviewing a "Grande Soirée de Gala" for French colonials that fea- tured one of Joe Alex's "dynamic plays on the inter-racial problem."93 Wiggins attended and mentioned with evident pride that only one of Alex's troupe was white and praised the quality of the six-hundred- strong "intellectual and colorful crowd," who later enjoyed dancing and a "delightfully merry atmosphere" until six in the morning. These reports were written by a musician reporting for the black press and thus they unify the two types of black cosmopolitanism I have outlined in this discussion. They suggest that by 1939 African American per- formers in Europe were participating in black cosmopolitan networks that reflected some sense of shared humanity, linked by race and bridg- ing national divides.

Conclusion

Black American performers in interwar Europe gained new knowledge of the world in their travels that equipped them with the authority

91 Pierre Ramelot, "le Jazz et la crise," Candide, Coupures "Jazz," reel R 98531 (Dept des Arts et Spectacles, Richelieu, BNF, Paris).

92 Edgar Wiggins, "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender (National Edition), 1 July 1939. For performances in which both French colonial and African American entertainers worked together, see his column of 17 December 1018.

93 Edgar Wiggins, "Across the Pond," Chicago Defender (National Edition) , 22 July 1939, p. 15.

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to compare the restrictive racial practices in America with a variety of alternative practices. A hint of the long-term effects of this might be found in performers' increased involvement in political observation and action after their experiences of welcome and success in Europe. Noble Sissle and Fredi Washington were inspired to join the Negro Actors Guild once they returned to the United States.94 Eugene Bullard and Josephine Baker gave up on America completely after their warm welcome in France, although both were involved in protest actions during the civil rights years.95 Bricktop was transformed into a model black cosmopolitan by her European experience. She was proud to be a "100% American negro born in Alderson West by god Virginia" but lived internationally for most of her life and socialized with a truly cosmopolitan network.96 She believed in receiving full respect and citi- zenship regardless of racial difference, and although she herself didn't protest politically, she supported those who did, such as Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr. (She cooked the latter a "down south" din- ner of black-eyed peas when he visited Rome but warned him not to appear before "European dinner hours.") 97

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the European experience for the development of an African American ideal of cosmopolitan- ism, however, was that it expanded the horizons of wider African American community. The interwar jazz migration was a complicated historical process whereby performers freely chose to travel but also accepted the sometimes demeaning, frequently racially stereotyped, and almost always gender-bound roles they were offered. Nevertheless travel to Europe and especially Paris promised mobility, money, and social acceptance to a group that had historically been denied all three. The possibility of transcending the Jim Crow limitations of interwar America through the jazz migration offered a ground-level narrative of black cosmopolitan identity forged in the "black Atlantic" in which "Movement, relocation, displacement, and restlessness are the norms rather than the exceptions and where . . . there are long histories of the association of self-exploration with the exploration of new territories

94 See http://www.nypl.org/research/manuscripts/scm/scmfredi.xmL 95 For Bullard, see Craig Lloyd's account of his refusal to submit to racist harassment

at Paul Robeson's Peekskill concert in 1949, and the subsequent publicity (Lloyd, Eugene Bullard, pp. 134-137), and see also the account of his earlier fights with Americans in Paris for the same reasons. For Josephine Baker, see Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, chap. 7.

96 Private letter, undated, Ada "Bricktop" Smith collection. 97 Bricktop and Haskins, Bricktop, pp. 281-282.

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Gillett: Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism 495

and the cultural differences that exist both between and within groups that get called races,"98

Jazz musicians moved and relocated like Bricktop, they were foot- loose and restless like Granstaff, and their career meant that travel was the norm rather than the exception. The interwar jazz craze established long-lasting patterns of mobility for jazz musicians, who from that time forward seemed to chart the "Jazz Atlantic" with increasing frequency and reliable success. Black jazz musicians in the 1920s developed a cos- mopolitan set of practices that resonated well beyond the confines of a crowded Parisian nightclub. Their experiences fueled a substantive and constant journalistic exploration of territorial and cultural differences between Europe and America that promoted a vision of full citizenship in society regardless of color. It also gave black Americans of all classes a vicarious pride in these globe-trotting representatives of "the race" as it presented them with a new and widely disseminated model of black jazz cosmopolitanism.

98 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 133.

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