Modernism in Black and White: American Jazz in Interwar Europe

Abstract

This essay is partly about how and why Paris became the great good place for American jazzmen and women in the 1920s and 1930s, especially those who were not merely black but whose sexuality made life back home or elsewhere— difficult. It is also about how jazz music became written about by Europeans, beginning as early as 1919 with Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet, conductor to the Ballet Russe, for whom Sidney Bechet's clarinet-playing has the "primitive" force analogous to the authentic or even autochthonous, primal energy sought for and found, to their own satisfaction, by early modernists in Africa and the Pacific Islands, and including Constant Lambert, who in his Music Ho! (1934) makes much of the music of Duke Ellington. Lambert regards Ellington's compositions as reaching the same level of achievement as, among others, Ravel, Hindemith and Stravinsky. Jazz thus becomes available and assimilated to modernist enterprises —in the fine arts, in literature, and, of course, in music. But jazz musicians were unlike any other creators within the modernist movement in that they never made theoretical statements about their music. Nor did they issue manifestoes. They made the music, others explained it.