Two subscribers selected to receive a copy of “Paris Blues” by Andy Fry
21 Thursday Aug 2014
A Woman’s Paris™ in Book Reviews, Cultures
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African American music in France, African American musicians in France, Andy Fry King's College London, Bessie Smith jazz, Casino de Paris, Cotton Club Harlem jazz, Django Reinhardt Paris jazz, Duke Ellington, Folies-Bergère Paris, France, Guthrie P Ramsey Jr The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop, jazz age France, Jazz Age Paris, Josephine Baker Paris, Louis Armstrong, Ma Rainey jazz, Oxford London, Paris, Paris Blues Diahann Caroll Sidney Poitier Martin Ritt, Paris Blues Music, Paris Blues Sidney Poitier Paul Newman Diahann Carroll Joaane Woodward Martin Ritt, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture 1920-1960 Andy Fry, Ronald Radano University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sidney Bechet Paris jazz, Sunset Cafe in Chicago Jazz, The University of Chicago Press, Universities of Lancaster Berkeley California, University of Berkeley, University of California San Diego, University of Pennsylvania
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Two subscribers have been selected to receive a copy of Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960 by Andy Fry, who teaches in the Music Department at King’s College London. A $30 U.S. value. Winners are: Liz F., Palm Beach, FL, and Judith H., Minneapolis, MN.
Praise for Paris Blues
“What a pleasure to encounter this astute rethinking of the first forty years of jazz in France. Fry’s perceptive reading of the complex discourse network shaping the reception and practice of a broadly construed Parisian jazz is informed by an equally impressive command of a wide and deep historiography. The author’s engagingly written portrait not only upends some of the familiar narrations of Parisian jazz and its place in a wider jazz history; it also urges us to be a little smarter about how we talk and write about the place of jazz in the world today.” —Ronald Radano, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Paris Blues is a rich, thoughtful and diligently argued account of the African American muse’s great adventures in France during the twentieth century. Fry’s illuminating case studies—including from Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, Sidney Bechet, and more—revisit many of our preciously held views about modernism, black music, and French culture and teases out the complexities and pleasures that have made this intercontinental dance such a delight to revisit again and again.” —Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., author of The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop
In Paris Blues, Andy Fry provides an alternative history of African American music and musicians in France, one that looks beyond familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. He pinpoints key issues of race and nation in France’s complicated relationship with jazz from the 1920s through the 1950s. While he deals with many of the traditional icons—such as Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet—he asks how they came to be so iconic, and what their stories hide as well as what they preserve. Fry focuses throughout on early jazz and swing but includes its re-creation—reinvention—in the 1950s. Along the way, he pays tribute to forgotten traditions such as black musical theater, white show bands, and French wartime swing. Paris Blues provides a nuanced account of the French reception of African Americans and their music and marks an important intervention in the growing literature on jazz, race, and nation in France. (Purchase)
Excerpt from Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960, “Reprinted with permission from Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920-1960, by Andy Fry, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2014 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
Andy Fry joined King’s College London in 2007 having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, and as a visiting professor at Berkeley, He completed his graduate studies at Oxford, D. Phil., and has also studied at the Universities of Lancaster, California (Berkeley), and Pennsylvania.
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