Synesthetic Rhythms:
African American Music and Dance Through Parisian Eyes
"[Josephine Baker] embodies the frenzy of jazz, the hard rhythms of
modern sculpture, [and] the tormented vagaries of contemporary melodies
[...]."[1] As this 1930 article suggests, Josephine Baker, the young
American dancer who captured the hearts of the Parisian public, captured
the spirit and color of the jazz age as well. Dubbed "the Black Venus"
(la Vénus noire), "the black star," and "the empress of jazz,"
Baker experienced an extraordinary success in Paris in the 1920s. Her
performance with La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
in Paris in 1925 launched a vogue for the black bottom and Charleston
across Europe and advanced the craze for jazz that had already overtaken
the capital.
In much of the reception of the period, the Vénus noire came
to be seen as an exemplary figure of urban modernity. The cross-play of
the arts found force in the figure of Baker, who was considered the
living embodiment of modernist art, from primitivism to German
expressionism to cubism. The premiere of La Revue Nègre gave rise
to a number of visual metaphors. For dance critic André Levinson,
Baker's plastic poses had the potency of "the finest examples of Negro
sculpture"; for a critic of Le Soir, La Revue Nègre constituted
the "quintessence of the modernism of the music hall"; one spectator
commented simply, "It's cubist."[2] In the words of contemporary critics
Karen Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Josephine Baker was
primitivist-modernism on two legs, the cubists' art nègre in
naked, human form."[3] The frenetic pace of her dance and the liberty of
her movements seemed to provide an aesthetic response to the
kaleidoscopic fervor of the Roaring Twenties. In Baker, one saw a mirror
of modernity, a reflection of its palpitating rhythm, its perpetual
movement, its ephemeral and fleeting nature. Paul Colin's art deco
designs of Baker, which appeared in a portfolio of 45 hand-colored
lithographs entitled Le Tumulte noir (1927), capture the energy
and rhythm of Baker's movements [Figure 1]. The stark lines, bold colors,
and exaggerated angles of the drawings render Baker a vivid articulation
of the throbbing metropolis. For Count Harry Kessler, Josephine Baker
and La Revue Nègre were both "ultramodern" and "ultraprimitive."
On a performance of La Revue Nègre at the Nelson theater in
Berlin in 1926, Kessler wrote, "They are a cross between primeval
forests and skyscrapers; likewise their music, jazz, in its color and
rhythms. Ultramodern and ultraprimitive."[4]
Figure 1: Josephine Baker in her banana skirt, lithograph by Paul
Colin from Le Tumulte noir, c. 1925. Jerome Robbins Dance
Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris. [Back to
text]
Primitivist modernism in motion, Baker, considered by one critic "a
saxophone in movement," embodied for many the spirit of jazz.[5] Jazz had
reached Paris as early as 1917, with the arrival of African American
regiments in France, whose bands, such as Harlem's Hellfighters and
Seventy Black Devils, performed throughout the country.[6] The most
well-known band was Lieutenant James Reese Europe's Hellfighters, drawn
from the highly decorated 369th Infantry Regiment of New York. In the
early months of 1918, the Hellfighters went on a grand tour of France,
visiting over 25 provincial French cities in a period of six weeks
(Shack 2001, p. 19). These "goodwill ambassadors" were responsible for
raising the morale of Allied troops on the front and in country
hospitals (Blake 1999, p. 62). The Hellfighters, who drew the attention
both of the armed forces and the civilian population during the war,
represented the United States at a number of ceremonies marking the
war's end. While many American G.I.'s returned home after the war, jazz
left an indelible mark on the French capital. The most famous early jazz
bands were drummer Louis Mitchell's Jazz Kings, a group of seven jazz
musicians which played at the Casino de Paris and various cabarets
across Paris, and violinist Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated
Orchestra, a 41-piece orchestra which gave a series of concerts at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1921 in the wake of a European tour.[7]
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