"[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]

By the mid-1920s, the jazz vogue was in full swing. Eugene Bullard's nightclub Le Grand Duc in Montmartre provided a gateway for New York talent in Paris, while Jean Cocteau's bar Bœuf sur le Toit attracted the vanguard of Parisian intellectuals, artists, and celebrities. When Baker arrived on the scene in 1925, she seemed to provide physical expression to the synchronized rhythms of jazz. For one viewer she appeared to be "the frenetic and unbridled soul of jazz;" for another, she constituted "the rhythm of jazz" itself.[8] For many critics of the period, African American dance and musical idioms were inextricably intertwined. According to André Rivollet, Baker's performances with La Revue Nègre revealed to the Parisian public the formula that was to characterize the more flexible and improvisational sounds of the 1930s—le jazz hot. As opposed to "straight jazz," symphonic music-hall jazz that had been tempered to meet the tastes of an older generation, le jazz hot was, in Rivollet's words, pure, primal music whose voluptuous and boiling notes stood close to an exotic source and whose solo instruments spoke, leapt about, joked and improvised.[9] "This new formula of jazz, which relies more on personal improvisation than the immutable rules of harmony, was revealed to us in Paris [...] in La Revue Nègre, whose star was Josephine Baker. [...]," writes Rivollet. "She danced..., she danced..., certainly, but she was unconsciously part of this jazz hot with her improvised Tyroleans [...]" (Rivollet 1935, p. 103). For André Levinson, Baker's movements were so infused with the ethos of jazz that her body directed and led the music:

[T]here seemed to emanate from her violently shuddering body, her bold dislocations, her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm. It was she who led the spell-bound drummer and the fascinated saxophonist in the harsh rhythm of the "blues." It was as though the jazz, catching on the wing the vibrations of this mad body, were interpreting, word by word, its fantastic monologue. This music is born from the dance, and what a dance! (Levinson 1991, p. 74).

This dance was rooted in the soil of African American musical traditions. Josephine Baker grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, amid segregation and race riots. In 1925, she was engaged in an all-black dance troupe directed by Caroline Dudley Reagan, an American society woman intent on bringing the "authentic" African American spirit to Paris. The company of La Revue Nègre, which opened on October 2, 1925, included pianist Claude Hopkins and his orchestra, the dancer and choreographer Louis Douglas, the blues and spiritual singer Maud de Forest, and the soprano saxophonist and clarinetist Sidney Bechet [Figure 2].[10] After making her début in La Revue Nègre, Baker obtained the principle role in La Folie du Jour (1926), a revue à grand spectacle directed by Paul Derval at the Folies-Bergère. In comparison to the United States, where African American performers were subject to overt racial practices, Paris constituted an artistic haven. Baker's appearance on the Parisian entertainment scene ushered in a series of all-black troupes, from the Black People starring Louis Douglas and the Blackbirds with Florence Mills in 1926 to Lew Leslie's Blackbirds, which performed in 1929 at the Moulin Rouge.[11] "Black, with Josephine Baker, has come back into fashion," remarked a critic at the time.[12]

Figure 2: "La Revue Nègre au Music-Hall des Champs-Elysées," poster by Paul Colin, 1925. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. [Back to text]

Baker's choreography, which drew on the musical idioms of American jazz and vaudeville, was inscribed in a vogue nègre unfolding in Paris. While African painting and sculpture had exercised an important influence on the visual arts before the war, particularly in the work of Matisse and Picasso, the mode for "primitivism" extended to all the artistic domains in the interwar period. In 1921 Blaise Cendrars published his Anthologie nègre, while René Maran received the prix Goncourt for his novel, Batouala, véritable roman nègre; the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs featured cubist works with a markedly African influence; the surrealists held African art as the art of the epoch; the sounds of jazz and ragtime filled the interiors of bars and cabarets; and the "Bal Nègre" at the rue Blomet in Montparnasse drew the center of the Parisian artistic scene. "Parisian taste, we must admit, is at the present moment Afro-American," wrote a critic in 1929.[13]

Baker capitalized extensively on this mode. From her "savage dance" (danse sauvage) with Joe Alex at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to her infamous "banana dance" (danse des bananes) at the Folies-Bergère, she staged conventional Western representations of African and African American norms. The tableaux of La Revue Nègre, such as "Mississippi Steam Boat Race," "New York Skyscraper," "Louisiana Camp Meeting," and "Darkey Impressions," constituted an "anthology of visual clichés" of the life of African Americans in the United States.[14] In the final tableau, the famous danse sauvage which will launch her career, Baker assumes the role of the prey of a black hunter, played by, in Janet Flanner's terms, the "black giant" Joe Alex.[15] The stage is set as a nightclub in Harlem. With the sounds of tam-tams drumming a steady beat in the background, Baker appears on stage on the back of the naked hunter, adorned only in rings of feathers. The hunter turns her in a cartwheel onto the floor, and she launches into an openly erotic dance. This "pas de deux of 'savages,'" which, according to André Levinson, "attains a savage grandeur and a superb bestiality,"[16] shocked and enraptured the public. While the danse sauvage is set in the context of segregated America, the banana dance at the Folies-Bergère unfolds in an explicitly colonial setting. The curtain opens onto a luxuriant jungle, palpitating to the rhythms of tam-tams played by natives in loincloths. A white explorer sleeps tranquilly under a mosquito net hung on the banks of a river. The explorer wakes up when Fatou, the native girl played by Baker, descends from a tree in a belt of bananas, a human prey and ultimate colonial fantasy. Baker's staging of the primitive extended well beyond the confines of the theater. Forging a public persona that matched her image on stage, she strolled the streets of Paris with her leopard Chiquita; surrounded herself with monkeys, serpents and exotic birds; and put her name on a number of lines of beauty products perpetuating her erotic image.[17]

Baker's mise en scène of the primitive accorded well with the expectations of the French public. For the Parisians, she imported the breath of the jungle. Perceived as "intoxication and unleashed instincts, unknown delirium, frenzy and deranged animality,"[18] she represented, in the eyes of the public, the return of the repressed, the black continent of Freud, the triumph of primitive and spontaneous instincts over the intellect. She was described in the press as "a beautiful savage animal," a "gracious, small, exotic animal," and a "strange and splendid savage beast [....]"[19] These illusions to animality were by no means unique in the reception of Josephine Baker in the period. A virtual menagerie was constructed around her: she was considered a she-monkey, a serpent, a giraffe, a kangaroo, a gorilla, a panther and an exotic bird.[20] An article that appeared in 1930 described her début in the following manner: "In the month of October 1925, the Parisians invited to the performance of the new show at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées saw the curtain open onto a strange set. [...] Suddenly an extraordinary person of color appeared, wearing boxers, advancing with supple and spread knees, the stomach concave, like a kangaroo hiding a baby in her pouch. This hybrid being, [...] was Miss Josephine Baker" (Bauer 1930). Baker was aware of the extreme reactions her image provoked. "They think that I come from a virgin forest [...]," she remarked in one of her autobiographical works. "The primitive instinct, the madness of the flesh, the tumult of the senses, animality in delirium... Everything possible! The white imagination is something when it comes to blacks."[21]

In Paris, Baker's apparent "savagery" was greeted with enthusiasm, as a regenerating force to a war-weary Europe. For a continent that was spiritually and physically depleted by the war, African art was considered a source of rejuvenation.[22] Avant-garde artists saw African, West Indian, and African American cultures as authentic alternatives to European values and traditions. In the words of the critic and art collector Paul Guillaume, who considered the "revelation" of l'art nègre to constitute a crucial event in the history of civilization, "African art (l'art nègre) is the vivifying sperm of the spiritual twentieth century."[23] In a dedication to the Vénus noire which appeared in Joséphine Baker vue par la presse française, an illustrated collection of articles edited by Baker's manager and husband Pepito Abatino, novelist Erich Maria Remarque lauded Baker for infusing a weary continent with the revitalizing force of elemental nature: "To Josephine Baker who has brought the breath of the jungle, elementary force and beauty, to the tired stages of Western civilization."[24] In a reversal of terms, Europe became the locus of savagery and Africa that of an ideal elsewhere.

While the liberal and avant-garde reception in Paris largely drew Baker as a regenerative force, a few reactionary voices perceived her as a symbol of degeneration. When Baker appeared on stage in 1925, dramatist and Académie Française member Robert de Flers viewed her as an affront to French taste, warning his readers that they were in the process of returning to the primate stage in much less time than it had taken them to descend from it.[25] An article that appeared in Le Soir in 1928 represented Baker as "the black peril," a sign of European degeneration. The respected dance critic André Levinson took a decidedly conservative position. In a 1925 essay entitled "The Negro Dance: Under European Eyes," Levinson contrasted what he considered to be the innate, spontaneous rhythms of "Negro dance" (the "formless and purely instinctive motor energy" with which "the savage is overflowing") with the refined art of classical dance (Levinson 1991, p. 73). In an article that appeared in Comœdia in December 1925, Levinson wrote:

From the point of view of our civilization, Negro ascendancy is, certainly, a symptom of the decadence of the European spirit, the proof of a malady of the western will. The triumph of the Negroes is for us a defeat. Because they are bad? No, because they are good. [...] Europe is an aristocracy. It is repelled by such an abdication of intelligence to instinct. [...] We have let our supremacy go. Let us regain it; and let's start by regaining ourselves. Let's not have fun by lazily whistling at those who are stronger than we are."

Au point de vue de notre civilisation, l'emprise nègre est, certes, un symptôme de décadence de l'esprit européen, la preuve d'une affection de la volonté occidentale. Le triomphe des nègres est pour nous une défaite. Parce qu'ils sont mauvais? Non, parce qu'ils sont bons. [...] L'Europe est une aristocratie. Elle répugne à une telle abdication de l'intelligence devant l'instinct. [...] Nous avons laissé échapper la suprématie. Sachons la reprendre; et commençons par nous reprendre nous-mêmes. Ne nous amusons pas à siffler paresseusement des gens qui sont plus forts que nous.[26]

The most virulent reactionary voice was without a doubt that of Maurice Hamel. In the rubric of "Irreverent Letters" of an issue of La Rumeur that appeared in January 1928, Hamel published a letter addressed to Baker whose tone recalls the violence of the American South:

Because of your mediocrity, your complete absence of any type of talent and, above all, the indecency of your physique, you dishonor the French music hall. [...] The imported American article that you offer to the spectators in our country should be forbidden by superior order. [...] Perhaps the Parisians themselves will soon condemn you to death. [...] Be strong, O Josephine! Disappear forever. Take the next ship leaving for America.

Par votre médiocrité, par votre absence complète de toute espèce de talent et, surtout, par l'indécence de votre physique, vous déshonorez le music-hall français. [...] L'article d'importation américaine que vous offrez aux spectateurs de notre pays devrait être interdit par ordre supérieur. [...] Peut-être les Parisiens eux-mêmes vous condamneront-ils bientôt à mort. [...] Ayez ce courage, ô Joséphine! Disparaissez à jamais. Prenez le premier paquebot en partance pour les Amériques.[27]

Baker didn't take the boat to America. On the contrary, she undertook a two-year European tour and returned transformed, passing from the status of "commercial star" to that of a "great artist." "The Charleston, the 'bananas,' that's over, you see?" ("[L]e charleston, le 'banana's,' c'est fini, compris?") she declared in an interview in 1929.[28] In her performance in the revue Paris qui Remue at the Casino de Paris in 1930-31, she expanded her register to include vocal numbers and comedic sketches. Compared from this point on to Mistinguett, the darling of the French music hall, she affected the posture of a grande dame des planches (queen of the stage), adorning herself with sparkling tiaras and feathered trains.[29] In the eyes of the press, Baker had become civilized. "The former star of the Revue Nègre," wrote a critic in 1930, "who formerly made a scandal and sensation by her frenzy, her extravagance, her savage spontaneity, has been assimilated by Western civilization."[30] A 1931 article in Le Figaro saw this transformation as the mark of Europe's civilizing power: "For those who [...] attended her début [...] and who find her again at the Casino de Paris in 1931, Josephine is the best example of the improvement possible in the intellectual shaping of the black race by European civilization."[31] What is striking in the description of Baker's self-motivated metamorphosis is the use of color as a metaphor for the process. According to a number of critics, Baker had gotten whiter.[32] "[S]he gets visibly whiter and, as she was never completely black, she seems whiter today than many of our fashionable women returning from the South of France" (G. de Pawlowski 1930). Assimilated in part, she was promoted to an intermediary zone: "She is no longer a black woman and not yet a white woman, without it being exactly possible to say if there is too much coffee in her milk or not enough milk in her coffee" (Saint-Bonnet 1928).

Like Baker's dance, jazz was seen as a particularly revitalizing musical form. The powerful tempo of the syncopated rhythms of jazz and the liberty of its improvised scores allowed for a freedom and immediacy that was particularly suited to an era in need of escape and healing. The metaphor of jazz as a drug resurfaces in the critical literature of the period. A "drug against suffering," a "dispenser of joy," jazz was seen as a vital healing agent in the troubled postwar climate.[33] For German film critic Siegfried Kracauer, jazz represented the present in its presentness. In an essay entitled "Renovierter Jazz," Kracauer attributed to jazz the power both to induce forgetting and to instill life into war-weary bodies.[34] As Nancy Nenno points out, jazz as a "healing tonic" rejoined the host of drugs that provided a temporary haven from recent memories of the war.[35] In "The Negro Dance," Levinson also conceived of the African American musical idiom as a narcotic, as a healing agent with both sedating and intoxicating effects. On African American dance, he wrote, "The primitive, human instinct is violently affected by such rhythmic insistence. The monotony of this measured tramping, the symmetry of its pattern, has the effect of a narcotic, while its gradual acceleration brings about a sense of exhilaration amounting to a positive ecstasy" (Levinson 1991, p. 72).

The impact of this new "drug" on French culture was so powerful that jazz, often described as an invading or conquering force, opened up heated debates in intellectual and musical circles. On July 1, 1925, music critic André Schaeffner and ethnomusicologist André Cœuroy launched a "Jazz Survey" in Paris-Midi. The survey, which opened with the statement, "The jazz band has invaded Europe," posed a number of questions concerning the autonomy and influence of jazz, of which the first was: "Do you consider jazz to be 'music'?"[36] In a column entitled, "Jazz Before the Judges," Paris-Midi published 44 of the responses drawn from figures across the music industry, including musicians, composers, singers, and critics. Responses ran the gamut, from jazz as an anti-musical abomination ("'Jazz??,'" protests baritone Lucien Fugère, "An abomination! A horror!!! The negation of musicality") to jazz as a "super-music" effecting an artistic revolution.[37] On the whole, critics found jazz to be an influential popular form of music whose artistic merits derived primarily from rhythm and whose authenticity lay in its African or African American roots.

As with the dance to which it gave birth, jazz had its detractors. For some, jazz music was seen as pure noise. One critic, applying the popular denomination of bruiteur to jazz musicians, writes, "Dadaists of music, they bustle about [...] to discover everything that bad international taste has produced, and import it to the heart of the capital [....]"[38] Jazz seemed to capture the pulse of modernity itself, its temporal simultaneity, its tumult, its dynamism and its unceasing energy. In a 1927 article that appeared in Débats, significantly entitled "The Orchestra of Dr. Moreau," the theater critic Gustave Fréjaville considered the modern sounds of jazz to be the sounds of the machine age and an echo of the wailing and weapons of war:

Suddenly, an astonishing organized din responded to the clamor of the sirens, to the roar of the Gothas, plucking, grating, scratching, shuddering, the rattle of drumsticks, the rumble of the drum, the cries of the trumpets and horns, the ringing of metallic snare drums, the noise of chains, rods and gongs, brass calls, an entire sonorous production of an ingenious complexity.

A la clameur des sirènes, au ronflement des gothas répondit tout à coup un étonnant vacarme organisé, pincements, grincements, grattements, frémissements, crépitement de baguettes, roulements de tambour, cris de trompes et de klaxons, tintements de timbres métalliques, bruits de cha”nes, de tringles et de gongs, appels cuivrés, toute une mécanique sonore d'une complication ingénue.[39]

A French doctor warned against the harmful effect on the nervous system of such a cacophony: "[...] when we are dealing not with symphonic music but JAZZ," he claimed, "we can expect the worst repercussions on the nervous system."[40]

As art historian Jody Blake has pointed out, avant-garde artists such as the Dadaists embraced the so-called "noise of jazz," considering jazz to be "the musical counterpart of Dada's own anti-art activities," an "anti-music" that furthered dada's anarchic program of social and political protest (Blake 1999, p. 60). Surrealist writers, such as Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, composed poems devoted to the subject of jazz, while jazz music provided the backdrop for many avant-garde theatrical productions.[41] Jean Cocteau, whose Bœuf sur le Toit gave birth to the expression faire le bœuf, or "have a jam session," considered the jazz band to be the "soul of modern urban forces," from machines to skyscrapers to ocean liners, lyrically expressing both the cruelty and the melancholy of postwar life.[42] For Philippe Soupault, the lure of jazz for the Dadaists was intimately linked to the experience of the war: "To fully understand this taste for scandal," he explained in his 1927 Mémoires de l'oubli, "it is necessary to remember the brutal rupture that occurred between our childhood and our youth. We were precipitated from childhood into the war, and from the war into a sort of euphoria of lust for life and will for oblivion. The Charleston fully expressed this frenzy that possessed us."[43]

For more conservative critics, jazz was a sign of cultural decadence and degeneration that threatened to undermine the French "civilizing mission." In an article that appeared in Le Soir in June 1926, one critic asked anxiously, "Are we still in Paris? Are we still in a civilized country?"[44] Under the aegis of its president, Princess Anna de Saxe, the League against the Jazz Band banned all jazz music at its events.[45] In a long article on African American music and dance that appeared in Mercure de France in September 1926, critic André Rouveyre saw jazz as the living proof of the racial theory expounded in racial theorist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), which attributed a heightened sensuality and musical capacity to the "Negroid" race: "[T]he jazz band is the abdication of music in its role as an instrument of traditional culture. And this in the service of a virulent disorder, one that benefits only the instincts violently pulled out of the train of civilization, and then nurtured, with a blast of brass, drums and woodwinds, according to their ingenuity, their savagery, their sensuality, by the blacks" (Rouveyre 1926, p. 412). As critic Jeffrey Jackson points out, jazz provided a unique cultural vehicle for the expression of an entire constellation of concerns about French identity in the postwar period, fears both of regression and advance, of African arts and the machine age, of foreign influence and the loss of political power.[46] John Souter's Breakdown, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1926, captures both the fear and fascination attending this new musical form. The painting depicts a black saxophonist seated atop a classical statue in ruins, a statuesque nude moving in time with the music. The mammoth size of the statue suggests the enormity of the loss, the enraptured white dancer the potency of this cultural rebirth. The scandal caused by the painting, which resulted in its removal from the exhibit, expressed the larger cultural scandal that was jazz in the 1920s.[47]

Paul Morand's Magie noire (1928) captures in literary form the vivid and revitalizing qualities attributed to African American dance and music in the 1920s. The third part of Morand's Chronique du XXe siècle, the work presents a quasi-ethnological or sociological literary portrait of its era, with the poetic aim of discovering the "magic" of black culture. The chapter entitled "Congo (Bâton Rouge)" treats the figure of Sophie Taylor ("Congo"), a fictional black American dancer modeled on the figure of Josephine Baker. An 18-year-old dancer starring in the "super-revue" Paris-Cochon, Congo is a wild success in Paris, "the most photographed girl in the world."[48] An unspoiled figure (un monstre naturel) with dance in her blood, the predominantly nude Congo is at one with her body, a figure untouched by the modern metropolis (Morand 1992, p. 515). In accordance with the work's aim to penetrate into the soul of black culture, the chapter moves from surface to profundity, from a ball at the dancer's chic hotel at the rue de l'Université to the depths of Pigalle, where Congo will take part in an occult African ritual to find a cure for the voodoo spell cast over her. The ball is a social event, the black magic ritual a reality. In Morand's depiction, the move from European to African culture, from the shining surface to the spiritual depths, is not depicted as a regression but rather as a movement toward essence or authenticity.

The portrait that Morand paints of African American culture is an exoticized and racialist one, which, however, reverses the predominant assumptions of the era. In a passage with an explicit reference to Josephine Baker, Congo evokes the nobility of a royal lineage: "She recalls Josephine, say the old-timers. No! I am speaking of another, who was empress, in the past ..." (Morand 1992, p. 516). This rapprochement of Josephine Baker, the "empress of jazz," with Napoléon Bonaparte's first wife, the Empress Joséphine, renders Congo a royal figure in modern form. In a reversal of the logic of Gobineau, who held that the "Negroid" improves with racial mixing, Congo retains the noble qualities inherent to her race, wearing her naked body as an aristocrat would wear a royal gown. In the basement of the bar in Montmartre where she stands naked in a circle of nude bodies chanting an occult refrain, the narrator comments: "And here is Congo nude again, the smooth nudity of her Guinean ancestors, the ease and nobility of the high epoch" (Morand 1992, p. 521). Jazz music, which Morand calls in the preface "this imperious melancholia that comes from the saxophones," is the modern voice of this ancient aristocracy, the pure and haunting expression of the essence of African culture (Morand 1992, pp. 481-82). But unlike the ancient nobility of Europe that was linked through bonds of blood, Congo's aristocratic creed is based on a sense of brotherhood and unity. Congo's ball represents a leveling of distinction, a crushing (plier), grinding (moudre), and trampling (fouler) of difference, and a promise of future unity.[49]

Congo's transformative power operates primarily through the medium of dance. Morand infuses her movements with all the spontaneous energy and force imputed to the modern dance forms of Charleston, black-bottom, and the fox trot in the reception of the period. In a rapid-fire Charleston that she performs at the ball, she moves like a shot, with lightning force and unexpected gestures. While cast in an unmistakably modern form, Congo's dance works an act of black magic, providing access to the realms of the authentic and the essential, to the primitive sources of the world: "[T]his young sorcerer pulverizes the musical, political or sentimental melodies of the Whites, makes them go back to the origins of the world" (Morand 1992, p. 516). The dance idioms of the 1920s are merely ancient African totemic rituals in modern guise. This modern, spiritual dance produces an occult effect, the transference of force from one body to another: "[I]t's a vital shock that is immediately transmissible, a discharge more violent than that of the electric chair. As soon as she appears, everything is set in motion, the people, the lights, the furniture" (Morand 1992, p. 515). Much like W.E.B. Du Bois, who valorizes what he considers to be the profound musical capacity unique to African Americans, Morand imputes to Africans the gift of joy, an infectious gift with the power to distract and uplift a fatigued and cynical populace: "[T]he program of Congo, who is also called Congo the Joyous, has been accomplished: 'I will drive Paris to distraction!' Paris laughs, with her tired, cynical laugh, consoled by the simple elation of her refreshed limbs, brightened by these frolics of the stone age, perked up by this organic, indestructible radiance; doesn't she know that God gave a gift to Negroes of his most precious treasure: joy?" (Morand 1992, p. 516).

It is the changing face of Paris which becomes the main character of Morand's utopic vision: old Paris laughing its cynical, tired laugh; new Paris driven to distraction; a future Paris infused with energy and hope. Morand's text brings out the restorative and revitalizing qualities imputed to jazz music and dance in the period. The essentializing tropes underscore the extent to which the reception of African American musical idioms were subject to European colonialist fantasties and the admiring embrace the extent to which these fantasies met the needs of a postwar generation. In the end, the popular reception of African American music and dance in the 1920s may tell us more about the cultural needs of the period than the art forms themselves.

The sources for this paper derive from the articles in the press on Josephine Baker and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in the Collection Rondel of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, as well as from a collection of articles entitled Joséphine Baker vue par la presse française, edited by Pepito Abatino (Paris: Les Editions Isis, 1931). For sources on jazz in the press, I have drawn on Denis-Constant Martin and Olivier Roueff, La France du jazz: Musique, modernité et identité dans la première moitié du XXe siècle (Marseille: Ed. Parenthèses, 2002), which contains a substantial appendix of original articles on jazz from the 1920s and 1930s. This article appeared under the title, "A 'Saxophone in Movement': Josephine Baker and the Music of Dance," in Jazz Adventures in French Culture, ed. Jacqueline Dutton and Colin Nettelbeck, special issue of Nottingham French Studies 43:1 (Spring 2004): 39-52. I am grateful to Nottingham French Studies for permission to reprint this article, which has been slightly modified for The Scholar and Feminist Online. Parts of this essay were published in French in "Joséphine Baker: Parodie ou Pastiche?" Francographies, journal of the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d'Amérique, No. Spécial 2, vol. 1 (1999), pp. 141-156. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Endnotes

1. Le Cri de Paris, 10 oct. 1930 (in Abatino 1931, p. 40). [Return to text]

2. André Levinson, "The Negro Dance: Under European Eyes," in André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties, ed. by Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1991), p. 74; Phillipe d'Olon, "Au Champs-Elysées Music Hall: Damia, Gabaroche, La Revue Nègre," Le Soir, 1er nov. 1925; Michel Georges-Michel, "Soirée nègre," Comœdia, 28 sept. 1925. [Return to text]

3. Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes," Critical Inquiry, 24 (Summer 1998), p. 933. For a discussion of Baker as a figure of primitivist modernism, see Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1998), pp. 95-116. [Return to text]

4. Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher 1918-1937 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1961), entry for February 26, 1926, p. 482. Quoted in translation in Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 171. [Return to text]

5. Pierre de Régnier, "Aux Champs-Elysées: La Revue Nègre," Candide, 12 nov. 1925. [Return to text]

6. Louis Mitchell's Seven Spades, which performed in Paris in November 1917 and evolved into the Jazz Kings, is thought to be the first jazz band to make an appearance in Paris. For discussions of early jazz in the French capital, see Jody Blake, Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900-1930 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 62-66; Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 108-110; and William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 11-25. [Return to text]

7. Jody Blake, "'Jazz-band Dada': L'afro-américanisme dans le Paris de l'entre-deux-guerres," Revue de L'Art, 118: 4 (1997), p. 70. [Return to text]

8. L'Illustration, 15 nov. 1930 (in Abatino (1931) p. 41). "I begin to understand the rhythm of jazz," writes Pierre Bret. "This rhythm, it's Josephine Baker" ("L'étoile noire s'est levée," L'Intransigeant, 7 nov. 1925). [Return to text]

9. Andre Rivollet, "Du Jazz Hot à 'La Créole,'" conférence de M. André Rivollet, faites le 21 mars 1935, Conferencia, 1er juillet 1935, p. 102. [Return to text]

10. The opening of La Revue Nègre drew le "tout Paris," including Robert Desnos, Francis Picabia, Ferdinand Léger. and Blaise Cendrars. See Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker (London: Robson Books, 1981), pp. 58-59. [Return to text]

11. Jean-Claude Klein, "La Revue nègre," in Entre deux guerres, ed. by Oliver Barrot and Pascal Ory (Paris: F. Bourin, 1990), p. 374. [Return to text]

12. Gérard Bauer, "Le Romantisme de Couleur," conférence du 20 janvier, 1930 (in Abatino 1931, p. 20). [Return to text]

13. Claude Berton, "Réflexions sur le music-hall," La Revue de Paris, 1er nov. 1929, p. 674. [Return to text]

14. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 20. [Return to text]

15. American journalist Janet Flanner, who wrote a column for The New Yorker entitled "Letters from Paris" at the time, recalls the danse sauvage as follows: "She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage, he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instance of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater." Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday 1925-1939 (New York: Popular Library, 1972). [Return to text]

16. André Levinson, "Paris ou New-York? Douglas. La Vénus noire," Comœdia, 12 oct. 1925. [Return to text]

17. Baker loaned her name to a series of products, from skin creams and lipsticks to perfumes, liquors, and bathing suits. Le Bakerfix, a hair-straightening cream, brought her almost as much revenue as her appearances on stage. See Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 171. [Return to text]

18. Louis Léon-Martin, Paris-Midi, 8 oct. 1930 (in Abatino 1931, p. 15). [Return to text]

19. Excerpts from Abatino (1931), pp. 26, 24, and 37: Gérard Missaire, Journal des Débats, 9 oct. 1930; Simon Gregorio, La Rampe, 1er nov. 1930; G. de Pawlowski, Le Journal, 9 oct. 1930. [Return to text]

20. In an article devoted to "Negro dancing," André Levinson comments on the "irrepressible animality" of black dancers: "[T]he undeniable rhythmic superiority of these Negro dancers is nothing less than an adjunct of their irrepressible animality. The tom-tom of the cannibal may be termed the apotheosis of brute rhythm" (Levinson 1991, p. 73). [Return to text]

21. Marcel Sauvage, Voyages et aventures de Joséphine Baker, feuilleton in L'Intransigeant du 12 oct. 1930. [Return to text]

22. In Primitivist Modernism, Sieglinde Lemke remarks that rejuvenation is a key trope of primitivist modernism: "[T]he black cultural idiom—be it a West African sculpture, or syncopated jazz, or an evening at the Savoy—is, somehow, primarily invigorating" (Lemke 1998, p. 101). The interpretation of the postwar popularity of African American cultural forms as arising from a profound cultural need for revitalization runs through the critical literature. See, for example, Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996), pp. 30-32. [Return to text]

23. Paul Guillaume, "Opinion sur l'Art nègre," La Dépêche africaine, 17 (October 15, 1929). See also "L'art nègre et l'esprit de l'époque," Paris-Soir, 25 nov. 1925. [Return to text]

24. Erich Maria Remarque, 1930, dédicace (in Abatino 1931, p. 51). Colette, who frequented Chez Joséphine, Baker's nightclub in Montmartre, also included a dedication in this collection, in which she wrote: "To the most beautiful panther, to the most charming woman, with my friendship." [Return to text]

25. Robert de Flers, "La Semaine Dramatique," Figaro, 16 nov. 1925. [Return to text]

26. André Levinson, "'Loin du bal:' Joséphine siffléeŃBlanc et noir," Comœdia, 7 déc. 1925. [Return to text]

27. Maurice Hamel, "A Mademoiselle Joséphine Baker," La Rumeur, 14 jan. 1928. [Return to text]

28. Georges Schmitt, "Joséphine Baker passant à Paris nous dit...," Volonté, 20 avril 1929. [Return to text]

29. This stage image translated as well in Baker's quotidian life. Constructing a glamorous public persona, Baker adorned herself in jewels from Tiffany and Cartier and dressed in gowns designed by Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel. She bought a fifteenth-century chateau in the Dordogne Valley with 50 rooms and a bed said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. See Wendy Martin, "Remembering the Jungle: Josephine Baker and Modernist Parody," in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. by Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 313, 323. [Return to text]

30. Dominique Sordet, Ric et Rac, 8 nov. 1930 (in Abatino 1931, p. 35). [Return to text]

31. Jean Sejournet, Le Concours Medical, 8 fév. 1931 (in Abatino 1931, p. 20). [Return to text]

32. Baker was outraged by this claim: "It's blasphemy," she declared, "I have not gotten one drop whiter!" ("Joséphine et ses mémoires," Cyrano, 7 déc. 1930). [Return to text]

33. Arthur Hoérée, "Le jazz et le disque (essai critique et historique)," L'Edition musical vivante, no. 46 (Dec. 1931), pp. 7-15 (in Martin and Roueff 2002, p. 295). [Return to text]

34. Siegfried Kracauer, "Renovierter Jazz," in Schriften, vol. 2: Aufsätze 1927-1931, ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 390-392. [Return to text]

35. Nancy Nenno, "Femininity, the Primitive, and Modern Urban Space: Josephine Baker in Berlin," in Women in the Metropolis, ed. by Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), p. 154. [Return to text]

36. André Schaeffner and André Cœuroy, "Enquête sur le jazz band," Paris-Midi, 8 mai-1er juillet, 1925 (in Martin and Roueff 2002, p. 182). [Return to text]

37. Lucien Fugère's response is drawn from Martin and Roueff (2002), p. 199. Michel Georges-Michel writes, "Is jazz music? Not long ago there were people who cried: 'Wagner, Debussy, it's not music.' After this, who would dare to venture to deny jazz. It's a super-music [sur-musique] which stands head and shoulders even above Stravinsky" (in Martin and Roueff 2002, p. 183). [Return to text]

38. Louis Vuillemin, "Concerts métèques...," Courrier musical, 1er janvier 1923 (in Martin and Roueff 2002, p. 170). [Return to text]

39. Gustave Fréjaville, "L'orchestre du Dr. Moreau," Débats, 9 juillet 1927. Quoted in Jeffrey Jackson, "Making Enemies: Jazz in Inter-war Paris," French Cultural Studies, 10:29 (June 1999), p. 192. [Return to text]

40. Quoted in André Mauprey, "Le jazz peut-il rendre fou?" Jazz-Tango-Dancing (August 1931). See also Jackson (1999), p. 193. [Return to text]

41. For examples of "jazz poetry," see Blake (1997), p. 72. [Return to text]

42. Jean Cocteau, "Jazz-Band," 4 aoôt 1919, Le Rappel à l'ordre, in Oeuvres completes de Jean Cocteau IX (Genève: Marguerat, 1946-51), pp. 124-127. For a discussion of the expression faire le bœuf, see Bernard Gendron, "Jamming at Le Bœuf: Jazz and the Paris Avant-Garde," Discourse 12:1 (Fall-Winter 1989-90), p. 23, and Martin and Roueff (2002), p. 37. [Return to text]

43. Philippe Soupault, Mémoires de l'oubli: 1923-1926, vol. 2 (Paris: Lachenal & Ritter, 1986), p. 35. [Return to text]

44. René Wisner, "C'est un enfer sonore," Le Soir, 18 juin 1926. Quoted in Jackson (1999), p. 193. [Return to text]

45. See Shack (2001), p. 57. [Return to text]

46. See Jackson (1999), p. 199. [Return to text]

47. See Blake (1999), p. 89. [Return to text]

48. Paul Morand, Magie noire, in Nouvelles completes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, ed. by Michel Collomb (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 514. [Return to text]

49. The narrator writes of Congo at the ball: "This evening, in this high hut of the dukes of Ré, she crushes classes, grinds races [...] and tramples on ages" (Morand 1992, p. 516). [Return to text]