Synesthetic Rhythms:
African American Music and Dance Through Parisian Eyes

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.¹ 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.² “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].³ 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.⁴ “Black, with Josephine Baker, has come back into fashion,” remarked a critic at the time.⁵

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 1929.⁶

1. 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). [↩]
2. Andre Rivollet, “Du Jazz Hot à ‘La Créole,'” conférence de M. André Rivollet, faites le 21 mars 1935, Conferencia, 1er juillet 1935, p. 102. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. Jean-Claude Klein, “La Revue nègre,” in Entre deux guerres, ed. by Oliver Barrot and Pascal Ory (Paris: F. Bourin, 1990), p. 374. [↩]
5. Gérard Bauer, “Le Romantisme de Couleur,” conférence du 20 janvier, 1930 (in Abatino 1931, p. 20). [↩]
6. Claude Berton, “Réflexions sur le music-hall,” La Revue de Paris, 1er nov. 1929, p. 674. [↩]