Paris Blues

"Intelligently illustrated by carefully chosen photos, contemporary cartoons and playbills, and the odd musical example, Paris Blues throws valuable new light on a still contested area of jazz (and social) history, and - as one reviewer states - it 'urges us to be a little smarter about how we talk and write about the place of jazz in the world today.'" -- "London Jazz News"
"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
"Fry has combined meticulous research with careful and creative use of sources from the worlds of music, film, history and popular culture more generally to produce an account that might, finally, bury the perennial (and perennially misguided) idea that Europeans and especially the French understood and appreciated jazz before Americans did. The story is false not only because African American and other U.S.-based supporters of jazz seem not to be 'Americans' in that version of history, but also because, as Fry eloquently argues, the French at times tried to claim jazz as their own creation, because ethnocentrism and paternalism were rarely absent from what they wrote, because the music and the musicians were often proxies in debates over national culture, and because musicians had reasons for living in France that previous scholars have failed to describe completely."
--Travis Jackson "University of Chicago"