Jazz Diasporas PDF

3. Inez Cavanaugh Creating and Complicating Jazz Community Her voice haunted me. At first I could only imagine it. On the pages of Le manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés Inez Cavanaugh stood—her torso tilted back, her eyes raised upward, her hands spread to the sky while her mouth widened as if singing a full vibrato. As trumpeters backed her and fans smiled, she caused “un petit spectacle” at the Club du Vieux Colombier (Vian, Le manuel 173). For a long time I couldn’t hear her for myself. Each library held tightly to its rare materials, and I had yet to find a remastered recording for sale with some of her recordings. Finally, I heard her sing “Every Time I Feel the Spirit.” Her voice punched through my stereo speaker, giving a little taste of that long-ago moment. But I felt loss. Had I passed Hotel Cristal without much notice as I hurried daily to study French at the nearby Sorbonne? The building had whispered nothing of her famed apartment parties. Had I unknowingly passed the Club du Vieux Colombier amid modern-day clubs like Le Baiser Salé? Where was it located, and did echoes of her vibrato still pervade its aura? In this city of light, where so many African American men owned the spotlight, I wondered about the migratory experiences of Cavanaugh and others who contributed to, but fell off, the pages of French jazz history. Perusing biographies, autobiographies, Parisian guidebooks, reviews, discographies, photos, and correspondences, I have pieced together parts. But many gaps remain of Inez Cavanaugh’s life in Paris. Singing with French saxophonist Claude Luter, collaborating with writer Richard Wright, opening a jazz club, and showcasing artists in her home, Cavanaugh carved a niche in the jazz community on the Left Bank in those post–World War II years (fig. 4). This is not phenomenal in and of itself. There were plenty of African Americans in the heart of this scene: Don Byas, Sidney Bechet, Kenny Clarke, and Bud Powell, among others. The 91 92 / Inez Cavanaugh figure 4. Inez Cavanaugh performs at the Club du Vieux Colombier with a band featuring Claude Luter (clarinet) and Christian Azzi (piano). © Jacques Rouchon / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. significance of Cavanaugh is that she was a woman, an African American woman. So her experiences abroad were not common.1 By traveling, nego- tiating, and managing her job opportunities, Cavanaugh resisted traditional middle-class white female roles in homemaking and marriage, and she eschewed stereotypes of the strong, black matriarch holding her family together. Also, when African American women did tour and front bands in Paris, such as Billie Holiday’s 1954 and 1958 tours, most did not stay. Apart from Josephine Baker’s continued success in this era, not much has been written or discovered about figures like Inez Cavanaugh and pianist and singer Hazel Scott, for example, who stayed for more than five years in Paris.2 Cavanaugh exhibited rare prominence and authority as a female African American vocalist and journalist in the male-dominated jazz scene of post–World War II Paris. She embodied various reasons for African Inez Cavanaugh / 93 American migrations, exemplified their survival strategies, and nurtured as well as negotiated her way in an ethnically mixed jazz community. This chapter begins to excavate the life story of a woman about whom little is known in jazz scholarship but whose contributions were significant to the creation and maintenance of a jazz diaspora in post–World War II Paris. But this chapter is about more than just one person. Cavanaugh introduces other stories, thus opening this narrative to a series of collabora- tions and migratory experiences for both African American men and women living in Paris. Her home, club, and friends were fully integrated into the jazz scene of the late 1940s and 1950s. Her life and work illuminate reasons why so many African American jazz musicians made Paris their home, key experiences and issues in living abroad in Paris, and their prompts for leaving or staying. The case of Inez Cavanaugh also introduces the concurrent possibilities of local community and global movement encompassed in a jazz diaspora. Born in 1909 Chicago, Cavanaugh made her way to New York City to begin a multilayered career in jazz as a publicist, journalist, singer, and club manager. A passion for jazz led her to her lifelong companion, Danish duke Timme Rosenkrantz, who was poor in funds but rich in knowledge and public relations talent. The two worked diligently to promote artists. Rosenkrantz is credited with discovering pianist Errol Garner and being the first to record saxophonist Don Redman. Cavanaugh was the secretary for poet Langston Hughes (D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). She was also the man- ager or publicity agent for Duke Ellington––reportedly writing a one- hundred-page text to accompany his album Black, Brown and Beige (Fabre and Williams, Way 35; L. Dahl 169; D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). Writing liner notes for Ellingtonia as well, her early days promoting Ellington turned into a lifelong friendship. In 1973, as Ellington convalesced at home after a hospital visit prompted by his battle with lung cancer, he gave special instructions to his staff: “[Inez] was a very dear and important person to him.... Duke asked me to feed her, give her money and bring her to my house, and make sure nothing bad happened to her” (Patricia Willard quoted in D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). Beyond liner notes Cavanaugh wrote jazz reviews for Metronome and New York Amsterdam News (Fabre, From Harlem 166; Griffin, If You 206). While New York Amsterdam News was an African American–run newspa- per, her work with Metronome and Esquire demonstrated her insider status with mainstream jazz journalism as well. For example, she reviewed Fats Waller for Crisis (the journal of the NAACP), and she was the only woman to sit on the jazz jury for The Esquire Jazz Book. 94 / Inez Cavanaugh Cavanaugh gained clout as a jazz journalist, a very rare position for an African American woman in the 1930s. Most jazz critics were male and white, but Cavanaugh stepped around these obstacles. When Rosenkrantz realized that jazz had gone dormant in his home of Denmark and through- out Europe during the war, he called on Don Redman to put together a band to tour Europe, starting in Copenhagen and then traveling to Paris (Olav Harsløf quoted in Büttner). He picked Cavanaugh to be the band’s vocalist. When she arrived in Paris, it was conceivable that jazz fans would be sparse after the negative perceptions held by the Nazis and attempts at restricting American jazz during the Nazi occupation; but although live jazz may have been harder to come by, underground concerts and private listening persisted, and even radio shows featured jazz—organizers simply withheld Jewish and American artists’ names until the radio program was affirmed (Fabre, From Harlem 165; Régnier 144). On December 15, 1946, Cavanaugh accompanied the Don Redman Orchestra and presented the French with a sample of postwar American jazz. The music had changed considerably during the war with the creation of the bebop genre. Amateur fans were thrilled with the concert and cele- brated the return of American players. No African American jazz band had toured since 1939, except for military units. The Redman Orchestra finally brought American jazz musicians back to France after the war; its concert in Salle Pleyel spurred an enthusiastic return of jazz musicians to Paris, particularly in the 1948 and 1949 French jazz festivals (Shack 113–14; Tournès 119).3 Saxophonist Don Byas, pianists Aaron Bridgers and Art Simmons, saxo- phonist/clarinetist Sidney Bechet, drummer Kenny Clarke, pianists Bud Powell and Mary Lou Williams, and vocalist Inez Cavanaugh all arrived in the mid-1940s and early 1950s and nurtured the Parisian jazz scene. Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—and boppers Charlie Parker and Miles Davis—intrigued the French crowds on their tours, leav- ing much wonder and a lot of emulation in their wake. Well known today for his producing, composing, and arranging, Quincy Jones lived in Paris several times throughout his career, once as A&R (Artists and Repertoire) director of the Disques Barclay recording house, where he sought Kenny Clarke out as often as he could for recordings (Hennessey, “Clarke-Boland” 127, 132). Between 1950 and 1964, the population of African American art- ists in Paris tripled from five hundred to more than fifteen hundred (Baldwin quoted in Stovall, Paris 232; Fabre, “Cultural” 45). African American musicians like saxophonists Nathan Davis and Johnny Griffin, trumpeters Donald Byrd and Don Cherry, drummer Art Taylor, and pian- Inez Cavanaugh / 95 ists Kenny Drew and Errol Garner were just a few of the artists who migrated to Paris from 1962 to 1965.4 There were several reasons for this continual stream. The American military proved an instrumental tool for the migration of African American artists: “The G.I. Bill gave World War II veterans full educational benefits, paying the tuition and living expenses of those who chose to go to college after demobilization. Millions took advantage of these benefits” (Stovall, Paris 141). Artist Herbert Gentry was one of many African American sol- diers who moved to France on the G.I. Bill. Gentry returned to once again experience the beauty and good life he had previously enjoyed: “I first saw Paris when I was in the army. After serving with the 369 Anti-aircraft out- fit, I joined the special services unit because they were stationed just 60 miles outside of Paris. I just loved that city. I used to go there every night just to walk around.... I promised that I would return to Paris and I did” (Gentry 9). With his wife he would later open an art-infused jazz club, Chez Honey, where clients could discuss art and relax over music and food (Stovall, Paris 149). While the American military presented opportunities for Gentry and other African American soldiers to see life abroad and study later on the G.I. Bill, military service during the war also put into high relief the racism and limitations with which they had been dealing for so long in the United States. Saxophonist Johnny Griffin migrated to Paris because of the greater respect and better treatment he had received during his tours: “The way people treated black musicians—or jazz musicians in general—was compa- rable to the respect they accord to classical artists. Coming back to New York, I ran into the same old hassles;... I’d enjoyed a period of relaxation and felt I could have a more dignified life in Europe, so I took off in the summer of 1963” (quoted in Moody 63). For Griffin, Paris afforded a life where blacks were treated with decency and respect—in sum, with humanity. Also, while World War II had provided a source of comparison and an expediency for departure, the Cold War and the battles over civil rights in this era just as much spurred migration. These two cultural wars were often linked, as Mary Dudziak’s enlightening book attests in its title, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Communism played a key role in either keeping African Americans in Europe or pushing them there. Paul Robeson made a speech at the Paris Peace Conference sponsored by the Soviet Union in 1949 Paris. What he said while touring in that last week of April would change his life and career forever, even though it was immediately misrepresented by the Associated Press and later by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.5 A French translation of the 96 / Inez Cavanaugh speech is housed in Robeson’s archive at Howard University and reports the following. Though Robeson’s remarks were improvised and the text is translated, it is one of the closest representations of what was said that day: “We in America do not forget that it is on the backs of the poor whites of Europe... and on the backs of millions of black people that the wealth of America has been acquired—And we are resolved that it shall be distrib- uted in an equitable manner among all of our children and we don’t want any hysterical stupidity about our participating in a war against anybody no matter whom. We are determined to fight for Peace. [Applause]. We do not wish to fight the Soviet Union. [Applause]” (Robeson). The response was explosive, with the NAACP quickly saying that Robeson did not speak for all African Americans and Jackie Robinson publicly taking a stance against the comment (Thomas 23–36). Robeson’s passport was revoked in 1950, and his rights to travel were only reinstated in 1958—too late, after his career and health were in decline. The renowned intellectual and writer on race relations and proponent of Pan-Africanism W. E. B. Du Bois had also been stripped of his right to travel. So he could not speak at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which was headed by Senegalese writer Alioune Diop and his journal Présence Africaine in 1956 Paris. Responding to the invitation, Du Bois sent a cable including the following statement: “I am not present at your meeting today because the United States government will not grant me a passport for travel abroad. Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe. The government especially objects to me because I am a socialist and because I believe in peace with communist states like the Soviet Union” (“Après la congrès”). Du Bois encouraged participants not to be stymied by the pro- hibitive forces of colonization and imperialism that would keep minorities silent. In her biography of pianist Hazel Scott, Karen Chilton meticulously illustrates how Scott’s tireless commitment to civil rights for African Americans, women, and artists drew attention from the House Un-American Activities Committee and was a prominent factor in her near decade-long self-exile in Paris starting in the late 1950s (137–72). Beyond political differences, some African American artists believed there was a more positive reception of African American art and music in France. They were seduced by the prospects of greater creative opportuni- ties and more respect. Saxophonist Hal Singer, who has lived in the Paris suburb of Nanterre for nearly fifty years, described this to me: “A lot of people here read books and knew the life of the people.... European fans Inez Cavanaugh / 97 could recite to you all the records a person had made” (Singer). So in his opinion it was not just appreciation but rather intellectual awareness that European fans demonstrated. In contrast Miles Davis once argued that European audiences and record- ings were less cutting-edge because Europe was removed from the heart of jazz creation and innovation found in the United States (Davis and Troupe 218; Stovall, Paris 180). Writer Richard Wright affirmed this sentiment when he made the following observation of the Tabou club in 1947: “Then the music was bad and loud and an imitation of the American New Orleans style and the French boys and girls who were trying to dance and act like Americans made a self-conscious job of it” (Fabre and Williams, Way 42). Other African American artists came to Paris and stayed because they relished the artistic freedom they found while visiting there, particularly the experimentation and collaborations. Artist Ollie Harrington wrote that the artistic community in Paris was a totally open one that encouraged an “atmosphere of camaraderie, a sharing of ideas, techniques, and often soup, all of which seem indispensable in the making of the artist. I never even remotely experienced anything like that at ‘home’ except perhaps in Harlem” (quoted in Stovall, Paris 148). Harrington pointed to the unique- ness of Paris in presenting this type of artistic freedom. In addition to artistic freedom, collaborations in the intimate Parisian jazz community were at times groundbreaking. There was bebop’s contro- versial showdown at Salle Pleyel in 1948 (made possible by jazz promoter Charles Delaunay and Dizzy Gillespie) and the first-ever improvised jazz score in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (prompted by Boris Vian’s introduction of Miles Davis to Louis Malle). The second jazz-only record label, Disques Vogue, was initiated by Charles Delaunay in 1947 and fortified by Sidney Bechet and Kenny Clarke’s recordings. All of these events positioned Paris as a center of collaboration. Paris also enacted collaborations between African Americans, for example bringing together Hal Singer and Kenny Clarke to record for the first time. There were artists who used Paris as a stepping-stone. Don Byas stayed in France for a bit but then settled in Holland. The same was true of saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who migrated to Denmark. Trumpeter Don Cherry lived in Paris from 1965 to 1967 but then left for Sweden and explorations through- out Asia. His stay was brief, but the image of his “thumb trumpet” poised from ballooned lips as he captivated crowds in Le Chat Qui Pêche still makes the then-student-now-retiree Salim Himidi smile in memory (Himidi). Others like Kenny Clarke used Paris as a home base to return to after tours throughout Europe and Asia. In the 1960s Clarke cofounded the 98 / Inez Cavanaugh Clarke-Boland Big Band, a multinational band that recorded in Cologne, Germany, but toured in England, Switzerland, and throughout Europe. Paris’s proximity by train and plane to many prominent European cities made it a good location for touring and travel. While the aforementioned reasons helped attract African American artists, the perceived history of racial equality and job opportunities ranked highest as reasons for migration. why paris? jobs and racial equality await Paris had jobs! At least that’s what Inez Cavanaugh thought. She came to Paris because she perceived it as having promising job opportunities. In this post–World War II era jazz jobs were hard to come by. From 1942 to 1944 the labor union of the American Federation of Music (AFM) instituted a recording ban that restricted union musicians from recording at all. The AFM and Britain’s Musician’s Union had already joined up to ban foreign musicians from doing live performances in the respective countries from 1935 to 1955.6 Add to that the difference in pay and rampant appropriation of copyright and royalties that some African American musicians experi- enced, and Paris seemed to offer the opposite. Paris beckoned with more job opportunities and a desire for African American musicianship. Pianist and composer Michel Legrand offered Kenny Clarke a job in 1956. Though it later fell through, Clarke quickly found more engagements (Hennessey, Klook 124). Mary Lou Williams had worked in London and France; she was enthused to extend her stay in Paris for two years, as there were no French union restrictions in comparison with her experiences in Britain (“Europe”). As for Cavanaugh, she had heard of job opportunities and couldn’t see why anyone would stay in the United States considering it all. Before moving to Paris, Cavanaugh had paved a path of success, not as a high-profile singer but rather in several behind-the-scenes roles as a jour- nalist and secretary. She decided to try her luck abroad despite her access to these top-notch positions. Writing to her friend and jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams in 1947, she revealed, “That’s why I wanted to get everybody I could out of America last year. I felt this coming. It always does after a war.... The labor lock-out is on.... I can’t understand why everyone was so hard to convince... and to think of those guys going back when we got the news” (1). Sidney Bechet also wrote about the difficulty of finding work in the United States: “All the damn jockeys on the radios was playing Jazz num- bers, answering all kinds of requests, making all kinds of expert explana- tions all wrong. Everybody was excited, but no Jazz musicianer had a job Inez Cavanaugh / 99 except to make records” (Treat 192). In 1930s New York he once gave up performing to make ends meet with a laundry and tailoring service (J. Chilton 96). In France, Bechet became a king of jazz; he never again had to fear unemployment. With his movie roles, steady club gigs, and oppor- tunity to write a musical ballet, Bechet’s opportunities in France were a world apart from his lowest moments in the United States. In the mid-twentieth century Paris appeared to live up to its reputation as a place where jobs for musicians and other artists were plentiful. French festivals were a big draw for jazz musicians. They offered gigs and continu- ity (since they occurred each year). After making connections there, one could start to count on that work each year. By the time the Newport Jazz Festival (the first annual jazz-only festival in the United States) com- menced in 1954, France boasted several big festival venues in Paris and Nice. Though they were often one-time events, the 1948 and 1949 festivals featured Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker among others, and they were monumental moments in the history of jazz in France.7 There were also increased job opportunities in clubs. Club Saint-Germain headlined visiting stars like Miles Davis. The Blue Note linked young French stars and African American veterans, such as bebop jazz drummer Kenny Clarke with French pianist René Urtreger. Some clubs also high- lighted more French players and bands. Le Tabou started off slow in 1947 but became a hot spot for Dixieland jazz as it featured key French artists as well as jazz critic and trumpeter Boris Vian’s house band, the Claude Abadie Band (Fabre and Williams, Way 64; Stovall, Paris 165). Several new clubs opened after World War II; Club Du Vieux Colombier led the charge. Cavanaugh regularly accompanied Claude Luter’s band. “The V.C. is packed every nite and I’m really going over this time,” she excitedly wrote to Rosenkrantz in May 1949 (Cavanaugh, Letter to Timme, May). However, vocalist and writer Maya Angelou gave her much competi- tion, singing at La Rose Rouge (Fabre, From Harlem 64). The Blue Note, Le Chat Qui Pêche, Mars Club, and Jazzland also provided competition on the Left Bank. Job opportunities were certainly a big pull for many African American musicians settling in Paris, but the perception of Paris as color-blind had long been a prominent motivating factor. Soldiers’ experiences in both world wars went a long way in solidifying the illusion of Paris as color-blind. African American cultural critic Amiri Baraka has suggested that World War II opened the world up to African Americans, making them aware of foreign culture and society and emphasizing the discrepant treatment they received in America: “The sense of participation and responsibility in so major a 100 / Inez Cavanaugh phenomenon as the World War was heightened for Negroes by the rela- tively high salaries they got for working.... But this only served to increase the sense of resentment Negroes felt at the social inequities American life continued to impose upon them” (Blues People 178). African American soldiers had returned home after World War I and regaled their families with stories of France. In his book Harlem in Montmartre William Shack details how these soldiers had glimpsed beautiful France juxtaposed with the destruction of battle. They told their families that they dreamed of returning. Shack also reveals a personal account of his own father’s experiences. During World War I his father had “made sharp com- parisons with the racial hostility they experienced in the company of white American soldiers. [He learned that] a ‘colored man’ in America had to travel and study in France or England to be recognized as ‘equal’ to a white man” (xiii). For Shack’s father France was a land of more freedoms. The war had not only been a fight for world freedom; it had also opened the door to ethnic freedoms for African Americans fighting against U.S. injustices. These soldiers’ stories were passed down from generation to generation and created an illusion that was absorbed into African American folklore. This illusion was underlined by a long line of writers and artists who moved to Paris. Valerie Mercer notes that African American artists had arrived in France as early as the 1830s, and Michel Fabre adds that even before painter Henry Ossawa Tanner came to Paris in 1891, there were several others who studied at the Beaux-Arts school (Mercer 38; Fabre, “Cultural” 33). The 1920s represented a peak in the migration of African American artists to Paris. One such example was the brief sojourn of Langston Hughes, which is well noted in his autobiography, The Big Sea.8 Hughes had dreamed of France ever since he read the poems of Guy de Maupassant; Fabre further reveals, “In Hughes’s mind the image of France early evoked literary accomplishment and absence of racial prejudice” (From Harlem 63). Hughes finally made it to France but with only seven dollars to his name. Still the dream was alive, and as soon as he set foot in Paris, he rejoiced: “I was in France. La Frontière. La France. The train to Paris. A dream come true” (Hughes and Rampersad 147). Henry Crowder, an African American jazz pianist, had stayed for years in interwar Paris while having an infamous seven-year affair with the white British writer and political activist Nancy Cunard, who had been in Paris since 1920. Crowder recounted his dreams of Paris on his 1928 ship voyage: “A chance to live as every other man lived regardless of his color” (quoted in Shack 44). Given the choice between a foreign locale and a history of oppres- sion and segregation in the United States, many artists dreamed of Paris as Inez Cavanaugh / 101 a haven that furthered liberal-minded thinking about race. As these artists fled the racism of the United States in the 1920s, they contributed to a broadening perception of open-mindedness and liberty in France. The dream had only solidified decades later. Driven overseas by American racism, especially practices of segregation, another wave of African American artists sought a haven in Paris after World War II. Living in Paris for ten years, Nathan Davis recounted: “I ran into little or no prejudice there. It is hard to separate it from the music. We were looked at as special. I would advise anybody to go and live in a foreign culture, especially in one so rich as France” (quoted in Moody 132). Davis’s positive experience fur- ther contributed to the illusion of Paris as color-blind. American popular culture didn’t help either. Famous songs like “La vie en rose,” which means “a life in pink,” further popularized and dissemi- nated this illusion. In 1947 Louis Armstrong first recorded the song Edith Piaf had first performed in 1946. In fact, his version is arguably as popular and enduring as hers. But Armstrong did more than cover the song; he translated, rewrote, and transformed it. Whereas Piaf’s is a passionate torch song of a remembered love, Armstrong hypnotizes the listener into a fan- tastical love affair with Paris. His musical interpretation begins its seduction with a soft tumbling across the high register of piano keys. The high tones descend, waterfall-like, repeating and mesmerizing with a whispering effect. The rhythm section emphasizes the backbeat. A walking bass, percussion, and guitar sustain a repeated vamp. Four measures later, Armstrong’s signa- ture trumpet enters and layers on a raspy tone with a lilting, lazy pace. The music sets the mood for the lyrics he intones in the next verse. Hold me close and hold me fast The magic spell you cast This is la vie en rose... Armstrong substantially reworked the meaning of the song, transforming it from a tortured memory to a present and future vision of idyllic love. The fact that his version is the most well-known by many, at least among the English-speaking public, is important. In this recording Armstrong became a representative of France, or at least the American vision of France, as “romance incarnate.” This song has become a tried-and-true symbol of France in many films, Wall-E being a contemporary example. This symbol connotes a city replete with outdoor cafés, sophisticated fashions, delectable pastries, and love-struck couples embracing on bridges overlooking the Seine. It’s signifi- cant that Armstrong is also identified with France in this song, because it links African Americans to France, suggesting that African Americans have 102 / Inez Cavanaugh access to “la vie en rose”—but specifically in France. These media examples also demonstrate that Americans, often African Americans, prominently performed this rose-colored narrative of Paris as a color-blind place of social and professional opportunity. The media’s role in disseminating this narrative became especially clear when I spoke with pianist and vocalist Almeta Speaks. Speaks grew up and came of age in 1940s North Carolina. She first visited Paris in the mid- 1950s and decided to split her home between Paris and Toronto in 1999. Speaks’s interest in Paris first came from African American periodicals: She [Aunt Edna] used to have subscriptions to magazines, good magazines, cause you know Ebony and all those were good magazines, Life Magazine, Look, all of those really good magazines. And she had the subscriptions to the newspapers, black newspapers, there was one in the Pittsburgh Courier, there was the Amsterdam News, there was The Chicago Defender.... What you got out of white newspapers was who went to jail, who robbed somebody, who got killed. All of the negative, everything that was negative that went on in the community, you could get it in the white newspapers, it was like a vow not to uplift the black community so they didn’t get above themselves. But the black newspaper told us about Hazel Scott, Adam Clayton Powell.... It told us about movements, it told us about teachers who were making strides. It told us about black people who were making strides in the armed services. It told us about black classical performers.... And we learned that they lived in places like France and Germany and Russia. The thing that always struck me, and ahhhhh, I loved reading the ones who lived in London and who lived in Paris. So my eyes were filled with all these people. I knew there was something beyond Reidsville North Carolina. (Speaks) Speaks’s memory was strong enough to propel her to visit. She fashioned images of financial success, stardom, political activism, and artistic freedom that proliferated when African Americans traveled outside the States. In his seminal study of African Americans in Paris, Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light, Tyler Stovall also posits a political function for the success of African Americans in Paris. Stovall’s expansive lens portrays a “critical mass” of African Americans that constituted a real artistic presence in Paris from the early 1900s until present day (xv). He uses their success in France to critique an American public that has long ignored the achieve- ment of African Americans (xvi). Jazz becomes one of many activities that illustrate the success of African Americans in Paris. Looking at the “critical mass” of African Americans created in Paris in the mid-twentieth century (and before, in the 1920s, and inevitably after, in the 1960s), I notice a continuum—a recurring example of African American Inez Cavanaugh / 103 “community” and “success” abroad, in Stovall’s terms. Pointing this out in handed-down stories, in film, and through African American media outlets advertised that success and provided proof and detail for those living in the United States. Those were the reasons for migration; those were the bene- fits. But, as I discuss later in this chapter, the narrative of Paris as color-blind proved more illusion than reality the longer one stayed and the later in the twentieth century it became. cavanaugh’s community away from home As members of a community of their own within Parisian cul- ture—the French called them Am-Am—black Americans had established social centers, cafes like Chez Honey,... where expatriates met one another as well as visitors from the States. david hajdu Life magazine proclaimed it “the most popular chez in Paris”; African American journalist William Gardner Smith described it as “a Left Bank institution”; and Chez Inez soon overtook the space of Perroquet, a night- club featuring Guadeloupian singer Moune de Rivel’s popular Caribbean songs (Carson 107; W. Smith, “It’s Six” n. p.). Opening its doors in 1949, Chez Inez was a jazz restaurant located on Rue Champollion just behind the Sorbonne in the fifth arrondissement (Fabre and Williams, Way 35). Chez Inez housed an ethnically mixed Parisian jazz scene and supported connections among African Americans during the three years of its exist- ence. James Baldwin described its importance as a space of congregation and networking: “It is at Chez Inez that many an unknown first performs in public, going on thereafter, if not always to greater triumphs, at least to other night clubs, and possibly landing a contract to tour the Riviera during the spring and summer” (Baldwin, Notes 85). Always smiling in her pictures, whether with Sidney Bechet or fellow singer Billie Holiday, Inez Cavanaugh drew people in and was known for her ability to uplift the mood, especially in her own club (D. Clarke, Billie 148; Rosenkrantz, Harlem 44). The good spirits of the owner and the con- vivial club atmosphere were played up. The sign on the entrance proclaimed: “Aperitifs, music, dinner, happiness. This Is It.” Cavanaugh’s song lyrics advertised, “Someday he’ll come along, the man I need, and he’ll be big and strong, the man I feed” (Carson 107). At Chez Inez, Cavanaugh would play games and always try to do something new and exciting to keep her patrons relaxed and enjoying themselves (Letter to Timme Rosenkrantz, May; Letter to Timme Rosenkrantz, June). 104 / Inez Cavanaugh An assortment of people mixed at Chez Inez, so the restaurant took on an important networking role in Paris. Rosenkrantz described Chez Inez as “a place where Eartha Kitt and the entire Katherine Dunham troup [sic] could be found... after the party was over... on the Eve of Christmas or New Year’s... peeling potatoes, making pies for the next day’s festivities!” (Rosenkrantz, “Liner Notes”). In addition, photos and articles place Cavanaugh with top stars like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet, among others (D. Clarke, Billie 148; Rosenkrantz, Harlem 44; Carson 107; Bechet, Sidney Bechet). Inez Cavanaugh forged connections between the jazz scene and com- munity of African Americans living in Paris; she also identified ways for herself and her compatriots to thrive in this jazz diaspora. Although a large jazz scene had existed in 1920s France, Tyler Stovall argues that the 1950s represented an even more popular period (Paris 167). Performers had firmly established Montmartre as a world-famous jazz center in the 1920s. But after the war everyone headed to the Left Bank (the half of Paris that lies south of the Seine) and sought out jazz in the neighboring arrondisse- ments of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Le Quartier Latin, and Montparnasse.9 In particular, Saint-Germain-des-Prés served as a mecca for jazz musicians and as a multicultural center of creativity, enticing not only African Americans but also American tourists, exiled artists, French literati, philosophers, and stars from all over the world. Clubs located here housed philosophy just as much as jazz. In these years, fresh after Nazi-occupied France, youngsters crowded the clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, listening to jazz and associat- ing it with freedom. So when the war was over, jazz was thoroughly embraced. It became the new norm to drink and party into the wee hours. Bodies grooved and notes swung while jazz brightened the dimmed smoke-filled caves. While commingling in the vibrant, diverse network of artists and intel- lectuals in the Parisian jazz scene, African Americans also created bonds among themselves in the overlapping community most commonly known as Paris Noir (Black Paris). Tyler Stovall has described the sense of com- munity forged in the first boom of jazz, the 1920s: “Two common experi- ences united African Americans in Paris during the 1920s. First and fore- most, the city offered them a life free of the debilitating limitations imposed by American racism.... Second, for the most part black Americans in Paris chose not to remake themselves as black Frenchmen or Frenchwomen, but instead established an expatriate African American community” (Paris 26). As Stovall notes, African American artists in Paris created their own space (though it interwove with other cultural spaces). That community was linked heavily to the image of Paris, in particular, as a place with fewer Inez Cavanaugh / 105 limitations and more possibilities for success. Stovall’s Paris Noir then is geographically set in this city as well as built on less tangible (but still fix- ated) ideals. Some writers like William Shack have likened this interwar community to the culturally rich space of 1920s Harlem. Shack’s book title Harlem in Montmartre connotes an almost supplanted community. Again, this com- munity is tied to place, a relationship between places actually. Shack’s vision of community emphasizes the continued relations between African Americans residing in France with their families and their homes back in the States. In the passage quoted above, Tyler Stovall also characterizes Paris Noir of the 1920s as a distinctive, Americancentric group—one not interested in assimilating per se but rather making use of Paris for its own gains. These characterizations of the interwar African American com- munity in Paris as still relating to the United States, as purposefully dis- tinctive from its French environment, and as geographically tied to particu- lar cities continued with the migration of African Americans who came after World War II. Paris Noir after World War II was a hot spot of black intellectualism and musical creation, just like its predecessor. African Americans of every artis- tic persuasion traveled to Paris to study, perform, and write. James Baldwin came in 1948 and seemed to inhabit the Saint-Germain-des-Prés hot spot Café de Flore, even more than his nearby apartment (Baldwin, Notes 127). Famed Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks made his home in Paris in 1950. In 1951 the cartoonist Ollie Harrington turned the Café Tournon into a famous spot, as he spent many a night swapping stories with writers Richard Wright and Chester Himes (Stovall, Paris 148, 188). Pianist Bud Powell came in 1959 and made Paris his home for years (Stovall, Paris 102). Romare Bearden was one of many African American painters who trained in Paris and exhibited work there through the 1940s and 1950s (Stovall, Paris 88). Thus, Paris was very much a center of black artistry at this time. Since jazz clubs were mostly owned by the French, restaurants became the “new centers of black sociability” (Stovall, Paris 161). They were among the few institutions that African Americans managed, and they became central to community gatherings. In a letter in May 1949 Cavanaugh char- acterizes Richard Wright as clamoring for the opening of the club so he could get some fried chicken. For many of these African Americans Chez Inez was at the core of what I term a “culture of catching up.” The culture of catching up entails a community mood that promotes catching up over food, music, discussion, and keeping in contact through correspondence or visits. The culture of catching up is a phenomenon I first observed when my 106 / Inez Cavanaugh mother and I were welcomed into the Parisian home of drummer John Betsch. He was glad to have visitors, to extend news on the jazz scene to me, to share recordings, and to discuss those we both knew stateside. I found that even today food and music were still an essential part of this culture of catching up. Betsch cooked us an extraordinary meal, using fresh seafood and vegetables from the nearby market. While he chopped, he talked about previous musical engagements and his favorite artists. He’d stop occasionally to pass around a photograph, liner notes, and most often to let the music speak for itself by popping in a CD. Chez Inez also fed its customers’ stomachs while fueling their memories of home and loved ones. Serving up everything from red beans and rice for 100 francs (30 cents) and fried chicken and rice for 200 francs (61 cents), Chez Inez reminded African Americans of home and foods easy to come by in the U.S. South (Carson 107; Stanton 81). Cavanaugh, rather than being singular in this trend to bring back the remembered foods from home, was representative. While women like Cavanaugh took on this role, there were others like former G.I. Leroy Haynes, whose restaurant Chez Haynes was famous for its soul food until its closing after sixty years in 2009. Food as a core survival strategy and tool for socializing is also depicted in the film representation of this era, Round Midnight, directed by Bertrand Tavernier in 1986. Based on the memoir of Francis Paudras and his relation- ship with Bud Powell, the film’s protagonist, Dale Turner, often comes back to his hotel room, where his wife, Buttercup, or friend, Ace, have cooked up a mouth-watering meal indicative of the southern United States. Whether at Chez Inez, Haynes Restaurant, or in private homes, African Americans found food to be a coping mechanism that reminded them of home. In her restaurant and in her home Cavanaugh helped feed a universal desire for home. She served soul food: chicken, collard greens, and spare ribs to name a few examples. The menu filled more than just appetites, though, as it provided a material connection to home. Marveline Hughes discusses how soul food can be traced back to African foods, like the seeds for black- eyed peas, that were brought to the United States during the Middle Passage; while soul food is “one preserver of Black culture,” black women may also take pride in their recipes and in the empowerment they feel in feeding and nurturing their families (272–73). Through Chez Inez, Cavanaugh literally nurtured her fellow African Americans. More than that, she provided a material and memory-based connection to their lives in the United States. These ties to home were important for surviving a life abroad. Talking to Laurent Clarke about his father, Kenny Clarke, I saw more examples of the culture of catching up at work in postwar Paris. He men- Inez Cavanaugh / 107 tioned that his father and Dizzy Gillespie had never missed an opportunity to connect and keep each other informed. Laurent Clarke told me that there was “a whole bunch of musicians playing together in the 30s and 40s; whenever one of these guys had the opportunity to come to France, it was just another opportunity to get together.... They were bringing news. They didn’t miss any occasion or opportunity to see each other” (L. Clarke). Also, he discussed his mother and how she joined musicians at her table. She seduced them with her chicken and chili. He remembered these get-togethers as humorous, with lots of teasing, swapping of stories, and good home cooking. Cavanaugh also reinforced the culture of catching up through her corre- spondence (fig. 5). She described to Rosenkrantz how Bechet “really gassed po’ Paree... [and] stopped ’em cold for 10 minutes” during the 1949 festi- val; in another letter she recounted that she’d “had a coffee with Kenny Clarke last nite. Everyone likes him here” (Letter to Timme Rosenkrantz, May; Letter to Timme Rosenkrantz, June). These letters demonstrate again that Cavanaugh was at the heart of activity among African American artists and was therefore very knowledgeable about this scene. They also show that the culture of catching up was not limited to Paris; this cultural practice con- nected with others abroad and widened the inner circle of the community. This was the case for saxophonist Hal Singer, who revealed to me the role that the smaller, more localized jazz scene in Paris contributed to net- working for him. Even though Singer had heard of, and even shared musi- cal partners with, Kenny Clarke, it wasn’t until Singer settled in Paris that he met Clarke and later played with him. So, in this case, the small size and the even smaller population of African Americans in Paris encouraged bonding that did not occur elsewhere. The culture of catching up was about reminiscing. It was about establishing community, not only community with those in Paris but with those far away. In many ways Cavanaugh created a home away from home for African American artists. Whether with her club, letters, or cooking, she helped shape a community that was supportive of African American success and sociability. Performance studies and African American studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson discusses the possible dangers in African American com- munities of creating an “authenticating discourse based on skin color, cul- tural traditions (e.g., food preparation or ‘soul’ food), and experience narra- tives” (196). But Cavanaugh avoided much “authenticating discourse,” for even though she built community among African Americans, Cavanaugh and other artists were not exclusionary in their activities. In the postwar African American community of Paris the elements of food, racial connec- tion, and sharing of experiences were integral to the culture of catching up. 108 / Inez Cavanaugh figure 5. Inez Cavanaugh corresponds with good friend pianist Mary Lou Williams. Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University. But rather than distinguishing “real” African American culture or isolating themselves, many African Americans maintained bonds among themselves while simultaneously commingling in a vibrant, diverse network of artists in the Left Bank. This is perhaps one distinction from the more isolated and Americancentric model of community referenced in the aforementioned passages from Shack and Stovall. Not only did Cavanaugh interact with a range of black artists; she also partied with figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, whom jazz critic Boris Vian Inez Cavanaugh / 109 brought to enjoy jazz at Chez Inez. She schmoozed with French film stars, too: “French singers and film stars like Juliette Gréco and Sacha Distel had been regular patrons, trying to copy her special way with a vocal, and it was the place where American musicians on Paris gigs loved to drop by on their way home” (Rosenkrantz, Harlem 219). Apparently, Chez Inez was so pop- ular it even drew the French aristocracy. In the liner notes for Cavanaugh’s 1968 album with Teddy Wilson, Rosenkrantz boasted: “It was where the Duc de Talleyrand drove up with an open-carful of noisy friends and had a chamber pot emptied on his head by an angry neighbor upstairs, shouting ‘Las Bas Les Américains’... and the Duc de Talleyrand showing ‘Mais, je suis français.” So even dukes were known to come to Chez Inez and were just as rowdy at times as the reputed Americans. Cavanaugh provided a bridge between the white French jazz community and the ever-burgeoning African American artistic population in Paris. Her local and international connections among multiple artists and communi- ties is apparent in figure 6; on the cover of her notebook Cavanaugh’s friend and pianist Mary Lou Williams scribbled Cavanaugh’s Copenhagen address, key Parisian contacts such as Boris Vian and Charles Delaunay, and her network of friends and musicians in England and the United States. The notebook cover melds these multinational and cultural influences together in a way that resembles the function of Chez Inez. In its diversity of races and nationalities Chez Inez exemplified the concept of a jazz diaspora. The venue spurred ethnically hybrid relationships by offering a space for net- working among white French musicians, critics, and African American jazz musicians. While I have yet to find records that clearly distinguish whether Inez owned or only managed Chez Inez, the very management of the club was hybrid, reflecting the ethnic backgrounds of Inez and her Indo-Chinese comanager. Alongside blues and jazz, Cavanaugh was required to feature a certain number of Indo-Chinese songs each night; the audience makeup of Chez Inez reflected a similar ethnic diversity as it welcomed interracial couples and people of all nations and races (“Paris” 71–72). The Ebony pro- file on jazz clubs in Paris revealed that this ethnically mixed club scene was the norm: “There are no all-Negro night clubs, as such, in Paris. Owners, bands, floor shows and customers are all mixed. Wherever Negroes work, there are always more mixed couples than all-white or all Negro couples on the dance floor” (“Paris Night Life” 71). Cavanaugh exemplified interracial relations. Her long-held relationship with Timme Rosenkrantz bucked segregation. An African American woman with a white Danish man still caused a stir in the United States; in fact, interracial marriage was illegal in many states. The landmark Loving 110 / Inez Cavanaugh figure 6. The notebook cover of Mary Lou Williams. Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University. vs. Virginia case, wherein the Supreme Court invalidated state laws against interracial marriage, was not decided until 1967. I have uncovered no accounts or correspondence about discomfort with their relationship in New York City. But the dismay of Rosenkrantz’s grandmother may have been the primary cause for their never getting married (D. Clarke, Donald Inez Cavanaugh / 111 Clarke’s). The couple spent more than thirty years together before Rosenkrantz died in 1969. Their relationship and Chez Inez were important symbols and realiza- tions of diversity in these jazz and Paris Noir communities. In addition to Chez Inez, Haynes Restaurant, another cultural hangout of Paris Noir, also exemplified miscegenation and became the heart not only of African American cultural memory and catching up but also of interracial connections: Another black GI who remained in Paris was LeRoy Haynes. He was a student of the arts when he came with the army, and he remained to study on the GI Bill. He soon met a French girl, Gaby, whom he married. She became his partner in an American restaurant in Pigalle that specialized in soul food. The place rapidly became the haunt of many race brothers who had more stories to tell than money in their pockets. LeRoy Haynes himself became a friend of Richard Wright, whose French-American Fellowship Association he joined, becoming its president in the early 1950s. (Fabre, From Harlem 165) These venues offered ways of interacting and thriving that would have been blocked in the United States. Most important, many African American musicians (particularly men) came to Europe and sought out interracial relationships. I remember seeing a large black-and-white photo of Bechet in the French national library archives. He was beaming at the camera and tucked in close to his white German wife, Elisabeth Ziegler, as they rode a carriage through a parade in honor of their marriage in 1951 Antibes, France. In 1962 Kenny Clarke married a white Dutch woman, Daisy Wallbach, and had a child with her. Clarke’s first marriage, to singer Carmen McRae, also produced a son, who would stay in the United States. In our conversations both Johnny Griffin and Hal Singer mentioned their long- term relationships with white European women. Tyler Stovall has recognized miscegenation as a common theme across decades of African American presence in Paris: “The theme of miscegena- tion, with its echoes of both romantic liberation and racial revenge, runs like a red thread through the history of postwar African American life in Paris. It expressed not only defiance of America’s color line but also a refusal to conform to the sexual practices of most black Americans” (“Harlem-sur- Seine”). Interracial relationships were a draw to African American musi- cians. These relationships added reasons to stay and helped combat loneli- ness while living abroad. Spaces like Chez Inez, and couples like Rosenkrantz and Cavanaugh, provided safe spaces to collapse racial divides, expectations, and conventions. 112 / Inez Cavanaugh But William Gardner Smith recognized that the French were only super- ficially open to integration. Living in France for sixteen years and working as a reporter, he interacted in Paris Noir but also observed and eventually critiqued racism in France in his books The Stone Face and Return to Black America. Smith distinguishes relationships and marriage, noting that the French frowned on the latter; he also suggests that while African American men may have enjoyed interracial relationships, they were aware of the oft-exoticized and hypersexualized perceptions of the French women they attracted (W. Smith, Return 65). Chez Inez was not the only place Cavanaugh encouraged friends to catch up and experience interracial and international mixing; she opened up her home, too. Cavanaugh and Rosenkrantz had been known for their parties and recording sessions in their Harlem apartment on W. 44th Street (Clarke). In their Parisian apartment they continued the tradition of inspir- ing, nurturing, and recording new talent. Conveniently located near Club du Vieux Colombier, where Cavanaugh performed often in her first years in Paris, Hotel Crystal was located on Rue Saint-Benoit, in the heart of Le Quartier Latin (Fabre, From Harlem 165). The apartment was apparently a popular resting spot for an assortment of African Americans: James Baldwin and Chester Himes; actor Canada Lee; singers Eartha Kitt, Ethel Waters, and Hazel Scott, as well as pianist Mary Lou Williams (L. Dahl 230). Situated as it was in the Latin Quarter, near the homes of many African Americans, it also helped foster creative innovation, as well as bonding— and not just among musicians but also artists of all media and African American exiles. Cavanaugh hosted parties into the wee hours, and her apartment served as an unofficial practice space for several musicians. Errol Garner found daily inspiration at Cavanaugh’s piano, once writing “Lamplight” in honor of “a subdued table lamp of hers” (L. Dahl 189). Her apartment acted as a musi- cian’s studio and an unofficial salon, inspiring musical development and help- ing musicians to be in control of recording their own work. This availability was key, given the desire for creative freedom but also the negative produc- tion experiences that many musicians had had in the United States. Drummer Art Taylor struggled with the white appropriation of jazz in the United States: They’ve got all the black musicians on the run. Black musicians all over Europe, running away from America. But that’s part of the white power structure that’s killing us and our music. Just like they’ve killed it with the so-called cool school, West Coast jive. They sold us down the line. Took the music out of Harlem and put it in Carnegie Hall and downtown Inez Cavanaugh / 113 in those joints where you’ve got to be quiet. The black people split and went back to Harlem, back to the rhythm and blues, so they could have a good time. Then the white power structure just kicked the rest of us out and propagated what they call avant-garde. (A. Taylor 67) One of Cavanaugh’s most prominent traits and survival strategies was the promotion of black music and musicians. She was particularly proactive with marketing herself. This prompted a joint project; she and Leroy Haynes starred in Richard Wright’s play Daddy Goodness (Fabre, From Harlem 165). In a May 1949 letter to Rosenkrantz she shared another opportunity: “The V.C. is about to put the other caves in the alley. Did I tell you Dick Wright was asked by Pagliere (Open City) to do a special script on V.C.? Pagliere and R. W. was in to see me. P said my scene in the documen- tary film is terrific, wants to do the sound over in a place with better acous- tics. I’m to phone studio and they’ll run it off for me.” All of these examples demonstrate a melding of disciplines and an opening of opportunities to African American jazz musicians. They also portray Cavanaugh as a key negotiator and publicist for her club and performances. Of course, she might also have been considered opportunistic. In pianist Mary Lou Williams’s accounts Cavanaugh was sneaky, moody, and out for herself, and the couple created a “perpetual open house” to secretly record songs from artists and later sell them for their sole benefit (L. Dahl 168– 301, 170). Williams suggested that the couple stole recordings, sold them on the black market, and did not pay her for her recording of The Zodiac Suite (170–71). This may have been the cause of a falling out, as they had been good friends. Were the gatherings at Cavanaugh’s apartment and Chez Inez nothing more than cash cows for the visionaries behind them? After multiple failed ventures in New York, from a radio program to a music magazine, Cavanaugh and Rosenkrantz (nicknamed Robber Baron for his dishonest practices) may have positioned “community” as just another tool to build their finances (L. Dahl 169). What this perspective misses is a musician’s inherent need for self-promotion and opportunism to survive. With a mod- est talent and mediocre success in singing, Cavanaugh undertook a range of tasks to keep herself afloat. She accompanied others not only as a singer but also in her interviews and writing. She followed, sought out, finagled, and created opportunities, all the while staying in the background of big names like Duke Ellington. These jobs did not give her a name or recognition. But they left Ellington remembering her as “a very dear and important person,” said his public relations representative Patricia Willard (quoted in D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). 114 / Inez Cavanaugh So Cavanaugh tried many ventures in order to survive, and she also tried a range of businesses with Rosenkrantz, from restaurant management to recordings. Their business ventures failed on most occasions. But while they lasted, they forwarded talent—supporting Don Byas on tour, facilitat- ing the recording of Errol Garner, opening Chez Inez in New York City and Paris, and debuting Timmes Club in Copenhagen to host and employ a range of American talents.10 So Cavanaugh kept finding ways to promote herself and other talent in the process. She also defied normative gender roles of mid-twentieth-century America. She worked in roles rarely inhabited by women at the time. She bucked American social rules of racial homogeneity by having a lifelong relationship with a white man. She dismissed the expectations of women at the time by not marrying Rosenkrantz and often living and traveling with- out him. Accompanying and networking with men was one of Cavanaugh’s suc- cessful survival strategies. In pictures she is often seen posing in a group or alongside a man (e.g., Aaron Bridgers, Sidney Bechet, Teddy Wilson, or Rosenkrantz). This perhaps points to stronger working relationships with men. In her letters to Rosenkrantz in May and June of 1949, she mentioned a range of opportunities from, and supportive of, men: Well I have just left the grand man of jazz [Sidney Bechet] at his hotel in Rue l’Université round the corner to dash home and write this additional note for him to carry on the plane today at 6 pm. Well everyone is... awaiting the opening of Chez Inez. Art Buchwald [Paris Herald Tribune] was in tonite. Is backing me to the hill [sic]. Avakian promised to do a story on me for Mademoiselle when I open the joint and get photos of names... and a new dress or two. I finally found a modiste. Incidentally I anticipate trouble from Moune so I’m going to get working papers for Rue Champollion “toute suite” to protect myself, n’est-ce pas!!! Had a coffee with Kenny Clarke last nite. Everyone likes him here. Jacque Dieval offered me 3 days in Brussels at 8.000 F a day—but I turned it down as I can’t afford to leave Chez Inez just now. All of the above excerpts feature men, except for the reference to Guadeloupian singer Moune Rivel. (Cavanaugh had taken over her club, Perroquet.) The distrust for Rivel greatly contrasts with the excitement and support of the men listed. It further supports my perspective that being a black woman with power in this Parisian jazz diaspora was rare, created competition with other female performers and managers, and required sur- vival skills. Inez Cavanaugh / 115 But Cavanaugh’s skills differed from those of her predecessors. Josephine Baker, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Adelaide Hall, and Florence Embry Jones were among the small but influential group of African American women who became club managers in the interwar period. Josephine Baker is the most remembered (and most revered and reviled at the time). As I have noted, her danse sauvage translated her black performing body into a jun- gle animal for the French imagination. It was the start of her path to star- dom in France and of recognition worldwide. (Cavanaugh’s predecessors tended to draw on dance and were hypersexualized and exoticized by fans, the press, and artistic renderings.) Rachel Ann Gillet’s dissertation, “Crossing the Pond: Jazz, Race and Gender in Interwar Paris,” pays attention to other African American female performers in Paris in the Jazz Age. She argues that black female entertain- ers, even those who did not dance, were often still described in terms of their physicality. She, along with other scholars of black female performers in this era, discusses the obstacles to respectability among other blacks in France that included the perception of African American female jazz per- formers as lacking in morals and not meeting the expectations of behavior and dress by the African American press and elite. Compared to Josephine Baker, Cavanaugh lacked star power and a dis- tinctive voice to make a name for herself. When she arrived in Paris in 1946, Cavanaugh was in her mid-thirties and a jazz-industry veteran. Baker, by comparison, was just nineteen. Also, Chez Inez and Vieux Colombier were jazz caves for eating, chatting, and listening to music, unlike the dance halls and clubs in which Baker performed. So Cavanaugh’s survival skills were unique but successful as they helped her thrive in the male-dominated Parisian jazz scene until 1952. behind the scenes of parisian dreams: a rise in racism and cognizance of racialized difference Letters from Cavanaugh don’t reveal it. Biography snippets rarely mention it. But behind the Parisian dreams of racial equality lurked a different real- ity. Where were the French of African descent in these jazz clubs? And why were the French so fascinated with African Americans when they had their own black colonists and immigrants? Looking back on the collaborations that African Americans produced in this fruitful jazz diaspora, there were only white French and African American collaborations. Africans were not part of the mix, and while the beguine playing of Caribbean musicians thrived in Paris, they were not a major part of the jazz scene. 116 / Inez Cavanaugh An economic divide marginalized French of African descent from par- ticipation. Catherine Bernard writes, “Africans in France were mostly work- ers on the docks in maritime cities. They were not politically organized and their isolation was one of the major reasons for their exploitation. Except for the writer Claude McKay, there were few interactions between these different communities” (Bernard 24). McKay actually portrays Africans as dockworkers in his book, Banjo; though the book illustrates musical play within this group of seafarers, no moves to play professionally are made. Also, James Baldwin described Algerians in roles as taxi drivers or janitors (Baldwin, Nobody 141). William Gardner Smith noted the high prices of clubs; because of the prices of drinks and admittance (though Chez Inez was fairly reasonable at 25 cents for beer), Parisian jazz performances were lim- ited to wealthier French fans, tourists, and foreigners (Smith, “It’s Six” n.p.). Thus, it seems that the economic status of most French of African descent and women was significantly different from African American exiles and visitors. Perhaps the low economic status of many North Africans kept them separated from this scene. While some African American artists came with barely more than a dime to their names (stories of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin living at the bare minimum come to mind), their cultural capital raised their sta- tuses above their means. Their Americanness raised it. African American artists overall were given stature and financial support that they did not have in the United States. In Paris they weren’t read as starving artists, even if they literally were. Moreover, Baldwin, always the American tourist, could cross “social and occupational lines” in Paris easier than he could in the States (Nobody 139). These same opportunities were not open to French of African descent. Some African American artists began to notice and remark on this racial- ized differentiation: Bechet visited Dakar and saw the poor race relations there and was wise enough to see that racism persisted not just in the colonies but in France as well. Esquire reporter Blake Ehrlich captured his voluntary avoidance of racism in 1950s France: “Bechet keeps in mind the places in Paris he feels Negroes aren’t welcome, and he stays away from them. Most of the time he feels too busy and too old to start proving things” (93–95). Pianist Art Simmons came to Paris in 1949, playing at the Paris International Jazz Festival with Kenny Clarke. Simmons often played at Chez Inez and accompanied Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae at the Mars Club (Fabre, From Harlem 203; Holloway). As house pianist at the Mars Club, he settled in Paris and did many recordings with the Parisian-based label Barclay Records. He made his career in Paris for more than twenty Inez Cavanaugh / 117 years and began to notice a distinction in how the French perceived African Americans: “Some of what we thought when we first came to Paris was probably naive,” said Simmons. “Pretty soon, I noticed some of the French people talking in a terrible way about ‘the Arabs’ and ‘the Jews,’ and I started wondering what they said about me when I wasn’t around. And there was something kind of superior in the way they embraced American blacks, a ‘noble savage’ attitude or something. But it was better than the situation in the States in a lot of ways. And I think it was better for other guys who were black like me but gay on top of it.” (quoted in Hajdu 143) Simmons was one of many who had been attracted to the illusion of a color- blind Paris but later noticed race consciousness rather than blindness. African American journalist William Gardner Smith also came to France with the idealized notion that Paris was color-blind (Stovall, “Preface” 305). Michel Fabre describes Smith as not totally gullible about French egalitari- anism but believing hard work on his writing would make for acceptance by the French; however, as Smith observed the reality of Algerians his opinion soon changed (Fabre, From Harlem 243–55). He was one of the first African Americans to confront the disparate treatment of Algerians and to write an account of the Algerian War of Independence as it was actually happening (Stovall, “Preface” 305). From 1954 until 1962 Algeria staged a revolution against France. In his 1963 novel The Stone Face Smith describes one of the goriest battles on October 17, 1961, when two hundred Algerians met their deaths in Paris (Stovall, “Preface” 305). Though the war was primarily waged on Algerian soil, the book also highlighted the subjugation and resistance of Algerians living in France. The novel goes on to explore the African American protagonist’s search for identity and the realization of racism in France that contributes to his disillusionment. James Baldwin believed the Algerian War of Independence pitted African Americans against Algerians in the French imagination. He realized that the two groups were joined by similar struggles and therefore conjoined in the French imagination (Baldwin, Conversations 268). Baldwin was one of few African Americans to understand that his experiences were quite dif- ferent from those of North Africans in Paris. He recognized the different treatment of Algerians, suggesting that Europe wouldn’t seem half as free to him if he weren’t an American (Nobody 141). As an African American in Paris, Baldwin had never visited the homelands or directly experienced the culture of the North Africans he met. He saw and 118 / Inez Cavanaugh recognized as familiar the violent oppression and prejudice enacted on them, but he could do nothing to change it. He recognized that his American pass- port distinguished him as coming from a free country. While the practice of freedom in the United States did not live up to the ideals, in Europe it meant that he was categorized and thereby treated differently from colonized and postcolonized French of African descent (Baldwin, No Name 377–78). Baldwin’s revelations illustrate and parallel Brent Hayes Edwards’s dis- cussions of the communicative link between African American and Francophone African writers in interwar France. In The Practice of Diaspora Edwards highlights the shared interest in creating a Pan-African conscious- ness across the literary and political works of African American writers. He shows common experiences of prejudice and challenges to political auton- omy in the works of African Americans like Claude McKay and Francophone African writers the Nardal Sisters from Martinique. Edwards also demon- strates the challenges to articulating shared experiences, goals, and strate- gies. He explains that “black modern expression takes form not as a single thread, but through the often uneasy encounters of peoples of African descent with each other” (Edwards, The Practice 5). Looking at this along- side James Baldwin’s perceptions highlights Baldwin’s unease in not fully understanding the heritage, perspective, and attitude of French of African descent. In this perspective Baldwin’s “encounter(s) on the Seine” become “uneasy encounters” that are more like debates, conflicts, and points of incomprehension. Despite these moments of unease, however, Baldwin is also clear that common, collective, and imposed meanings are read on black bodies irrespective of national experience and context. For example, Baldwin once experienced firsthand some of the disregard and unfair treatment meted out to North Africans in Paris. In his first year in Paris he was wrongfully accused of stealing hotel linen. After spending several days in jail, it was only his American status (and the help of his lawyer friend) that got the case tossed out. Through the process he learned that French policemen were not so different from American officers; their disrespect and cruel laughter began to seem universal. He saw a life of “pri- vation, injustice, [and] medieval cruelty” that was not too far from his own (Notes 101–16). Baldwin came to understand that there was a difference in social status between African Americans and French colonists of African descent. The increased freedoms that African Americans enjoyed existed alongside limitations for French of African descent. The requirements were easy to understand: one had to be American––specifically African American. African American writer and performer Maya Angelou experienced a similar disillusionment with racism in France. She brought Senegalese Inez Cavanaugh / 119 friends to the Parisian production of Porgy and Bess, in which she was a cast member. When she told her French host at the performance that they were African and not African American, the host showed a look of horror that she was interacting with Africans, and she disappeared (Angelou 184). Angelou had planned to settle in Paris with her son. But when she noticed France’s own race problem, she left because she “saw no benefit in exchanging one kind of prejudice for another” (Stovall, “Preface” 305; Angelou 185). The experiences of Angelou, Simmons, Baldwin, and Smith all point to the privilege of being an African American performer. By privilege I mean a differentiated and hierarchized attention by the French. French historians Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall have discussed the malleable nature of racial relations—the shift between racialized difference—as a way to subjugate the colonized, to downgrade and position as inferior, and to deny access to rights and opportunities (Color 3). In these ways, and more, the French fed off of the racialized exclusion of its subjects while attempting to consume the exotic “other” that African American musicians represented. The French saw African American jazz musicians, like Art Simmons, as guests that contributed to economic production in a time of recovery. Postcolonial studies scholar Didier Gondola suggests that African Americans were beloved because they introduced jazz to the French and that this musi- cal form helped express the “cosmopolitan” nature of interwar Paris (208). For example, Kenny Clarke’s prolific jazz production, mentorship, and interracial and international collaborations certainly promoted increased knowledge and participation of jazz by the French––thereby making France more cosmopolitan in its jazz scene and jazz more universal in its reach. But French of African descent were perceived as pushing against the French republic with their resistance to ethnic homogenization. Perhaps this was owing to a fear of being kicked out of France. This is what Tyler Stovall argues: “Black expatriates were acutely aware of their status as guests of the French. Throughout the twentieth century, the French government had welcomed foreign political exiles on the implicit assumption that they abstain from involvement in French politics” (Paris 254). In the Cold War period, when a collection of French literati and politi- cians were protesting the spread of American culture in France, African Americans were not the targets of anti-American sentiments. This privi- leged distinction, however, fell by the wayside when the lines of ethnic distinction blurred, for African Americans were not always clearly read as American; at times they were mistaken for Africans. Then the difference between these groups collapsed, causing confusion in national and ethnic identification. Mae Henderson, for example, argues that Josephine Baker, 120 / Inez Cavanaugh who was chosen as the queen for the 1931 colonial exposition, often had her identity conflated with that of an African (117). Moreover, Melvin Dixon talks about how he appreciated most of the national nonrecognition. In an interview with Jerome de Romanet, Dixon said, “I was asked frequently whether I was from North Africa, from the Caribbean, from anywhere in the world, other than the United States; and I felt that that was very inter- esting, because it gave me a way to explore various attitudes towards America” (quoted in de Romanet 98). The conflation occurs today as well. When an African American settles in France and his or her language approaches fluency, there are times that even France’s longtime love affair with African Americans and African American cultural expressions is replaced by misrecognition and the all-too-familiar return of racism. All of these examples illustrate that differences amid peo- ple of the African diaspora are not always read accurately. They also point to a connection, whether recognized or unrecognized, between African Americans and other peoples of African descent. Didier Gondola’s article “But I Ain’t African, I’m American!” engages this issue. He contends that African Americans were actually linked to Africans in the French imagina- tion. He opines that the French related to African Americans differently to counteract their treatment of their colonized people of color: “In France, colonial history has constructed Africans as ‘niggers’ and Europeans as vic- timizers. Once this ‘nigger’ status has been created, Europeans need to guar- antee their status as usurpers. To that end, they use other minorities as aux- iliaries to create a fiction that race does not matter and that culture is, in essence, what sets subjects apart from citizens, victims from victimizers. The auxiliary is constructed as the deracialized alter ego and naturally pitted against the ‘nigger’” (202). In Gondola’s opinion the African American thus acts as the foil to the black French and helps promote a race-free Europe. Accordingly, this Europe is not judged on the basis of skin color but on the distinction accorded a particular culture. But in allowing such privilege to African Americans, France actually positioned the black French in a hierar- chical relationship to African Americans—indeed, as “niggers.” As auxilia- ries to the French white status as victimizer, then, African Americans were unconsciously complicit in the subjugation of the black French population, thereby placing African Americans in a “liminal” state. Gondola describes the liminal figure of the African American in the following way: “In early twentieth-century France, black American émigrés served as liminal figures. They were thrust in[to] what Shelby Steele calls ‘a nirvana of complete freedom,’ a world that was yet to define the racial and cultural arsenal that would in later years enhance whiteness at the expense of African immi- Inez Cavanaugh / 121 grants” (202). Gondola’s arguments suggest that there must always be a “nigger”—if not an African American then some “other” must always be created to fill that role. The recognition by African Americans of the unjust treatment of other people of color makes African Americans complicit in building their own status on the backs of others. Perhaps this is the reason Maya Angelou left Paris. the end of an illusion: from jobs galore to moving on Since the entry of jazz in France in 1917, African American jazz musicians had enjoyed respect even greater than other artists owing to the French history of negrophilia (love of African diasporic culture). In contrast to primitivist art that popularized the Depression era, the French were unable to fully understand and imitate jazz rhythms despite their desire for it. So, even though Paris encouraged social mixing, when African Americans were present, they most often led the jazz bands. Talking to jazz musicians Hal Singer, Bobby Few, and Archie Shepp, all of whom played in 1960s Paris, I confirmed that the bands of these times were mixed. Often, however, they featured one, or a maximum of two, African Americans surrounded by French musicians. These African Americans were the big draws. René Urtreger told me that “the audience[s] were more pro-American jazz; they preferred American jazzmen to European jazzmen, more black American.... Of course some were really fantastic and first, I mean top genius, but some were less good I would say. Ils sont profité un petite peu de ça” (They ben- efited a little from that) (Urtreger; my translation). It was one of the rea- sons behind the respect and craze for jazz, this perception that African Americans could play better. During this post–World War II period essen- tialist mind-sets prevailed, and African American musicians were still con- sidered by most as more capable than their French counterparts. Hugues Panassié illustrates this point in his revised edition of Real Jazz. He apolo- gizes for not formerly recognizing that African Americans excelled in jazz, writing that “from the point of view of jazz, most white musicians were inferior to black musicians” (vii–viii). But in this era white French musi- cians improved their skills and performed more thanks to musicians like Kenny Clarke, who taught them skills in keeping time on the drums, for example. So while the bands remained mixed, in the 1960s the ratio of African American or white American performers to white French changed. French musicians began to protest more vocally the competition for gigs that African American musicians prompted. French work quotas that started 122 / Inez Cavanaugh as far back as the 1920s were reinstated in the 1960s, and they kept American musicians from competing for all jobs. The quota required that only one per- former could be American (Broschke-Davis 57; Moody 129). Discussing Don Byas’s decreased job opportunities in France, jazz critic Mike Zwerin wrote, “Like Kenny Clarke, Byas had been winning American jazz polls. He did very well in Europe at first. After a while, however, he found that he wasn’t ‘exotic’ anymore. He came to be considered a ‘local.’ His price went down. Locals tend to take locals for granted” (Zwerin, “Jazz” 541). This discussion of Byas as a “local musician” applies to his bandmate Inez Cavanaugh, too. After slightly more than five years in Paris, Cavanaugh learned that only a few could exist in the spotlight of jazz on the Left Bank. Unfortunately, she was being crowded out to the shadowy edges. Just as Chez Inez had knocked Moune Rivel’s club, Perroquet, out of the water in 1949, so, too, Cavanaugh now had to move on. So in 1952 it was time for her to leave. Italy was next on her itinerary. Over the next ten years she moved from Copenhagen to Rome, all the time writing to friends and asking for finan- cial support. In 1968 she was finally back in New York. But by then she had lost her spark and calling as a manager, singer, and convivial host: “Inez had lost faith in her own ability to be hostess and cook her famous ‘southern fried chicken’ while serving as house vocalist—those things that had made her ‘Chez Inez’ club so famous in Paris in the 1950s” (Rosenkrantz, Harlem 219). Even though she was only selling cigarettes now at the famed Hotel Bolivar in Manhattan rather than performing there, she was in contact with Rosenkrantz by mail, helping him with arrangements to open “Timmes Club” in Copenhagen (Rosenkrantz, Harlem 218–19). She would soon move back to Copenhagen herself, recording a few songs on An Evening at Timme’s Club with the Teddy Wilson Trio in Denmark. In 1969 Rosenkrantz died in his hotel room in New York City; Cavanaugh sang “I’ll Never Be the Same” at his Copenhagen memorial (D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). She was later sighted in Rome, a bare skeleton, asking friends for money; then she disappeared (D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). After much sleuthing, jazz biographer Donald Clarke and Rosenkrantz’s niece, Bente Arendup, discovered what became of her. In 1980 she died of cerebral arteriosclerosis in Long Beach, California (D. Clarke, Donald Clarke’s). The years of migrating and promoting herself from France to Italy to Denmark to the United States had come to an end. Cavanaugh’s story, or the pieces I have put together of it, offers some insight into the experiences of performing and surviving as an African American woman in post–World War II Paris.11 Like Cavanaugh, a number of African American musicians stayed for a while. Then they left. The resi- Inez Cavanaugh / 123 dency and mobility of musicians like Cavanaugh in Paris redefines tradi- tional ways of envisioning home and community. Susan Friedman has written: “Blurring the boundaries between home and elsewhere, migration increasingly involves multiple moves from place to place and continual travel back and forth instead of journeys from one location to another” (261). So “home” is no longer necessarily one place but multiple places. Paired with Dwight Conquergood’s discussion of “ ‘place’ as a heavily traf- ficked intersection, a port of call and exchange, instead of a circumscribed territory” (“Performance” 145), I have begun to think of the home of these African American artists as a relationship among places that shape and move a person. As Friedman suggests, many African American jazz musi- cians did not originally go to Paris thinking they would stay for long. They went for an opportunity. Paris was one place––a stop, among several, that could work. Some did make it work in Paris, attempting to settle in. The memory of jazz’s heyday in Paris persists today through the musi- cians who remain, like Nancy Holloway. In 2010 I interviewed the African American singer. Holloway arrived in Paris in 1953 after eight days aboard the ship La Liberté. She never returned to live in the United States. Like Cavanaugh, she used Paris as a springboard to sing worldwide, including places such as Beirut, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Bangkok, and Singapore. But she ended up settling in Paris, singing in the Mars Club for the G.I.s and accompanying Kenny Clarke and Lou Bennett at the Blue Note. Her memories further realized the culture of catching up I had imagined, since she fondly reminisced about food and music as sites of connection: “Over here, we sort of all came together because of Haynes, because of the Haynes Restaurant, because of the Blue Note” (Holloway). It’s where she’d see James Baldwin and was the most popular place in town. When we met in her apartment, she regaled me with the stories of others she’d known: Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, even Elvis. I was so impressed by the original paintings from an old beau and the photos of Holloway in her heyday that I became nostalgic myself. I recognize, however, that this life was never perfect. There were strug- gles. This jazz diaspora meant negotiation. It meant having increased job opportunities but then watching them fall away. It meant thinking the French viewed you with respect but then recognizing that respect was built on a history of stereotypes. That respect was in relation and in contrast to a willful disavowal of their African colonists and immigrants. It meant com- petition. It meant longing for home. This jazz diaspora was also two-sided, exemplifying community—both Paris Noir and the Left Bank jazz scene. It featured a diverse mix of artists, 124 / Inez Cavanaugh races, nationalities, and classes, and Paris was the time-honored “meeting place” where so many had stayed and collaborated. Cavanaugh’s jazz diaspora was specific to an ethnic community, a musical scene, and a par- ticular geography that is encompassed in Tyler Stovall’s discussion in Paris Noir. Yet at the same time it was global. The participants were not just African American, and they brought their own cultural backgrounds and interests as they traveled, creating moments not only of entertainment but of potential cultural exchange. Inez Cavanaugh stayed, left, then disap- peared. Nancy Holloway also stayed for some time, but in my most recent visit I learned she had returned to New York City. With figures like these, who stayed and didn’t become well-known stars, there is less to work with. They don’t get put in jazz biographies and histories, because of hagiography and minimal archival material certainly but also because they kept moving. Histories in the new millennium have proliferated about jazz outside the United States, from France to China to South Africa and beyond. There are countless studies of the African diaspora and a growing trend of study on those communities, in France and Germany, for example. But what of those diasporic communities that were spread out or spaced out or kept moving? Case studies like Inez Cavanaugh’s reveal the importance of investigating situated, localized communities alongside moving, global ones when study- ing individual and collective stories of migration, as well as the travels of jazz. Looking at the photos of Holloway, I remember the surprise I felt at never having heard her story. I learned so much about what that world must have been like. It fueled my desire to uncover more stories and under- stand how and why African Americans stayed and left—so that the stories of Cavanaugh, Holloway, and others who settled and kept moving don’t disappear.

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