This cultural history of jazz in France manages to be both enjoyable and scholarly, incisive but engaging – its style neither too formal nor too familiar. As with the later story of rock'n'roll, French intellectuals and other commentators have always had strong, revealing and sometimes morally ambivalent reactions to invasive Anglophone popular musics. But these reactions have rarely been as straightforwardly nationalist or anti-American as they are often thought to be. Fry sets out to show that conventional narratives about jazz's arrival and implantation in France fail to capture the complexity of such reactions. His mission is to give a more nuanced picture, particularly where two widely accepted and in fact contradictory perceptions are concerned. The first is the ‘rose-tinted’ view that visiting African American jazz musicians found a more liberal, less racist, climate for their creativity than in the States. The second is that, in large part due to the culture shock of Josephine Baker's Paris performances in La Revue nègre in 1925, jazz was consistently viewed in France as primitive and inferior. Fry shows that, while neither of these historical takes on the music's reception is entirely false, both need to be carefully unpacked and qualified.

After a rather long Introduction, the book is divided into five case studies. Chapter 1 looks at the Revue nègre. Others have done so before Fry but his originality is to be concerned with its aftermath: the less well-known popularity through the 1920s and 1930s of other instances of black musical theatre. The second case study, in Chapter 2, is the controversial influence in France of the British bandleader Jack Hylton, who ‘helped’ early jazz make the transition to French music hall and to a dubious notion of ‘Frenchness’, with the advent of home-grown big bands in the Hylton mould, like Grégor and his Grégoriens and Ray Ventura and his Collégiens. Chapter 3 tackles Baker in more detail by examining her subsequent career in France. Deciding to settle there, she succeeded in moving on from the erotic dancer she was taken to be by critics in 1925, to become a singer in the chanson or light-opera tradition, as with her revival in 1934 of Offenbach's La Créole. But what she never escaped, in Fry's estimate, were the ‘colonialist assumptions’ built into discourses around her, including those concerning ‘racial hybridity’. Chapter 4 covers the years of Nazi occupation (1940–1944) and is the most illuminating, as Fry punctures a peculiarly tenacious myth. It has long been thought that jazz was anathema to the occupying forces and the collaborationist Vichy government. Some say it was even banned, others that it was just forced to go underground and became a form of cultural resistance. On the contrary, Fry insists, both the music and discourses in favour of it flourished under Vichy, as demonstrated by the popularity of Django Reinhardt and the famous Hot Club Quintet. One fascinating question he touches on in Reinhardt's own case is how this ‘gypsy’ musician was able to thrive under Vichy when over 6,000 so-called ‘nomads’ were rounded up, many of them dying or deported to death camps. But Fry's main finding is that the whole idea of jazz as a form of resistance was, like much of the heroic French myth about that era, a postwar invention. The last chapter probes the equally intriguing case of the saxophonist Sidney Bechet who, after a chequered history in France dating back to the 1920s, finally settled there, managing to turn his version of jazz into a youth mania prefiguring French adolescents’ enthusiasm for rock'n'roll.

Throughout his book, Fry wisely bows to Ludovic Tournès’ excellent New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France (Reference Tournès1999). And although he doesn't set out to match the depth of detail Tournès achieves, he does comes close to providing an English-language alternative of equivalent value. Anglophone readers are given access to important French-language documents, and quotations are sensitively translated into English by Fry himself (although I would quibble over translating chanson populaire as ‘folk song’). His textual analysis is meticulous, covering both shows like Baker's La Créole and French essays and articles on jazz. The level of textual detail may at times seem excessive, especially where the essays are concerned. But it's hard to see how he could have done otherwise without sacrificing the ambition to identify nuances, which is one of the achievements of the book. And anyone with a serious interest in Fry's subject is likely to find his textual deconstructions essential. Where he succeeds above all is in showing how the story of jazz in France raises issues of race, racialism, nationalism and cultural difference. He is especially astute in observing in his ‘Epilogue’ that debates in France about art and culture are usually about something else, and that the fairly common view that jazz has European rather than African or American roots has the effect of ‘minimiz[ing] black invention’ (p. 270). His book therefore makes an important contribution to the cultural history of both jazz and France itself.