# When jazz came to Europe: The American Dream? That’s right – pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But what happens if you don’t have any boots? Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/02/05/when-jazz-came-to-europe-the-american-dream-thats-right-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-but-what-happens-if-you-dont-have-any-boots-video-photos/
- Published: 2024-02-05T00:02:56+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The continent became a safe haven in the postwar years for American musicians 
escaping racism and drugs. Decades on, they are still coming. In the early 1950s,
during the dark days of the cold war, the Soviet propaganda machine began drawing
attention to an inconvenient truth: for all its chest-beating about freedom and 
democracy, the USA was less enthusiastic about those principles if you happened 
to be black.**

Worried about the effect of this obvious contradiction on its image in the non-aligned
countries of the world, the US State Department decided to hit back, and unexpectedly
chose the medium of jazz. After all, jazz was one of the few areas of American life
in which blacks and whites mixed with some degree of equality. Not only that, it
was an art form – the only art form – actually invented in America.

Accordingly, in March 1956 it sent trumpet star (and future presidential candidate)
Dizzy Gillespie on a 10-week tour to the Middle East, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey and
Greece. In the propaganda war, Dizzy explained, holding up his trumpet, “the weapon
that we will use is the cool one”.

![Jazz giant Duke Ellington performed, recorded album at Travis in 1958 >  Travis
Air Force Base > Display](https://i0.wp.com/media.defense.gov/2020/Feb/26/2002255362/-
1/-1/0/541103-A-F3215-0002.JPG?w=640&ssl=1)

He was fully aware of the hypocrisy of the exercise. When the State Department invited
him to a pre-tour briefing, he replied: “I’ve had 300 years of briefing. I know 
what they’ve done to us… I sort of liked the idea of representing America, but I
wasn’t going over there to apologise for the racist policies of America.” Despite
his ambivalence, the tour was a great success and was followed by others featuring
Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck.

But it’s a curious fact that while jazz’s star began to fade in its country of origin,
it was a different story in Europe. Although Brubeck’s visit was the first foray
by an American jazz musician behind the iron curtain, his compatriots had been visiting
Europe since the earliest days of jazz. And while a mixture of racism and lack of
work at home drove many of them eastwards across the Atlantic, in Stockholm, Copenhagen,
Amsterdam, London, and above all in Paris, they were welcomed with open arms. Many
of them decided to stay.

The exodus peaked between the 1950s and 70s, and it continues to this day, albeit
on a more modest scale, and for a variety of reasons.

One early expat was clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow, who was Jewish and married to a black
woman. He settled in France in 1948 and lived there until his death in 1972. “Most
of the negroes who are here aren’t here because of the race question,” he explained,“
it’s just that you can live your life the way you wish and nobody bothers you… people
treat you as an artist, not the way they treat jazz musicians in the States.”

![What A Wonderful World': Louis Armstrong's Iconic Ballad | uDiscover](https://
i0.wp.com/www.udiscovermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Louis-Armstong-Courtesy-
Louis-Amstrong-House-Museum.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

A year after Mezzrow’s arrival, the 22-year-old Miles Davis travelled to Paris to
play at the first postwar Paris international jazz festival. He was already winning
the admiration and respect of his fellow musicians in the USA, but outside the world
of jazz, he had to deal with segregation and constant discrimination, and the existence
in most states of laws outlawing sexual relationships between blacks and whites.
France was different. “This was my first trip out of the country,” Davis wrote in
his autobiography. “It changed the way I looked at things for ever… I loved being
in Paris and loved the way I was treated. Paris was where I understood that all 
white people were not the same; that some weren’t prejudiced.”

His lifelong love affair with the white singer Juliette Gréco began then and there.
The impossibility of their relationship surviving in America was made rudely apparent
a few years later, in New York, when Gréco invited Davis to the Waldorf Astoria 
for dinner. There, she was no celebrated French chanteuse, merely a white woman 
shamelessly consorting with a black man. After they had waited almost two hours 
for their food to be served, the waiter finally slammed their plates down on the
table. Gréco never forgot the humiliation. “In America, his colour was made blatantly
obvious to me, whereas in Paris, I didn’t even notice he was black.”

The difference was rooted in France’s openness to the African cultures it had discovered
during colonial rule, particularly in Dahomey and Benin. For many French artists,
African masks and statues became a source of new ideas, which Pablo Picasso began
exploring during the first decade of the 20th century. When young Africans came 
to France to study, and found common intellectual ground with the likes of Langston
Hughes and other founders of the Harlem Renaissance, the Négritude movement was 
the result. Black culture was popularised by the sensational American dancer Josephine
Baker, who sailed from New York to Paris in 1925.

By the mid-1950s the American jazz scene was changing. With the untimely death of
Charlie Parker, the glory days of wild bebop were over, but the drugs lingered on,
to the point where promoters sometimes paid the musicians in narcotics.

![Stan Getz - Concord](https://i0.wp.com/concord.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/
stangetz-555.jpg?resize=640%2C360&ssl=1)

Saxophonist Stan Getz decamped to Copenhagen to escape his heroin addiction, living
there for three years, marrying a Swedish woman and fathering two children with 
her. Two other giants of the jazz saxophone – Dexter Gordon and Ben Webster – followed
suit a few years later. Their story is told in the award-winning Danish documentary
Cool Cats, released in 2015 with the poignant tag-line: “They left their country–
and found a home”. Despite the unfortunate detritus of their American lives, blighted
by drugs, drink and endemic racism, what makes the film so profoundly affecting 
is that neither musician could quite believe how well the Danes treated them: paying
them fairly, and promptly; allowing them the freedom to date white women; treating
them as friends. It was no wonder they stayed so long.

Gordon eventually married a Danish woman and lived with her in the Copenhagen suburb
of Valby, where he became a local celebrity. The affection the Danes held him in
is illustrated by an episode in 1966, when he was arrested in Paris for drug possession
and ended up serving jail time. At the end of his sentence, the Danish authorities
refused to allow him back in the country. In response, his Danish fans held a large
rally in Copenhagen demanding the reversal of the decision – and won. “They took
good care of him,” commented fellow jazz exile Johnny Griffin. “That’s the way these
people are.”

 

![The Jazzcord Guide to Dexter Gordon](https://i0.wp.com/static.wixstatic.com/media/
6ca481_dd645a31e32a4317819f1685e215b38a~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_763%2Ch_980%2Cal_c%2Cq_90/
6ca481_dd645a31e32a4317819f1685e215b38a~mv2.png?w=640&ssl=1)

After enjoying mainstream success in the 1950s, jazz was on the wane in America.
During the 1960s, the twin threats of the Vietnam draft and Beatlemania sent many
more American jazz musicians into European exile.

Two singers who made the trip to London during the decade were Mark Murphy and Jon
Hendricks. For Murphy, it was about quality of life. “London, to my way of thinking,”
he said, “is a much nicer place to live than New York, because New York is a business
city. It’s exciting, it’s fast, and everything is open late, but when it comes right
down to living, there’s no comparison.” Jon Hendricks had been living in San Francisco
with his wife and five children. Worried about the prevalence of drugs in Californian
high schools, as well as the riots that were breaking out in cities across America,
he put in a call to Ronnie Scott and got himself a month-long residency at the club,
then uprooted the family and moved them to London. They stayed for five years. “
The thing that makes me happiest,” said Hendricks, looking back, “is that it gave
me the opportunity to bring my children into a fairly stable society.”

Even today, Europe attracts a steady trickle of prominent American jazz musicians:
saxophonist Archie Shepp, pianist Kirk Lightsey, and the vocalists Michele Hendricks
and Melody Gardot all live in Paris; drummer Greg Hutchinson is based in Rome; bass
player Joe Sanders and his family live near Marseille; saxophonist Bill McHenry 
and bassist Michael League have both taken up residence in or near Barcelona, joined
recently by drummer Antonio Sánchez.

Just as the Covid pandemic was taking hold, saxophonist Ben Wendel and his Czech-
born wife moved from New York to Paris for eight months, and then to Amsterdam. 
It was a tumultuous time: in the 18 months they lived there, house prices rose by
35% due to the flood of money leaving London because of Brexit. “Living in Amsterdam
was like Adult Disneyland or something, it’s so clean, it’s so safe, it’s so reasonable…
I didn’t even know how much anxiety I had until I realised it was just a different
pace. Spain has that feeling too. There’s more of a focus on, yes, we’re proud of
our work, but let’s take a weekend where we’re not working. It’s a different sensibility.”

In America, he believes, it’s too easy to lose yourself in your work, for work to
become your whole identity, although for him there are both positives and negatives:
European business life, he feels, lacks the American can-do attitude.

But European healthcare came as a revelation. “If you’re an American and you’ve 
never lived in Europe, there’s no way to understand that until, as in my case, your
appendix bursts while you’re playing a Brecker Brothers retrospective with Randy
Brecker, and you have to go to an emergency room… Now, if you had that same situation
in America, in New York, you might not go! You might say to yourself, shit, I don’t
know, maybe I’ll wait another day. It’s probably food poisoning…”

![Brecker Brothers - Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/
6e/The_Brecker_Brothers.jpg)

It was in London that Washington DC native Rod Youngs, former drummer for Gil Scott-
Heron, met the Englishwoman who is now his wife. After conducting a long-distance
relationship for the best part of a decade, he finally moved over permanently in
1997 and got married. Professionally, he found there was a lot more opportunity 
and fewer obstacles. “You want to be in a place like London, which is an incredible
hub for the arts, lots of great musicians here, and lots of world-class musicians
come here to perform. You want to be with like-minded people.”

Would he go back to the US? “Absolutely not.” Not even for work? “No, not really.
Particularly for the last five years, politically, I just don’t want to be over 
in that environment. It’s not the same place. It’s racism, but a lot of it is classism.
You have this really wide divide between rich and poor, and a diminishing middle
class. And you have this division, this infighting for what’s left of the pie. It’s
just madness.”

But London is a less popular destination than it used to be. “Brexit has been a 
total disaster,” says saxophonist Jean Toussaint, who has lived there since 1987.“
As a musician, it’s been terrible, as I’m sure you’ll hear from any musician you
speak to. It’s made it a thousand times harder to travel to Europe, to tour, to 
work. Fortunately for me, I’m a dual American-

British citizen, so I have two passports I can use. But it’s a nightmare.

“Then there’s a tax situation when you’re working in Europe as well. They want to
withhold tax on your pay. And then you’ve got to claim it back in the UK. It’s just
a whole lot more red tape, and it’s made it a whole lot more difficult, and a lot
of people have stopped touring to Europe for that reason. And European musicians
are finding it more difficult to come here.”

To some extent, Britain’s self-imposed isolation mirrors that of America. “Americans
don’t travel that much, so they don’t know anything,” adds Toussaint. “They’re being
told, ‘you live in the best country in the world, so why do you want to go anywhere
else?’ And then they go somewhere and they say, ‘Oh well this is better than what
we got…’ The media and the government is constantly telling them how great they 
have it, and how [America] is the best place on the planet. And it is, for some.
But for the majority it isn’t.”

The American Dream? “That’s right – pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But what
happens if you don’t have any boots?”

![](https://i0.wp.com/www.theneweuropean.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/01/
Jazz1.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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