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Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. By William A. Shack. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xx, 191 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-520-22537-6.)
William A. Shack's Harlem in Montmartre is a loving account of African American jazz, its practitioners, and the culture they helped create in Paris between the two world wars. Inspired by his father's stories about the fair treatment he received as a black person in France during World War I and by his own memories of the vibrant and hospitable Paris he visited in the late 1950s, Shack sets out to show that the development of jazz in Paris owed much to the egalitarianism of French society.
Shack employs what he describes as an anthropological thick description to map the social relations that created Paris jazz culture. He first explores the musical histories...