Music before 1958

The live music performed in the music halls of the 1920s was designed to liberate and distract, responding to a public thirst for modernity and forgetfulness after the Great War: from the vivacious numbers of Yvette Guilderland Maurice Chevalier to the spectacular revues of misting duet and the Follies berg ere. ‘Typical revues presented forty-five or fifty tableaux in two acts – bright kaleidoscopes of flamboyant dress and settings and comic and dramatic sketches. The music hall was a dream factory full of behind-the-scenes machinery and lighting systems, a technological complex producing the magical succession of scenes and bathing them in rainbow hues and brightwhites.’18More exotic styles also arrived, mostly from the Americas but of African origin: the tango (which had reached France before 1914), the samba and jazz band music. By 1917, American soldiers were present on French soil in some numbers, bringing their own music with them and sometimes their ownstars.19 Such wartime encounters heralded the establishment of a significant number of African-Americans in France who believed they had found a more open racial attitude than their own country offered.20 American performers and dance bands began appearing on music-hall bills, most famously perhaps Josephine Baker, an unknown nineteen-year-old dancer who arrived in 1925with the ‘Revue merge’ (Black Revue) and made a successful career in Europe. America was coming to France economically too by this time, thanks to the post-war Dawes Plan for European development. US goods thus flowed in, followed by the assembly-line methods which produced them.21 Hollywood was enough of a threat to the indigenous film industry for the first quota of national production to be introduced in 1928. Some of the music which accompanied these migrations was band music linked to foreign dance crazes like the Charleston; suddenly the traditional French dance halls began looking old-fashioned and started calling themselves ‘dancing’s’ in a semblance of English.