Partition pour piano "Manda"

First French edition of this score for voice and piano, the upper wrapper colour-illustrated by Roger de Valério (1886-1951), then the exclusive cover artist for Éditions Salabert. A fine copy.

Manda is taken from the American musical comedy The Chocolate Dandies, which opened on Broadway on 1 September 1924, with music by Eubie Blake and lyrics by Noble Sissle. The title role was created by the young Valaida Snow.

The cast also included, in a comic role named « That Comedy Chorus Girl », a certain Josephine Baker, then aged eighteen, who attracted the attention of the New York press with her deliberately out-of-step dancing and comic squint modelled on the slapstick actor Ben Turpin.

This French edition, published by Francis Salabert as early as 1924 with an adaptation of the lyrics by Jacques-Charles, the future creator of the great revues at the Casino de Paris, thus bears witness to the circulation of African American stage repertoire in France more than a year before the Parisian sensation of La Revue Nègre in October 1925, which would make Josephine Baker a star.
Roger de Valério's cover, executed in the Expressionist vein characteristic of his work for Salabert, draws upon a caricatural representation of the Black body whose precise genealogy remains to be established. It stands at the intersection of an earlier, independently developed French colonial tradition of fantasised representations of Black bodies and an American tradition derived from minstrel shows, imported into France alongside jazz.

This imagery belongs to what art historians term « négrophilie »: the characteristically Parisian avant-garde enthusiasm of the 1920s for Black culture, jazz, dance and African art, which was paradoxically constructed upon the same stereotypes that this rehabilitation was intended to challenge, fascination with the « primitif » and racial caricature proceeding from one and the same impulse.

It was this ambiguity, characteristic of the period, that enabled a musical scene disseminating demeaning imagery simultaneously to offer African American performers the social advancement, fame and freedom denied to them by segregation in the United States. Only a few months after the publication of this edition, Josephine Baker's arrival in Paris would crystallise this paradox in a city already internationally renowned as a centre of social emancipation and of encounter between artists from the Old and New Worlds.

This document thus offers an oblique insight into the ambivalence of the French reception of early jazz, one year before the triumph of its most celebrated performer.