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Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp by Travis Atria

2021; Music Library Association; Volume: 78; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2021.0098

1534-150X

Pieter Mannaerts,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp by Travis Atria Pieter Mannaerts Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp. By Travis Atria. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2020. [xi, 292 p. ISBN 9780914090106 (hardcover), $27.99; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Bibliography, index. Have you ever heard of the "Louis Armstrong of Europe"? If not, you need not be surprised: among neither American nor European jazz historians has trumpeter Arthur Briggs (1901–1991) become a household name. In his overview L'odyssée du jazz (Paris: Liana Levi, 2016), French jazz historian Noël Balen justly credits Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli with the creation of the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934 (Balen, p. 252). Balen mentions Arthur Briggs only in passing, as one of the many American jazz musicians "de passage en France" (passing through France) with whom Reinhardt was recording, including Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and Bill Coleman. Little did Balen know—as did anyone, most likely—how crucial Arthur Briggs's role was in the origins of the Hot Club de France. In chapter 26 of Better Days Will Come Again, Travis Atria sheds new [End Page 228] light on the origins of this important club and its ensemble (pp. 135–40). "When the history was written," he concludes, "Briggs's role in the Quintette was almost completely erased. Worse still, Briggs's role in founding the Hot Club was never fully recognized" (p. 139). It seems to have been the story of Briggs's life. On the other side of the Atlantic, Alyn Shipton's important New History of Jazz (New York: Continuum, 2001) mentions Briggs as one of the first African American jazz musicians who based their careers in Brussels and Paris in the early 1920s, and in the latter half of the decade, he moved to German-speaking Europe, where he chose Vienna and Berlin as his home bases for cutting recordings and touring Europe (pp. 271, 278). While Shipton dedicates seven or eight lines to this episode of Briggs's career, Atria gives it ten chapters (pp. 55–104). It is one of the aims—and merits—of Atria's biography to give Briggs his proper place in American and European jazz history, lending particular attention to his projects and development in the 1920s and 1930s and his detention in the Nazi prison camp Saint-Denis from October 1940 until August 1944. This is a valid project, given Briggs's involvement in many important ensembles and developments in European jazz and his manifold contacts among the jazz greats of his time. He rubbed shoulders with nearly every important jazz musician between 1910 and 1939, from James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, Sidney Bechet, and Bricktop, to Cole Porter, Noble Sissle, Hughes Panassié, Jerry Roll Morton, Count Basie, Josephine Baker, and Duke Ellington, to name only a few. Along the way, a multitude of society figures and artists—such as Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, John Steinbeck, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—pass in review. Briggs's significance was, in fact, recognized by contemporaries such as the Belgian lawyer, poet, and jazz historian Robert Goffin, who wrote that Arthur Briggs was the first to use the trumpet instead of the cornet. Briggs was the very backbone of transatlantic jazz. Possessing an amazing technique, an exciting feeling for hot music, and a characteristic swing (long before the swing era began), Briggs was one of those great American pioneers who taught jazz to all of Europe. … Today, Arthur Briggs, that great and sincere musician, is imprisoned in a German concentration camp in France. Only one witness is necessary to prove the class of this musician: Louis Armstrong himself was a great admirer of Briggs and complimented him on more than one occasion. (Robert Goffin, Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan, trans. Walter Schaap and Leonard G. Feather [New York: Doubleday, 1944], 76) How did Atria approach the challenge of writing the biography of such an influential, respected, but undervalued musician...