For all the books and films that have been done about painters and writers who went to Paris, far less has been written about the lives of musicians from the United States who settled there, some for a while, a few for their whole lives. Yet American jazz musicians have felt the influence of that city on their creative abilities no less than did the Lost Generation of American writers after World War I and the impressionists and their successors before them. Much of their world, and of jazz itself, is still there to be seen and enjoyed.

You can listen to jazz on the radio for hours in Paris—there is plenty of it on the airwaves—and never hear a single piece played exactly the way you heard it back home. Jazz players made many recordings in Europe, where they had especially free rein; they could play anything they pleased, and their music usually had clarity and originality.

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