At the moment of parting, two couples — one black, the other white — embrace in the Gare Saint-Lazare, in Paris. It’s 1961. For the African-American couple the moment marks the beginning of a future in the USA, where the man is about to move, after performing as a jazz musician in Parisian nightclubs. The other couple are torn between indifference and unrequited love: she is returning home, sad that she’s unable to maintain her brief, intense passion; he will stay in Paris, tenaciously struggling for recognition as a jazz musician, of equal merit to any classical musician.

These differences are encapsulated in the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (who composed the soundtrack for Paris Blues), which begins melancholic and melodic and then becomes almost cacophonous. In the background, in the train station, workers are replacing a poster for a concert by the African-American jazz star, Wild Man Moore (Louis Armstrong), depicting his triumphant reception in Paris by a crowd gathered to welcome the jazz god, with his hoarse voice and trumpet. The image of Armstrong is substituted by a poster for the Larousse bookshop, thereby ending the story of Americans in Paris, of jazz and clubs, of passions and certain racial tensions. Paris, as M. Foucault might remark, in reference to places of multiple imaginaries and experiences, is a heterotopia, formed by the enchantments of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Montmartre, the quays of the River Seine and bridges, mansard roofs, underground nightclubs, or the mythical Cabaret of Lapin-Agile, home to Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Man Ray, Chaplin, Cendrars, Rudolpho Valentino, Apollinaire and many other outstanding artists and entertainers, writers, politicians, or simply Paris’ nightlife, cafés, cabarets, bookshops, theatres... of words and thoughts expressed in freedom, simultaneously marginal and cosmopolitan, depicting a genuine locale and a real/imagined image of the Paris’ 1920s jazz scene and, in the post-war years, existentialism, the tours of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Count Basie, etc., the Nouveau Roman, the Nouvelle Vague and abstractionism.

For the great American public, Paris featured in George Gershwin's symphonic poem, An American in Paris, which was performed for the first time in 1928, marked by the années folles of the 1920s. Gershwin masterfully combines Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky with the clarinet, saxophone, trombone, tubas, the sounds of Paris taxi horns and the ambience of blues and jazz, fusing aesthetics considered to be opposites. Maurice Ravel once remarked: "Why would you want to be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin??"

In Paris Blues, this question persists: Ram Bowen (Paul Newman), a composer in search of a place in the world of "serious" music, asks his musician friend, Eddie, to comment on his score. The latter replies: "All right, you’re Gershwin, you’re Ravel and Debussy (…) Ram

Bowen, all by itself." This reflected the clash between classical music and "minor" genres such as jazz. Gershwin had already taken his "Rhapsody in Blue" (1924) to major venues, thereby legitimising symphonic jazz in the circles of "high culture", and inspiring African-American composers to follow in his footsteps. Ellington composed his "Creole Rhapsody" in 1931 and — together with Strayhorn — transcribed and played "Rhapsody in Blue". Josephine Baker performed in the legendary Cotton Club and the Plantation Club in 1923/24. In 1925, she travelled to Paris to perform "La Revue Nègre" and "Danse Sauvage" in the Théatre des Champs Elysées, to the rhythm of "Le Jazz-Hot". The Harlem Renaissance existed on the other side of the Atlantic and black culture was taking the artistic avant-garde by storm.

Armstrong spawned other fractures. With his unmistakable style and magnetic body language he subverted the African-American identity of the "New Negro" (Alain Locke, 1925). He burst onto the scene in the 1950s as an "oncle Tom", a product of the dominant white culture, as portrayed in the short film Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932), where he wears a leopard skin, surrounded by typical Hollywood extras, like a "primitive" king and his court.

Since 1948, Billy Strayhorn had been living in Paris with Aaron Bridgers, the pianist of the Mars Club that inspired the film’s Club 33 (featured in the first scene), where we see an unconventional clientele for the epoch, including interracial couples, homosexuals, young people with mature women and drug addicts, such as the guitarist Devigne. Armstrong mingles with the musicians of Club 33, but what many people view as a special opportunity to see famous individuals, for others, reflects the commercial undertaking of a film that remains within the orbit of Hollywood's romance genre. Ellington was furious at the missed opportunity to defend black rights. Eddie Cook, the black musician in the film, tells his black girlfriend, Connie, that black people aren't discriminated against in Paris; she replies that things are changing in the US "not because black people move to Paris, but because they stay at home". That says it all.  The rest of the film features scenes set in a club on the Rive Gauche, where white and black people mingle and play jazz. Beyond the world of fiction, Paris was undergoing the frightening and violent period of the Algerian War, including the mass killing of Algerians in Paris, in October 1961.

The 1920s — the Black vaudeville scene, of jazz and swing — and the 1950s of the existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Beauvoir, Merlau-Ponty, Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian, Juliette Gréco... mythologised the atmosphere of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Montmartre, the geography of the avant-garde, the bohemian nightlife of clubs, underground bars and restaurants, bookshops, trendy places and meeting places, where jazz was the symbol of freedom, offering a critique of bourgeois and conservative morality. This is how the French exoticism that Vincente Minnelli brought to the cinema in An American in Paris (1951) was produced and disseminated: Gershwin's music exists in a postcard Paris, with exuberant, joyful choreography, tap dancing on a piano... devoid of any political dimension.

Ten years later, in Paris Blues (1961) Martin Ritt explored a nostalgic Paris, where racial tensions, jazz controversies and the electrifying atmosphere of clubs have been completely softened. Paris is now portrayed as a romantic playground and the USA is far away. The jazz of Ellington and Strayhorn, played by Ellington's Orchestra with Armstrong, in two performances, is preserved. On the historic day of August 28, 1963, two years after the premiere of Paris Blues, Josephine Baker, 57 years old, already a French national, accompanied Martin Luther King on his March on Washington: "I have a dream!"