I think about the scores of American artists who travel to Paris over the years. What is the connection between France and the United States? I thought about An American in Paris. Could it have been an American in London or Rome? An American in Athens?
Paris had all of the allure of a famous movie star-a beautiful woman, intelligent, admired throughout the world. A woman I surely could never approach much less meet. But then we did meet. Not only that, but we fell madly in love.
This is Leonard Pitt’s story of growing up the misfit in Detroit in the 1940s and 50s. In a later age he would have been put on Ritalin and paraded before psychiatrists because he couldn’t pay attention in school. In 1962, at the end of a misguided foray towards a career in advertising he took the ultimate cure, a trip to Paris. He thought it would only be a visit. He stayed seven years. There in the City of Light, Leonard’s mind exploded. And it hasn’t stopped since.
Untainted by too much formal education Pitt is the auto-didact’s auto-didact. Meandering from Detroit to LA to Paris and a final stop in Berkeley is a remarkable Zen-like tour, always experiencing, always learning, always at peace in his own skin.
He arrived in Paris in 1966 at the age of 21 and and studied with the great teacher of mime, Etienne Decroux, who numbered among his students Jean-Louis Barrault, whose opening mime sequence in Les Enfants de Paradis is among the great moments in film history. From Decroux he discovered human body movement and its influence on one’s life.
As an example he cites the impact of American Jazz in the aftermath of World War I on the French. Inspired French band directors borrowed the American sheet music but the French musicians were unable to get the same sounds out of their instruments. Why not? The French were too stiff in their bodies. The Americans were looser in their joints and spines than the French. They had a give-and-take foreign to the French body. Jazz is full of dipthongs and slides. It’s a curvy music with a swing to it, and is the antithesis of the angular, predictable, metronome-like rhythms of military music. The American body and its particular kind of relaxation was conducive to playing jazz. The French didn’t have the physical basis to understand jazz rhythms.
ED. Note-Michel Petrucciani is a notable exception.
His years in Paris taught him about the centrality of the French café in the French life. He has transplanted that custom to his life in Berkeley, where he can be found from 7AM onward, at the French Hotel Café in North Berkeley.
Stop by with a copy of this delightful book (purchased-not borrowed, please) and he will happy to autograph it over a shmooze.
