African American musical idioms ran rampant in Paris following the import of such ideas by American soldiers in the Great War. What started as music in niche social clubs for veterans who remained abroad soon grew in popularity, so much so that 1920s popular Parisian music is almost synonymic with jazz. The Parisian jazz scene drew a number of famous American performers to the city, namely Cole Porter, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, and Josephine Baker.
As jazz swept the popular music scene, classical composers of the time saw the harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic structure of jazz as tool to advance a new idea of French music. French composers had long used the idea of the other to differentiate French music from that of their German counterparts, particularly after the advent of the World’s Fair, which brought musical ideas from the world over to Paris. Debussy was well known for his use of exoticism in his compositions, drawing on East Asian harmonies and rhythms in a number of his pieces. All that to say, appropriating the musical ideas of an out group was nothing new to French composers.
Some composers, such as Milhaud, tried to fully understand the music they were appropriating, to understand the musical background and work to appropriately use it in their own compositions, showing true respect for the art form. Others, however, such as Poulenc and Satie, while their intentions may have been good, lacked this respect for jazz as an art form, and saw it primarily as a medium for engaging with the public, another form of popular music to incorporate into their own to achieve the everyman music they sought to create.
All of these composers, however, lacked the cultural insight to fully appreciate jazz music and its performers. The racism inherent in society precluded the composers of the day from being able to see jazz music as anything other than a primitive art-form, even those who spent the time and effort to try and learn the music themselves. Those kind of ideas surrounding Black music still exist today, with some right-wing critics and pundits claiming rap music isn’t truly music (most notably the comically misinformed Ben Shapiro), and while most musicians and people familiar with rap can see that that is blatantly untrue, the idea is pervasive among socially conservative whites in the United States. Ultimately, like in Paris with jazz, one must engage with the culture surrounding the music to be able to truly and fully appreciate it, something many are just unwilling to do.