A fascinating and insightful study of the development of New Orleans jazz and its effect on jazz history

Jazz has been around for over a hundred years but how much do we know about its history, and how much of what think we know is true? Beginning in the so called Jazz Age of the 1920s jazz history was recounted and interpreted by admiring authors and record collectors both in the United States and elsewhere. However, since the early 1990s some historians have come to doubt the validity of the conventional narrative of the story of jazz and some of its most hallowed traditions. In Jazz Historiography: The Story of Jazz History Writing Daniel Hardie uncovers the course of jazz history writing from early Jazz Age American and French publications to Academic texts in the 2000s, and seeks answers to questions about the accuracy of those accounts and the influence they have had on our understanding of jazz history - even the impact they might have had on the course of jazz history itself. How much for example did the work of jazz historians influence the course of the New Orleans Revival? Was the appearance of bebop in the 1940s a revolutionary response to oppression experienced by Afro American musicians in a commercialized popular music industry, or was it an attempt to mirror the development of classical music of the time? How has the development of University jazz studies influenced the writing of jazz history?

This book tells the story of the first Thirty Years of Jazz during which the basic jazz of Buddy Bolden developed into Classic Jazz and passed into history. It covers the first twenty years before recordings appeared and uncovers the Saga of the first Jazz Bands. - their struggle to adapt to the demands of their audiences and the impetus they gave to the Roaring Twenties when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz recordings in 1927 - and the age of hot Classic Jazz, of King Oliver and the transition to Swing.

Discover the enthralling world of Ralph J. Gleason, a pioneering music journalist who expanded the possibilities of the newspaper music column, sparked the San Francisco jazz and rock scenes, and co-founded Rolling Stone magazine. Gleason not only reported on but influenced the trajectory of popular music. He alone chronicled the unparalleled evolution of popular music from the 1930s into the 1970s, and while doing so, interviewed and befriended many trailblazers such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. A true iconoclast, he dismantled the barriers between popular and highbrow music, and barriers separating the musical genres. He played a crucial role in shaping postwar music criticism by covering all genres and analyzing music's social, political, and historical meanings. This book uncovers never-before-seen letters, anecdotes, family accounts, and exclusive interviews to reveal one of the most intriguing personalities of the 20th century.

In New Orleans, music screams. It honks. It blats. It wails. It purrs. It messes with time. It messes with pitch. It messes with your feet. It messes with your head. One musician leads to another; traditions overlap, intertwine, nourish each other; and everyone seems to know everyone else. From traditional jazz through rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll to sissy bounce, in second-line parades, from the streets to clubs and festivals, the music seems unending. In Talking New Orleans Music, author Burt Feintuch has pursued a decades-long fascination with the music of this singular city. Thinking about the devastation—not only material but also cultural—caused by the levees breaking in 2005, he began a series of conversations with master New Orleans musicians, talking about their lives, the cultural contexts of their music, their experiences during and after Katrina, and their city. Photographer Gary Samson joined him, adding a compelling visual dimension to the book. Here you will find intimate and revealing interviews with eleven of the city's most celebrated musicians and culture-bearers—Soul Queen Irma Thomas, Walter “Wolfman” Washington, Charmaine Neville, John Boutté, Dr. Michael White, Deacon John Moore, Cajun bandleader Bruce Daigrepont, Zion Harmonizer Brazella Briscoe, producer Scott Billington, as well as Christie Jourdain and Janine Waters of the Original Pinettes, New Orleans's only all-woman brass band. Feintuch's interviews and Samson's sixty-five color photographs create a powerful portrait of an American place like no other and its worlds of music.

Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune