This book tells the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and cultural sources of New Orleans jazz, the book provides a balanced assessment of the role played by all three of the city’s musical lineages—African Americans, whites, and Creoles—in jazz’s formative years. It also maps the inroads blazed by the city’s Italian immigrant musicians, who left their own imprint on the emerging styles. The study is based on the author’s own interviews, begun in the 1950s, on the extensive material gathered by the Oral History Project ... More

This book tells the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and cultural sources of New Orleans jazz, the book provides a balanced assessment of the role played by all three of the city’s musical lineages—African Americans, whites, and Creoles—in jazz’s formative years. It also maps the inroads blazed by the city’s Italian immigrant musicians, who left their own imprint on the emerging styles. The study is based on the author’s own interviews, begun in the 1950s, on the extensive material gathered by the Oral History Project in New Orleans, on the recent scholarship of a new generation of writers, and on an exhaustive examination of related newspaper files from the jazz era. The book extends the study area of the author’s earlier book Jazz: New Orleans, 1885–1957, and breaks new ground with its in-depth discussion of the earliest New Orleans recordings. It brings the story up to the present, describing the worldwide interest in the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the exciting resurgence of the brass bands of the last decades. The book discusses the renewed concern over New Orleans’s musical heritage, which is at great risk after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters.