Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations with the Men Who Make the Music
Author(s): Thomas W. Jacobsen (Author)
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2011
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 264 pages
ISBN-10: 0807137790
ISBN-13: 9780807137796
Book Description
About a century after its beginnings, traditional jazz remains the definitive music of New Orleans and an international hallmark of the city. The enduring sound and boundless energy of this American art form have produced a long list of jazz legends. From Lionel Ferbos — the city’s oldest working jazz musician — to Grammy winner Irvin Mayfield, the musical heritage of traditional jazz lives on through each player’s passion. In Traditional New Orleans Jazz, veteran jazz journalist Thomas Jacobsen discusses that legacy with Ferbos, Mayfield, and a who’s who of the present-day scene’s “trad jazz” players. Through intimate conversations with jazz veterans and up-and-coming talent, Jacobsen elicits honest, witty, and sometimes comedic discussions that reveal a strong mutual devotion to do one thing — compose and play music inspired by the Crescent City’s earliest jazz musicians. Traditional New Orleans Jazz presents local perspectives on what has become an international language with interviews from Lucien Barbarin, Evan Christopher, Duke Heitger, Leroy Jones, Dr. Michael White, and many more. Jacobsen also notes the stewardship of traditional jazz means more than making music. Its longevity relies on teaching and innovation, furthering the inextricable ties between the music and the men who make it. Traditional New Orleans jazz is a culture of its own, and the players in this remarkable volume are its native speakers.
Editorial Reviews
Review
”Thomas Jacobsen is not only incredibly knowledgeable about jazz, he is clearly at ease with the community of artists he writes about–authentic to the core. Much has been written about the originators of jazz in New Orleans. Jacobsen’s contribution is to show the vitality of many of today’s key traditional jazz artists. He has given us an accurate, heartfelt, and downright entertaining picture of many of today’s leading traditional jazz artists in New Orleans. Jacobsen, a fine jazz scholar, could have given us yet another book on early New Orleans pioneers. Happily, he chose to profile working artists, each with their own links to the city’s rich jazz past.” –Charles Suhor, author of Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years through 1970
”
Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations with the Men Who Make the Music is a thoroughly absorbing and impressively informative collection of musicians’ profiles by a seasoned and perceptive interviewer. An authority on early jazz and its makers, Thomas W. Jacobsen has provided incisive accounts of nearly twenty musicians, all of whom have been active into the 2000s, the careers of several reaching back to the 1920s through the ’40s. An especially valuable, and moving, feature of this book is the author’s updating of these interviews, which were done over the past fifteen years, to the post-Katrina era. There are splendid photographs of all the musicians. This volume is packed with history and should be read by all who are interested in both the evolution of the New Orleans sound and in jazz itself.” –W. Royal Stokes, author of Growing Up with Jazz: Twenty-Four Musicians Talk about Their Lives and Careers
”In an era when critics are pondering the denouement of jazz, there is a tendency to relegate New Orleans’s role to first act status and to leave it at that. Thomas Jacobsen’s book contradicts that assumption in exploring how New Orleans jazz has thrived in the last half century, continuing to attract and produce exceptional jazz talent. In this compilation of interviews, each with a distinct character, ‘new generation’ stars such as Irvin Mayfield, Evan Christopher, and Tim Laughlin, British expatriates Trevor Richards, Clive Wilson, and Brian Ogilvie, and such major unsung heroes as Lionel Ferbos, Eddie Bayard, and Jack Maheu talk about their lives in New Orleans music. Any jazz lover who picks up this book will not be able to put it down.” –Bruce Boyd Raeburn, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives
Book Description
About a century after its beginnings, traditional jazz remains the definitive music of New Orleans and an international hallmark of the city. Producing a long list of jazz legends from Lionel Ferbos — the city’s oldest working jazz musician — to Grammy winner Irvin Mayfield, the musical heritage of traditional jazz lives on through each player’s passion. In Traditional New Orleans Jazz, veteran jazz journalist Thomas Jacobsen discusses that legacy with Ferbos, Mayfield, and a who’s who of the present-day scene’s “trad jazz” players. Through intimate conversations with jazz veterans and up-and-coming talent, Jacobsen elicits honest, witty, and sometimes comedic discussions that reveal a strong mutual devotion to do one thing–compose and play music inspired by the Crescent City’s earliest jazz musicians.
About the Author
Thomas W. Jacobsen received his doctoral degree in classical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania and is professor emeritus at Indiana University. He taught at Vanderbilt University and has been a visiting professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, and Tulane University. Jacobsen, a resident of New Orleans for the last two decades, has published extensively on New Orleans jazz in The Mississippi Rag and The Clarinet magazine among several other jazz periodicals.
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