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| Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz
ISBN: 9781604733181
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University Press of Mississippi
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Jazz -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- History and criticism; Jazz musicians -- Louisiana -- New Orleans;
Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell 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, Charters provides a balanced assessment of the role played by all three of the city's musical lineages--African American, white, and Creole--in jazz's formative years. Charters 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 his earlier book Jazz: New Orleans, 1885-1957 , and breaks new ground with its in-depth discussion of the earliest New Orleans recordings. A Trumpet around the Corner for the first time 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.
Samuel Charters was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 1, 1929. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, he spent time in New Orleans, where he played clarinet, banjo and washboard in bands and studied with the jazz clarinetist George Lewis. He received a degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, The Country Blues, was published in 1959 and was released in tandem with an album also entitled The Country Blues. His other books included The Roots of the Blues, The Legacy of the Blues, The Poetry of the Blues, The Bluesmen, Jazz New Orleans, A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, Songs of Sorrow, and The Harry Bright Dances. He also produced albums including Chicago: The Blues Today! and the first four albums by Country Joe and the Fish. He published several poetry collections including Things to Do Around Piccadilly and What Paths, What Journeys as well as several novels including Louisiana Black and Elvis Presley Calls His Mother After the Ed Sullivan Show. He also translated works by Swedish authors and wrote a book in Swedish entitled Spelmannen, about Swedish fiddlers. He died of myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow cancer, on March 18, 2015 at the age of 85. (Bowker Author Biography) |
