Description: Much of what we know about the birthplace of jazz is the stuff of legend. Danny Barker was a small boy during the early years of jazz, but he heard all the great marching bands, the trumpet kings, and the jazz bottles at first hand, as well as playing in a children's "spasm" band in the red light district of Storyville (which officially closed in 1917, but where many of its occupants carried on exactly as before throughout the 1920s). Barker was working on this book -- the second volume of his memoirs -- for some years before his death in 1994, drawing together a lifetime of writing on early jazz and the characters that mode up the rich social fabric of New Orleans. Some of the raw material for this volume exists in draft form in the William Ransome Hogan Archive at Tulane. But through interview, correspondence and editorial collaboration, Barker and his editor have shaped and extended much of it into a book that brings brilliantly to life the formative years of a uniquely American art form.

Please Wait