There are few listeners in New Orleans who’ve devoted themselves as fervently to the cause of covering traditional jazz as Tom Jacobsen. Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations With the Men Who Make the Music is a unique oral history of a subject surprisingly neglected: the lives of people who’ve made their living playing trad jazz [...]
Sun Ra, This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra (Kicks Books)
Few people know that Sun Ra, besides being an avant-black futurist big band leader, was also a poet. He and his band would recite chants and poems during and between songs at performances, and now, thanks to Kicks Books—Norton Records’ publishing imprint—many of Ra’s works of words are collected in the appropriately titled This Planet [...]
Tom Piazza, Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America (Harper Perennial)
Tom Piazza sits in a car waiting for Jimmy Martin to come out of Jimmy Martin’s house. Jimmy Martin, in case you didn’t know—and Jimmy Martin would have been painfully aware that in many cases, people didn’t know—was a bluegrass legend, as memorable for his smash-the-table-against-the-wall temper as for singing and stringing. Jimmy Martin is [...]
Daniel Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House (Oxford University Press)
Son House has long been regarded as one of the most authentic Delta bluesmen. His music and performances were as intense as music gets, and his influence stretches from Robert Johnson to John Mooney, both of whom were his pupils. Daniel Beaumont’s book, Preachin’ the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House, is the [...]
Kevin Avery, Everything is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson (Fantagraphics); Conversations with Clint (Continuum)
Everything is an Afterthought presents a vision of the heyday of rock journalism, times that have long past. The features and reviews by Paul Nelson are longer than anyone would run today—a Warren Zevon profile started as a 67-page typewritten manuscript—and his head-butting with publisher Jann Wenner over the length and nature of reviews led [...]
The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll by Preston Lauterbach (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Unlike the vast majority of popular music historians today, first-time book author Preston Lauterbach admirably resists the temptations of “fan club worship”—complexly detailed biographies of popular entertainers— and “the new academia”—the same thing, but with impenetrable technical jargon. Instead, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll offers a colorfully rich portrait of [...]
Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (Pantheon Books)
A friend I know as intellectual and a roots music aficionado waved off Satchmo, saying the man’s main interests “were pot and Swiss Kriss.” When I told her that the late Louis Armstrong gave Eisenhower the finger, metaphorically, she lightened up a bit: “I would have given him the finger too.” For those who don’t [...]
City Songs: John Swenson’s New Atlantis and Keith Spera’s Groove Interrupted
Television before Treme treated musicians as outsiders—frequently as degenerates, at least as self-absorbed and often predatory. The HBO drama implies that they’re just as much a part of a city as lawyers, laborers and bar owners, and it’s a theme that writers John Swenson and Keith Spera echo in their new books. In New Atlantis, [...]
Preservation Hall by Shannon Brinkman and Eve Abrams (LSU University Press)
Preservation Hall is renowned worldwide for its music and spirit. In their new book about the Hall, photographer Shannon Brinkman and interviewer Eve Abrams capture that spirit in both beautiful shots and heartfelt comments from the musicians who populate it. The photographs focus on the musicians, the audience, and the setting, and Brinkman captures it [...]
Marie-Dominique Verdier, New Orleans Walls: Still Standing (First Light Press)
New Orleans Walls is a collection of portraits of more than 80 “emblematic” New Orleans people posing in front of walls. The walls were chosen by Verdier, born and raised in France, for their color, texture and various states of falling-down-ness (read beauté). Most of the portraits are accompanied by a story told by each [...]
