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 in our city over the last 40 years. The 14 essays cover a wide spectrum, from well-publicized entrepreneurs like Irvin Mayfield to splendid but unsung artists like Tom Fischer. The book is, in fact, pleasantly clarinet-biased with profiles of Fischer, Evan Christopher, Dr. Michael White, Joe Torregano, Tim Laughlin and the late Brian Ogilvie; it turns out Jacobsen is a long-time correspondent for the journal The Clarinet.

In my 28 years in New Orleans, I’ve worked with most of these musicians and know some of them quite well. Nevertheless, in every chapter I found new and interesting sides to these gentlemen. That’s what often happens when you let the musicians speak for themselves.

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 is Doomed. All of the themes of Sun Ra’s music are present here. There are romantic notions where the idea is to “dream my dreams / reach into the well as philosophical treatises in poetry darkness / and touch the stars,” as form. In Ra’s poetry, outer space and the apocalypse are always near and earth is backwards and primitive. Poems such as the title poem and the punk-rock-esque “Earth is a Hole in Space” confirm that viewpoint.

Some of these poems ended up as lyrics for some of Ra’s more obscure songs. “Message to the Earthman” ended up as a wild and wooly rock ‘n’ roll track with its repeating words acting as a chant to take listeners and readers away from this planet. Ra also revamps the rhythm of his poems throughout several of them by reworking certain phrases and repeating lines with only one word change, such as “out is the way of the outer / and in the way of the inner / the in of the inner in” in “The Damnedest Air.” This continues into an almost tongue-twister as it continues “is different from the outer in / because the outer in is the outer out yes.” This serves either to enlighten or confuse the reader, but the language itself becomes a music not unlike Ra’s musical themes.

Some of these poems get out into the universe, but that does not make them unintelligible or boring. As Sun Ra says outright, “Strange worlds whirl in my mind.”

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 drunk inside his own house. Tom Piazza’s thoughts of rousing him become quickly tempered by the sounds of Jimmy Martin’s two intemperate guard dogs.

Tom Piazza doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, and in simple, supple language his mounting terror becomes a hysterical heartbeat in the throat of the reader. Adept with emotions, the writer combines the personal and the political with his defenses of his adopted home. New Orleans as theme park, he writes—and not everyone will agree—could conceivably out-worsen New Orleans as après-deluge devastated: “The idea of turning one of the great, thriving, complex living cultural centers of the world…into a manicured jewel box like Savannah or Charleston…is nauseating and despicable.” Turning on a dime from the personal to the political.

He also finds a unifying theme between those two above. Like the Band (Canadians absorbed in Americana) and the Mekons (to Nashville by way of Leeds), Piazza isn’t sure where he belongs and the status of interested outsider leads him to inquiries into the very nature of community, and even friendship. Inspiration and illumination on every page. And he even survives Jimmy Martin (not really a spoiler).

Devil Sent the Rain on Amazon.com

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 first full-length biography of the mercurial musician. House’s career encompasses the heyday of Delta blues in 1930s and 1940s Mississippi and its resurgence as part of the folk revival of the 1960s.

Beaumont gives a fine portrayal of House’s life and music in both eras. His writing is straightforward and extensively researched. He lets the reader know what House’s life as a black musician in pre-Civil Rights Mississippi was like, and he delves comprehensively into House’s music and recording sessions. There are some great stories about well-known fellow bluesmen and travelers Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson as well as more obscure ones such as Willie Brown. Beaumont also gets into House’s mind and motivations too. As great a musician as he was, House was a conflicted man. He had been a preacher and had difficulty justifying singing “the devil’s music” on one hand and being a religious man on the other. He also seemed ambivalent about his fame and making music in the 1960s after he started his career again.

Beaumont devotes much analysis to these issues and more without patronizing or making cultural assumptions. This reserve serves him well as he spend almost half the book detailing House’s career after his “rediscovery” by white blues fans in the 1960s. Here, Beaumont presents a fair assessment not only of House’s career post-1960s but also of the different viewpoints of the folk revival, the “rediscovery” of these musicians, and the way all this was seen both then and now. Beaumont unearths previously unknown facts about House’s life and offers several new interviews with people who knew and played with him after he left Mississippi and ended up in Rochester, New York. This biography of one of the essential musicians of blues music is a required read for blues lovers and a good primer for those whose interest in this music isn’t as deep.

Preachin’ the Blues on Amazon.com

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 to Nelson’s resignation as Rolling Stone’s reviews editor. Reviews went from explorations of art and ideas to exactly 32-line reviews that, according to a Wenner letter, “must contain one sentence directly advising the reader whether or why he/she would like the LP, in whole or part.”

The story Kevin Avery tells is of someone who believed passionately in the art that moved him, whether it was Zevon, the New York Dolls—who he convinced Mercury Records to sign when he was their A&R rep—or Bob Dylan. He championed many of the New York singer/songwriters who collectively would come to be known as “the New Dylans,” and he treated musicians as par with the novelists and filmmakers he referenced when talking about music.

Few of the artists profiled in the selected works do much for me—late ‘70s Rod Stewart, Jackson Browne, Zevon—but Nelson writes about each with such care and insight that I went back to listen to all of them again. His grimly funny account of his days at Mercury is a look into another industry that has changed radically.

Nelson’s post-Rolling Stone story is a sad decline as he found himself unable to finish projects, and ended up working in a video store for much of his later life. He successfully pitched books on Neil Young and writer Ross MacDonald, but never delivered either, despite having done countless interviews with Kenneth Millar (MacDonald’s real name). He interviewed Clint Eastwood on and off for four years for a Rolling Stone cover story he never finished.

Kevin Avery has edited those interviews with Eastwood into Conversations with Clint, a look at Eastwood’s career from his television days on Rawhide to The Gauntlet, the period when Eastwood became a star. Nelson talks with him at length about the spaghetti westerns, Sergio Leone and Dirty Harry, but he spends significant time talking about some of Eastwood’s less respected films such as Every Which Way but Loose and Bronco Billy.

Because Nelson was a film buff, the conversations tilt toward the role of directors, particularly Don Siegel, who worked with Eastwood on a number of films including Dirty Harry. Eastwood consistently provides subtle insight into the life of an actor and his decision-making process, speaking frankly about what he saw in roles or projects, and what he thought of the results.

The books combined don’t make a claim for Nelson as the woefully overlooked writer of his time, but they put him back in a conversation he’s been AWOL from for too long.

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 the music business kingpins who rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s during a time of dramatic social and economic transformation. Radio supplanted vaudeville, black jazz morphed into white swing, and an emerging record industry helped spread the sounds of multiple strains of American popular music.

Taking up the role previously played by the Theater Owners Booking Association, these seminal entrepreneurs devised a new and more flexible economic strategy that selectively targeted the production of live performances in a seemingly endless string of black urban venues and back-country juke joints. They adapted the “jazz orchestra” model into smaller, more-informal units that began to shift their attention from snappy big-band arrangements to charismatic lead performers and especially compelling lead vocalists.

This new entertainment network came to be known informally as the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” and it featured such artists as Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Ray Charles, Little Richard, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, and even Jimi Hendrix. Remarkably, the inherent structure of the Chitlin’ Circuit survived the 1950s’ rise to dominance of the modern recording industry and has remained relatively intact, primarily in the Deep South, where in the 1970s and 1980s it produced a new generation of Southern soul artists, including Little Milton, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Bobby Rush, all part of an underground African-American music scene that continues to evolve to this day.

The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll is a highly entertaining and enormously informative contribution to modern American history, and is especially notable for the author’s ability to bring colorful characters to life and place them in the larger context of social change and evolving urban history. New Orleanians will especially appreciate whole chapters devoted to Roy Brown and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, as well as multiple descriptions of The Dew Drop Inn, not to mention the likely origins in the Crescent City’s drag queen subculture of both Louis Jordan’s classic “Caldonia” and Professor Longhair’s “She Ain’t Got No Hair.”

The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll does what more books about American popular music ought to do—it connects the music to what the author rightly describes as the “non-musical forces” within which the music evolved and then developed into new forms of expression, thereby influencing the larger American popular culture.

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 know, Armstrong’s “finger” flew during a 1957 interview with reporter Larry Lubenow
from the University of Arkansas. Satchmo called Ike “two-faced” and condemned him for having “no guts,” after Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to temporarily preserve segregation in Little Rock.

For good measure, the trumpeter called Faubus a “no-good motherfucker,” but Lubenow could of course not go to press with that. He did allow the reporter back into his hotel room after the Associated Press demanded proof of the two-faced, no guts remarks. “Don’t take nothing out that story,” said Satchmo. “That’s just what I said and still say.” At the bottom of Lubenow’s copy he wrote one word. “Solid.”

And that word can stand in, surprisingly enough, for most of Armstrong’s “decline,” defined by Riccardi as the span from the 1947 NYC Town Hall concert, until Satchmo’s overworked heart gave out in 1971. Riccardi finds much less fault with these years than most jazzbos and even most Satchmo-watchers. He methodically goes about rehabilitating Armstrong’s Act II.

And comes up with a fetching, sticky web of evidence. Armstrong taught “Mack the Knife” to swing before Bobby Darin turned it into a theme song. He let his heart show on “Blueberry Hill” before Fats Domino cut it a shade more smug. He led his All-Stars band all across the globe playing music planted in New Orleans’ classic style, but green and growing from its roots.

Many dismissals of latter-day Satchmo, the author argues, stem from misunderstandings. His upbringing taught him to value showmanship and entertainment as much as “artistry.”On race, he’ll always suffer for not marching; even Riccardi concludes as much, but his New Orleans upbringing taught him to cling to the nearest powerful white man (i.e. manager Joe Glaser). In those days, that was not an option as much as a survival tactic.

“They would beat me on the mouth if I marched, and without my mouth I would not be able to blow my horn,” he told a reporter in Denmark after the Montgomery riots in 1965. “They would even beat Jesus if he was black and marched.” But onstage that night he blew “Black and Blue” until everyone knew what he was talking about. “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country,” he’d told Lubenow about a proposed trip to the USSR. “What am I supposed to say?” He said it with song, with the horn, with all-inclusive artistry.

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, OffBeat consulting editor John Swenson recounts the efforts made by musicians to help with New Orleans’ recovery after the post-Katrina flooding. His account may be a little Bywater-centric—though that’s where a lot of the action was—and he focuses less on what big names did and more on the working class of New Orleans musicians, artists that people outside New Orleans might not know but who played meaningful roles in their neighborhoods or the music scene. He writes with passion and a strong sense of outrage of the roles played by musicians such as Glen David Andrews, Shamarr Allen, Helen Gillet and Tab Benoit, not so much because they chose them as because responsibilities fell to them. Making music, as Swenson depicts it, is a civic act as much as an artistic one, and the stories of musicians can’t be separated from the larger story of New Orleans after Katrina without missing an essential element.

Spera’s Groove Interrupted is less obviously the story of a community, with each chapter dedicated to one artist, ranging from household names to artists whose careers largely exist in New Orleans. But when he tells stories about Gatemouth Brown, Mystikal, Alex Chilton or Phil Anselmo, Spera tells people stories. Change their occupations and these could easily be the stories of elderly insurance salesmen and high school chemistry profs who want to be left alone. That doesn’t mean Groove Interrupted is devoid of music. The chapter on Jeremy Davenport’s recording sessions illustrates hilariously how musicians can get lost in the world of possibilities; nor are the specifics of the personalities lost in the commonalities. Fats Domino’s story is one of a man late in his life in New York City, but his eccentricities are very much his.

Taken as a whole, the chapters add up to tell the story of people—not just musicians—in a city and the challenges they face.

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 all with a sense of humanity. Previously, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has been presented with its black and white uniforms in stately, dignified portraits. This book looks like the way the music sounds today in all its reach; there are expressions of joy as well as the ambiguous stares of trumpeter John Brunious and drummer Joe Lastie, the mysterious wisdom in bassist Walter Payton’s portrait, and the quiet release of Greg Stafford looking at the ceiling.

Behind it all is the venerable architecture of the Hall itself, against which most of the photographs are set. Preservation Hall is a character in this book with its mottled colors, stained walls, and clouded windows. Eve Abrams’ interviews sensitively get the musicians to reveal the appeal of the Hall and the music without sacrificing either’s mystique. It is a delicate task and she does it very well, as does Brinkman behind the camera.

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 subject about a “significant moment” in his or her life. Anything from being thrown off a horse (Stacy Simmons) to jackknifing on the highway (Spencer Bohren) to cooking pasta a bit too al dente for a one-toothed man (Evan Christopher). Some of these stories are both moving and amusing, but there is no particular direction Verdier wants to take us in, other than to connect us, and herself, to New Orleans. She left the Crescent City with her husband (pianist Scott Kirby) and two daughters for a small North Idaho town in 2000.

The photographic technique used by Verdier is that of double exposure. One, take a picture of a wall with a camera on a tripod. Two, take a picture of a person in front of the same wall, without moving the camera. Verdier started out shooting 35-mm film, where she simply didn’t advance the film for the second exposure, but has since moved on to digital.

People are portrayed as ghosts and passers-by throughout the book, while the walls, albeit weathered, appear solid. This is a fairly European (as opposed to American) view—places and buildings remain; people pass. We “see” the people who have passed before us in flaky plaster and mossy cracks; we love old walls because of our imagined connections with other people through time. Verdier shares this view, I think. But in some ways it stands at odds with what happened here in 2005. Sometimes it’s the places and buildings that pass, while people remain. The template for this book was established long before Katrina (New Orleans Walls has been 16 years in the making) and it’s worth noting that Verdier did not change her artistic approach after the storm. Did she have to? No. The story she wants to tell us is about permanence and constance, and also romance, despite a change in circumstances. Marie-Dominique Verdier speaks with a French accent, and in some way, so does her book.