A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz (American Made Music Series)

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 citys musical lineages--African American white and Creole--in jazzs formative years. Charters also maps the inroads blazed by the citys Italian immigrant musicians who left their own imprint on the emerging styles. The study is based on the authors 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 Orleanss musical heritage which is at great risk after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrinas floodwaters.