Up From the Cradle of Jazz

"This book is considered to be the definitive history of New Orleans music in terms of an overview of the last 50 years. The three people who wrote the book are well-regarded journalists and researchers. Essentially they did this survey of the music of New Orleans from this era and if you want to understand what it consisted of and what it is now in the present this is the best book to read. This edition came out a couple of years ago and it was updated from the original book so they cover a little bit of the hip-hop scene and bring it up to date. Professor Longhair is one. He was a piano player who first came on the scene in the forties. His real name was Henry Byrd and he is sort of the patron saint of New Orleans music. In fact the club Tipitina’s, which is the flagship New Orleans club, got its name from one of his songs. There is a big banner of his face over the stage. He was the guy that influenced all the piano players that came after him, including Fats Domino and Allen Toussaint. He had this heavy left-hand style where he would play the rhythm parts and then the melody stuff with his right hand. It was just a really interesting synthesis of Caribbean styles, of Latin influences and barrelhouse, and it all came together in the style that was unique to him. He is discussed in the book as well as Allen Toussaint. But the book also discusses the brass band tradition. It goes back a hundred-plus years and it grew out of the jazz funeral tradition as well as from the influence of European brass bands in the early days in New Orleans. This is why New Orleans is seen as the place where jazz came from. And that is the thing. There are all these different musical influences mixed together. New Orleans from its founding was a synthesis of different cultures. You had French, Spanish and African influences. African was there in the form of the slaves that were brought here. It was that melting-pot scenario that really gave birth to the music. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Jazz grew out of a combination of African rhythm and European brass instruments. In New Orleans you had these brass bands that accompanied funeral processions through the city from the church to the cemetery. There would be a brass band that would play slowly for the first part of the march to communicate the sadness and then they would pick up the tempo and play faster to represent when the person’s spirit was being set free. That brass band tradition has over the decades morphed into something else, where you have these younger brass bands that play funk and hip hop and even rock songs but with brass instruments. And that is one of the real definitive sounds of the city now. There is nowhere else in the country or the world that has a similar tradition. As far as Treme goes there is no better depiction of the contemporary music scene in New Orleans than what you see on the show. David Simon, the co-creator, is very well regarded. His series The Wire was also highly acclaimed and he has been coming to New Orleans for 20 years. Eric Overmyer, his co-creator of Treme , has had a house here for over two decades, so both these guys know New Orleans’s music culture. They talked HBO into letting them set a series in the world of New Orleans music after Katrina. Technically it is a fictionalised show but they use a lot of musicians playing themselves in the show. Absolutely – they have a lot of live performances in the show. The soundtrack CDs are all live performances from the show so it is the most authentic representation of contemporary music in New Orleans that has ever been. The amount of money and research that these people have invested to make it really is pretty impressive."