[Dixielandjazz] The Stories of New Orleans Jazz

[Steve barbone]

Kind of an off beat literary review. But typical of the publicity generated
about New Orleans and Jazz these days.

Cheers,
Steve


New Orleans's Literary Gumbo of Jazz, Myth and History

By MARGO JEFFERSON - September 27, 2005 - NY TIMES

The story of New Orleans jazz is as much mythology as history. That's
probably because the facts themselves were so extraordinary. No city in the
United States has housed more nationalities and religions or has had more
racial, social and sexual divisions or interminglings.

Naturally, New Orleans music traditions have clashed, mixed and reinvented
themselves. By the late 19th century, the music that would be called jazz
was springing up there. Elsewhere, too. But New Orleans was at the center
generating memoirs, oral histories, fiction and nonfiction.

GRAVEYARD DUST by Barbara Hambly (1999)
SOLD DOWN THE RIVER by Barbara Hambly (2000)
COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER by Michael Ondaatje (1976)
CHASING THE DEVIL'S TAIL by David Fulmer (2001)
MR. JELLY ROLL by Alan Lomax (1950)
JELLY'S BLUES by Howard Reich and William Gaines (2003)
SATCHMO: MY LIFE IN NEW ORLEANS by Louis Armstrong (1954)
SATCHMO: THE GENIUS OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG by Gary Giddins (1988)
LOUIS ARMSTRONG: A SELF-PORTRAIT by Louis Armstrong & Richard Meryman (1996)
MUMBO JUMBO by Ishmael Reed (1972)

To read some of these books now, when the city has suffered so, is to feel
acute grief and longing. But one feels the pleasure again too, and the
excitement. Though the subject may be a murder mystery, a biography or race
relations, music infuses the work. Take "Graveyard Dust," the third in
Barbara Hambly's engrossing mystery series, set in 1830's New Orleans. It
begins: 

"African drums in darkness sullen as tar.

"Rossini's 'Di tanti palpiti' unspooling like golden ribbon from the
ballroom's open windows.

"Church bells and thunder."

In the novel by Ms. Hambly, a trained historian and demon storyteller, the
French ruling class tries to blunt the newfound power of Americans. Slavery
thrives. A small class of free nonwhites - Creoles of color and a few blacks
- make their way through a maze of ever more restrictive laws and
conventions.

Benjamin January is one. He is also a musician and surgeon, trained in
France thanks to the planter who bought his mulatto mother, made her his
mistress and saw fit to free her and her two children by a slave. Music
takes January into many worlds, driving or underscoring each tale. He plays
waltzes and mazurkas at white society balls. He hears the strong rhythms of
the stevedores, the African drums and chants of voodoo in the woods and in
Congo Square. In "Sold Down the River," he is returned to slavery - and,
alongside its horrors, to the patois, the field hollers and the sorrow songs
of plantation field hands.

Turn-of the-century New Orleans is the setting of Michael Ondaatje's short
lyrical novel "Coming Through Slaughter." Now we hear ragtime and blues in
honky-tonks and sporting houses; the marches and hymns of brass-band parades
and funerals. 

Men like Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong would eventually make their
way north to recording studios and international fame. The cornet player
Buddy Bolden stayed behind, though, to make his way into jazz legend.

They called him King Bolden: a Dionysius who craved women, wine and music.
He played the blues and mixed it up with hymns. In 1907 he went mad and was
sent to an asylum. Just 29, he stayed there until his death in 1931.

Bolden is the anguished genius of "Coming Through Slaughter." Mr. Ondaatje
alternates between third and first person to give us the voices of Bolden's
rivals, lovers and family, and band members. ("Where did he come from?" one
asks. "He was found before we knew where he had come from. Born at the age
of 22. Walked into a parade one day with white shoes and red shirt.")

Mr. Ondaatje gives Bolden a childhood friend, a sharp-eyed detective who
tries to look out for him. Another version of that figure appears in David
Fulmer's elegant 2001 thriller, "Chasing the Devil's Tail." He is Valentin
St. Cyr, a Creole. St. Cyr can pass for white when necessary and he works
for Tom Anderson, the shrewd bordello owner and politician who (in fact and
in fiction) was called the King of Storyville.

Someone is killing Storyville prostitutes and Anderson wants St. Cyr to find
the killer before the police do. Some suspect King Bolden, who is growing
erratic and knows each of the murdered women. St. Cyr knows Bolden's
innocence won't matter if the powers that be decide he is guilty.

A rising Storyville musician, young Jelly Roll Morton, plays a small part
when St. Cyr consults Morton's godmother Eulalie, a respected voodoo
practitioner. Mr. Fulmer knows about Eulalie because Morton described her to
the folklorist Alan Lomax in a series of extravagant 1938 interviews for the
Library of Congress. Lomax published them as "Mr. Jelly Roll," a
myth-memoir. Now, writers are trying to turn myth into researched history.
The most recent Morton biography, "Jelly's Blues" by Howard Reich and
William Gaines, does so without blunting the drama of his turbulent life.

Louis Armstrong also makes a cameo appearance in "Chasing the Devil's Tail."
Armstrong spent his life moving between fact and legend. He was a great
talker too, and a pithy writer who sometimes revised - or improvised on -
the facts of his life, as in his 1954 memoir, "Satchmo: My Life in New
Orleans." Gary Giddins's "Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong" is another
wonderful appreciation of the artist and the man that draws on newly
discovered Armstrong writings.

Another small, beautifully made book called "Louis Armstrong: A
Self-Portrait" contains the full text of a 1966 Life magazine interview with
Richard Meryman. 

It begins: "When I was about 4 or 5, still wearing dresses, I lived with my
mother in Jane's Alley in a place called Brick Row - a lot of cement, rented
rooms sort of like a motel. And right in the middle of that on Perdido
Street was the Funky Butt hotel - old, beat up, cracks in the wall. On
Saturday nights Mama couldn't find us, 'cause we wanted to hear that music."

Armstrong's potent voice also helps raise the curtain on Ishmael Reed's
brilliant novel "Mumbo Jumbo." This jazz collage jump-cuts from New Orleans
to New York and elsewhere, from frantic politicians to ecstatic artists. He
is mapping the violent culture wars that erupted in the 1890's with ragtime
and blues, and climaxed in the 1920's with a victory for the Jazz Age
against the monopoly of imported European culture.

Mr. Reed calls the spirit of jazz Jes Grew because no one knows just where
it began or how it spread. Jes Grew is an epidemic that makes its victims
feel better, not worse, when they walk down the street singing "Everybody's
Doing It Now" and dance the Turkey Trot on their lunch hour. It spreads from
New Orleans to Mississippi and heads north to Chicago, "with cases even
showing up in Wyoming."

"Mumbo Jumbo" was a graphic novel before we used the term. Mr. Reed accents
his machine-gun and drumbeat prose with cartoons, posters, photographs and
different kinds of typeface.

He reminds us that Jes Grew always renews itself: "We will miss it for a
while, but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never
left."