[Dixielandjazz] For your Xmas present list?

[TBW504 at aol.com]

I recently posted a mention about Mick Burns' book on Barry Martyn. Here's  
what LSUP have to say:
 
Drummer, record producer, bandleader, jazz researcher, and cigar-chomping  
raconteur Barry Martyn is a New Orleans original who happens to have been born  
in England. Implausible though this may seem, it makes perfect sense to 
members  of the New Orleans traditional jazz community, who view themselves as an  
extended family based on merit as much as nativity. For more than fifty years,  
Martyn has been a fixture in the Crescent City's jazz scene, laying down the  
beat for generations of celebrated musicians and avidly promoting the city's  
unique musical heritage around the world. In Walking with Legends—based on 
over  forty hours of interviews with Martyn by fellow British jazz enthusiast 
and  author Mick Burns—Martyn reflects upon his life in jazz and offers a window 
into  a musical world that few have understood, let alone witnessed from the 
inside.  
Like thousands of teenagers in Europe in the 1950s, Martyn espoused New  
Orleans jazz with a fervor bordering on religious fanaticism. At the age of  
nineteen, he found his way to the Crescent City and began working as a  
professional drummer in clubs and studios. The first white man in the United  States to 
join a black musician's union, he eventually started his own record  label and 
recorded hundreds of jam sessions that today are regarded as classics  in 
Europe. In 1972, he formed The Legends of Jazz, an old-style New Orleans jazz  
band that toured the world and took New Orleans jazz into the American showbiz  
mainstream. 
Martyn's life story provides unique intimate glimpses of a  vanished 
generation of New Orleans musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Kid  Sheik Cola, 
Harold Dejan, Joe Watkins, Albert Nicholas, Kid Thomas, Andrew  Blakeney, and many 
others. Throughout his chronicle, Martyn highlights the  continual clash of 
cultures that arose from an avid British pupil learning  lessons of life and 
music from elderly African American strangers who take him  under their wing both 
out of curiosity and self-interest. Together, they find a  way to connect 
through music, even if the road gets a little bumpy at times.  
Martyn punctuates the exploits of his musical mentors with punch lines, and  
his homespun mode of expression, coupled with Burns's deft and often humorous  
annotations, make for lively and entertaining reading. A standard-bearer for 
New  Orleans's jazz drumming tradition, Martyn remains one of the city's 
busiest  musicians and most avid promoters of New Orleans music. With Walking with  
Legends, he honors the legacies of the African American musicians who taught 
and  inspired him and affirms the importance of the human relationships that 
make the  music possible. 
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK 
"You may not learn how to play drums  in a jazz band by reading this book, 
but you'll definitely come away with an  understanding of how New Orleans music 
can bring people of diverse backgrounds  together."—Bruce Boyd Raeburn, 
Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University,  from his Foreword 
Mick Burns (1942-2007) was the author of Keeping the Beat  on the Street: The 
New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance and The Great Olympia Band  and played 
jazz professionally in Europe and the United States for forty years.  He lived in 
Spilsby, Lincolnshire, in England
 
Sounds good to me!
Brian Wood