New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History (Jazz Perspectives)

New Orleans Style tells the tale of the recognition of New Orleans jazz as a discrete style and how that recognition affected the writing of American jazz history.

The men and women who participated in the awakening of American jazz scholarship were partisans of a community of "hot" record collectors, whose interest in the origins of jazz was a foregone conclusion. As an international network of these collectors took shape between the 1920s and 1934, they provided a mechanism for the circulation of historical information on jazz, which then became the basis for the emergence of a jazz literati writing for magazines such as Down Beat, Esquire, the New Republic, and Jazz Information. It was not until later that writers like Charles Edward Smith and William Russell, inspired by their love for the music and emphasizing "New Orleans style," explained in works such as Jazzmen (1939) and The Jazz Record Book (1942) that jazz was "born in New Orleans."

Raeburn traces the conceptualization of jazz history derived from Jazzmen to jazz's ultimate refuge in New Orleans and its integration into the cultures which it celebrated. The result is an essential work of jazz criticism that will fill a major gap in the field's literature.

"Bruce Raeburn has produced an elegantly written and thoroughly researched volume on New Orleans jazz and how people have tried to make sense of it. Startling bits of information regularly emerge and force me to rethink the subject. Even the most informed readers are likely to have the same reaction."
---Krin Gabbard, State University of New York

Bruce Boyd Raeburn is Curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.

Photograph: Editors of Jazzmen (left to right: Charles Edward Smith and Frederic Ramsey, Jr.) enjoying a "folk" moment with William Russell (center) in July, 1941 (The Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 92-48-L).