George Lewis, one of the great traditional jazz clarinetists, was
born in 1900 at about the same time that jazz itself first appeared
in New Orleans. And by the time he died, on the last day of 1968,
New Orleans jazz had pretty much run its course, too. By then a
jazz museum stood on Bourbon Street, and a cultural center was
under construction where Globe Hall had Stood. Lewis's life thus
paralleled that of New Orleans jazz, and in his later years hew as
the best known standard bearer of his city's music. He came to the
attention of the jazz world at the time of the so-called "New
Orleans Revival" of the 1940's, when veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson
was recorded by a number of jazz enthusiasts, notably William
Russell. In this new biography, Tom Bethell challenges a favorite
myth of the history of jazz: that the music became moribund in New
Orleans after the legal red light district, Storyville, was closed
in 1917, resulting in most jazz musicians going "up the river." In
fact, Bethell shows, many more jazzmen stayed in the city than
left, and the musical style continued to develop and grow. Thus the
jazz fans who arrived in the city in the early 1940's did not
encounter a "revival" of an old style so much as an ongoing
tradition, with clarinetists like Lewis having been influenced by
Benny Goodman and the Swing Era in addition to Lorenzo Tio and the
Creole School. After Bunk Johnson's death in 1949, at a time when
many other social changes were beginning to be felt in the city,
the New Orleans jazz tradition began to go into a decline. It
became increasingly rigid and repetitive, and was often designed to
please what one observer called "Dixieland fans yelling for their
favorite members." The book is based on lengthy research in New
Orleans, including interviews with George Lewis shortly before his
death, and unpublished material from the diaries kept by William
Russell on his visits to New Orleans between 1942 and 1949. It also
includes a statement by Lewis on jazz and the best way to play it
and a complete Lewis discography. This title is part of UC Press's
Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California
Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and
give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to
1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship
accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title
was originally published in 1977.
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