This book explores the intertwined histories of Saint-Louis, Senegal, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Although separated by an ocean, both cities were founded during the early French imperial expansion of the Atlantic world. Both became important port cities of their own continents, the Atlantic world as a whole, and the African diaspora. The slave trade not only played a crucial role in the demographic and economic growth of Saint-Louis and New Orleans, but also directly connected the two cities. The Company of the Indies ran the Senegambia slave-trading posts and the Mississippi colony simultaneously from 1719 to 1731. By examining the linked histories of these cities over the longue durée, this edited collection shows the crucial role they played in integrating the peoples of the Atlantic world. The essays also illustrate how the interplay of imperialism, colonialism, and slaving that defined the early Atlantic world operated and evolved differently on both sides of the ocean. The chapters in part one, Negotiating Slavery and Freedom, highlight the centrality of the institution of slavery in the urban societies of Saint-Louis and New Orleans from their foundation to the second half of the nineteenth century. Part two, Elusive Citizenship, explores how the notions of nationality, citizenship, and subjecthood- as well as the rights or lack of rights associated with them- were mobilized, manipulated, or negotiated at key moments in the history of each city. Part three, Mythic Persistence, examines the construction, reproduction, and transformation of myths and popular imagination in the colonial and postcolonial cities. It is here, in the imagined past, that New Orleans and Saint-Louis most clearly mirror one another. The essays in this section offer two examples of how historical realities are simplified, distorted, or obliterated to minimize the violence of the cities' common slave and colonial past in order to promote a romanticized present. With editors from three continents and contributors from around the world, this work is truly an international collaboration.

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 forty 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.

At the age of nineteen, jazz fanatic Martyn 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.

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. In 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.

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).

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).