New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History

Abstract

This is a fascinating and insightful study of the development of Orleans jazz and its effect on jazz history. New Orleans Style is the story of how Orleans jazz came to be recognizable as a discrete style and how that recognition affected the writing of American jazz history. 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. An international network of collectors took shape between the 1920s and 1934, providing a mechanism for the circulation of historical information on jazz, which then became the basis for the emergence of a jazz literati writing for magazine such as Down Beat, Esquire, The Republic, and Information.Inspired by their love for the music and emphasizing 'New Orleans style', writers like Charles Edward Smith and William Russell explained in work such as Jazzmen (1939) and The Jazz Record Book (1942) that jazz was 'born in Orleans'. Raeburn traces the conceptualization of jazz history derived from Jazzmen to its ultimate refuge in Orleans and its integration into the cultures which it celebrated. result is an essential work of jazz criticism that will fill a major gap in the field's literature.