New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century was a complicated city, a rough and beautiful place bursting with energy and excitement. It was a city marked by racial tensions, where the volatile interactions between blacks and whites were further confounded by a substantial Creole population. Yet it was also a city of fervent religious beliefs, where salvation manifested itself in a number of ways. Perhaps above all else, New Orleans was a city of music: funeral bands marched through the streets; professional musicians played the popular tunes of the day in dance halls and cabarets; sanctified parishioners raised church roofs with their impassioned voices; and early blues musicians moaned their troubles on street corners and in honky-tonks, late into the night.

And right in the middle of it all, stomping his feet in church, peeking through the windows of the dance halls, and marching in the second line that followed the parade bands up and down Canal Street, was a young boy named Louis Armstrong. In Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, author and Armstrong scholar Thomas Brothers illustrates the indelible imprints left on Armstrong by New Orleans and its music. The author paints a vivid picture of old New Orleans and, in recounting Armstrong's formative years, also provides a fascinating look into the birth and evolution of jazz itself.

Highly evocative of a distant time and place, Louis Armstrong's New Orleans draws from a wealth of autobiographies, memoirs, and interviews with family, friends, and fellow musicians to tell the story of a man, his city, and his music. Alive with the cadence and speech of Armstrong and his contemporaries, the book is both an enjoyable, highly readable biography and a serious contribution to the scholarship of jazz and one of its greatest geniuses.

THOMAS BROTHERS is the author of Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words and Chromatic Beauty in the Late-Medieval Chanson. A professor of music at Duke University, he lives with his family in Durham, North Carolina.

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