Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville

A selection of Danny Barker's writings, beginning with a long portrait of Buddy Bolden, the "first man of jazz", drawn from conversations and interviews with the generation of jazzmen that invented the music. The book also contains Barker's own recollections of Storyville.

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This is a selection of Danny Barker's writings, beginning with a long portrait of Buddy Bolden, the "first man of jazz", drawn from conversations and interviews with the generation of jazzmen that invented the music. The book also contains Barker's own recollections of Storyville in its dying days, plus more material dating from his pioneering period of work in the big bands, with a memoir of trombonist Charlie Green, and of life on the road with Cab Calloway. Barker has included material from the "Jazzland Research Guild", an organization founded in the 1940s to research the backgrounds of his colleagues in one of the first efforts by any black musician to document jazz history. Barker died on 13 March 1994, and the final text has been edited by Alyn Shipton from Barker's copious drafts and notes, plus transcripts on their conversations together.