This book is a highly personal portrait of New Orleans and its music today - a city that has been hard hit by Katrina, but is managing to keep its great jazz tradition, brass band scene, incomparable food, and unique lifestyle vital and intact. The book will be published just in time for the August 29 first anniversary of the hurricane which changed New Orleans completely.

Among the musicians and groups at the heart of the New Orleans jazz scene who make their appearance in this book are:

The Rebirth Brass Band, Hot 8, The Soul Rebels, The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Johnny Vidacovich, Barry Martyn, Lars Edegran, Chuck Badie, Pete Fountain, Michael White, The Hot Club of New Orleans, Coco Robicheaux, record company owner George Buck, and the gospel musician Billy Edwards.

The book also presents portraits of every day New Orleans people confronting a challenging situation.

To read an extract of this title, click here

Samuel Charters is an eminent historian of jazz and blues music. He began making field recordings in the South in the early 1950s and has subsequently produced many recordings, both of individual blues artists and of the musical backgrounds of the blues in the United States and the Carribbean. Born in Pittsburgh, he now divides his time between Sweden and Conneticut.

Other books by Samuel Charters:

Walking a Blues Road
The Day is So Long and the Wages So Small
Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn
The Legacy of the Blues
Roots of the Blues: An African Search

Orginal Paperback £9.95 $17.95
330 pp Black & White photographs
ISBN: 0-7145-3131-6
September 2006
Rights: World