Should inspire many new visitors to the Crescent city and hip them to what's been cooking there all these years.
A casual yet palatable guide to the music of New Orleans that serves up its spicy musical and historical matter in high style.
Seeking clues to the city's rich musical heritage, Lichtenstein (Machisma, 1981) and Dankner (Music/Loyola University) find them in New Orleans's extraordinary racial and cultural mix, and in an appreciation for revelry that goes back to Louisiana's first French governor. The authors describe the Sunday celebrations of slaves in Congo Square, and the influence their music had on the musicians of the city's red-light district. We meet mythic figures like Buddy Bolden, Tony Jackson (so eager to play piano that he built his own at age seven), and Jelly Roll Morton. We encounter Louis Armstrong, whose genius made jazz jump, dropping a sheet of lyrics in the middle of a recording session and inventing scat out of sheer inspired desperation. The authors also make clear the city's contribution to rhythm and blues and rock, with the gospel- drenched voicings of Ray Brown and Little Richard, and with Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew honing the art of the "two minute radio hit.'' Full of stories, anecdotes, and interviews, the text describes the contribution of masters like Dr. John and the Neville Brothers to many classic R&B recordings, and it brings us up to the present with performers like the Marsalis family, the Rebirth Band, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and many underappreciated musicians. And though the authors tiptoe around controversies like the one surrounding Wynton Marsalis's paradox-riven jazz purism, they don't fail to investigate the role of education or of ethnic and social tensions in New Orleans's musical development, and they make clear how the various artists have suffered for the music that has made their city "America's Florence.''
Should inspire many new visitors to the Crescent city and hip them to what's been cooking there all these years.Pub Date: June 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03468-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf