Description
This book reflects the passionate interest the author has in music, especially the musicians of New Orleans whom he has been photographing since 1957. New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, was once home to such legends as Louis Armstrong and King Joe Oliver. Friedlander has photographed most of them, musicians like Manuel ‘Fess’ Manetta, who was playing with bands before World War I and who tried to teach Louis Armstrong to play with two trumpets at once. Here are Johnny St. Cyr, George ‘Kid Sheik’ Cola, Sweet Emma Barrett, Isidore Barbarin and Roosevelt Sykes, blues singers and guitarists Robert Pete Williams and Snooks Eaglin. From the portraits we move out into the streets, to the marching bands like Young Tuxedo and Eureka, following Friedlander’s eye to the edge of funerals, until, finally, we are immersed in the rhythm of the city itself. Many of Friedlander’s subjects are encountered in an afterword by Whitney Balliett, America’s foremost writer on jazz, who describes a visit he made to the city in the mid-sixties. The Jazz People of New Orleans is a remarkable testament, by a virtuoso photographer, to a city whose musical tradition is at the heart of American culture.
First edition (first American edition, simultaneously published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, London), first printing. Signed by Friedlander. Hardcover. Full red cloth-covered boards with title debossed on cover and spine; with photographically illustrated dust jacket with some wear. Photographs by Friedlander. Afterword by Whitney Balliett. Edited by Friedlander and Mark Holborn. Designed by Katy Homans, New York. 120 pp., with 94 plates, printed by Amilcare Pizzi, Milan, from duotone separations made by Richard Benson and Thomas Palmer. 9-1/9 x 11-1/4 inches. This first edition was limited to 10,000 cloth copies.
