The latest issue of VJM Jazz and Blues Mart features reviews of two UPM book - John McCusker's Creole Trombone and Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff's To Do This, You Must Know How. Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and The Early Years of Jazz tells Ory's story from his birth on a rural sugar cane plantation to a French-speaking, ethnically mixed family, to his emergence in New Orleans as the city’s hottest band leader. Reviewer Max Easterman says:
John McCusker’s detailed and intensive research has revealed that Ory was a much more complex and important character in the birth and growth of New Orleans music...a book brimming with anecdote, with first-hand accounts of New Orleans music before the recording horn or microphone captured it, and with finely-drawn portraits of the men who played and promoted it – oh, and some great family photographs.
Read and enjoy!
To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition traces black vocal music pedagogy from the halls of Fisk University to
the mining camps of Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New
Orleans. Reviewer Russ Shor praises Abbott and Seroff's latest collaboration saying:Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff are perhaps the premier researchers of black vocal music, secular and sacred, of the pre-1920 period...With this work, Abbott and Seroff have fulfilled a 30-year quest filled interviews and poring through old and very obscure publications to produce a work that will be the standard reference for this music. The writing is clear and concise and the production is first rate.
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