Word: men
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After playing in oblivion for the first 30 years of his career, George Lewis became so popular in Europe that the arrival of his band was sufficient to touch off riots. There were maybe a hundred European jazz bands trying to copy the Lewis sound. Even young men in Italy, Australia, and Japan were crowding around their record players, religiously copying all the Lewis imports they could get their hands...
...almost as if some anthropologist who had spent a lifetime studying cave drawings suddenly encountered a surviving Neanderthal. These men were playing the music which had developed out of 200 years of enslavement, out of a thousand years of African culture, out of Civil War marches, creole melodies, ragtime, blues. It had all meshed on the back streets of New Orleans around the turn of the century, and blossomed in the grand houses of Storyville, the city's legendary red-light district...
...style of jazz that had developed around the turn of the century. When Storyville closed up, the music went on as it always had--on the streets of the black sections, in the back yards, in the little churches, at parades, picnics, dances, funerals. The culture which produced these men and their music didn't change very much in those 50 years or so, and the music was still very much alive on those back streets...
...symbol of the perseverence of that music and the culture which had engendered it. His career stretched all the way back to the 1890's when he had played with the famous Buddy Bolden band. Bunk had been the idol and teacher of many great New Orleans trumpet men, including Louis Armstrong. "They was all crazy behind old man Bunk's playing" he said himself in 1942. He had worked in every joint in Storyville, and played countless parades and funerals throughout the city. And now in the 40's, ten years after his "retirement" from music, he was discovered...
...years ago, I wandered into Preservation Hall in the French Quarter of New Orleans on a night when George Lewis was playing. I was knocked out by his music. I didn't know what it all meant then; I didn't really know who those old men were, what their lives had been like, or what made their music so great. I only knew that it was great, and that Lewis' clarinet was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard...