Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz

Known best today for their appearances in funeral processions, the New Orleans brass brands of nineteenth-century America played for dances, street parades, and political rallies, blending popular, light classical, and dance tunes with the syncopated rhytms found in black culture. Through this synthesis, Schafer finds, the brass bands preserved the best elements of both the march tradition and the emerging Afro-American music of ragtime and jazz. 
 
Included in Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz are photographs of New Orleans brass bands from the 1860s through the 1970s, a roster of the bands, and a valuable discography of their known commercial recordings. Jazz enthusiasts, musicologists, and students of American culture will find here a significant volume in the growing literature on a uniquely American music.