Jazz on the River

by William Howland Kenney

Just after World War I, the musical style called jazz began a waterborne journey outward from that quintessential haven of romance and decadence, New Orleans. For the first time in any organized way, steam-driven boats left town during the summer months to tramp the Mississippi River, bringing an exotic new music to the rest of the nation. For entrepreneurs promoting jazz, this seemed a promising way to spread northward the exciting sounds of the Crescent City. And the musicians no longer had to wait for folks upriver to make their way down to New Orleans to hear the vibrant rhythms, astonishing improvisations, and new harmonic idioms being created.

Simply put, when jazz went upstream, it went mainstream, and in Jazz on the River , William Howland Kenney brings to life the vibrant history of this music and its seduction of the men and women along America's inland waterways. Here for the first time readers can learn about the lives and music of the levee roustabouts promoting riverboat jazz and their relationships with such great early jazz adventurers as Louis Armstrong, Fate Marable, Warren "Baby" Dodds, and Jess Stacy. Kenney follows the boats from Memphis to St. Louis, where new styles of jazz were soon produced, all the way up the Ohio River, where the music captivated audiences in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh alike.

Jazz on the River concludes with the story of the decline of the old paddle wheelers-and thus riverboat jazz-on the inland waterways after World War II. The enduring silence of our rivers, Kenney argues, reminds us of the loss of such a distinctive musical tradition. But riverboat jazz still lives on in myriad permutations, each one in tune with our own times.

229 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2005

Reviews

[Elyse Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Fate Marable basically fathered all of your favorites. He should be a household name. My mind is blown, such enriching history.

[Nathan Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for individuals interested in Riverboat Jazz. This book contains the best depiction of Fate Marable to date! Thank you Mr. Kenney for bringing attention to such a very important individual. Well done!

[M.R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, excellent book. If you really want to understand where jazz came from and why it changed when it migrated out of New Orleans, you need to read *this* book, followed by Kenney's earlier text, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History 1904-1930. The two together explain to much and cover a good deal that even Louis Armstrong's biographers to date have missed. Kenney, a very good scholar, connects all the dots ... and suddenly jazz's evolution from New Orleans to Chicago to New York -- especially Armstrong's seminal role in shaping and redirecting the development of jazz, even as his own music **had** change in order to develop, because of his travels -- makes absolute sense. Kenney is completely underrated as a jazz scholar, but I'd put his two jazz histories at the top of any other books about the evolution of jazz, including the text that accompanied Ken Burns's wonderful PBS documentary series, JAZZ. In fact, you should only read/watch/listen to all the materials that Burns produced for that series **AFTER** you read Kenney's two volumes.

Sometimes, the clearest vision about a subject comes from someone standing apart from it -- and in the case of Kenney and jazz, that's absolutely true. If you love and/or want to understand jazz, get your hands on Kenney's two books immediately, then make sure you listen to the specific music tracks as you read about them. You'll find a lot of them uploaded to YouTube these days, so that part should be easy.