While contemporary music has a visual crutch -- the advent of the music video -- to add imagery to the sound, the jazz age of the first half of the last century is mainly seen through the imagination. Actual footage of the seminal artists who molded and engineered the popular music is now hard to come by. New Orleans takes place in the early jazz era and features two true legends of the form: Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday in her only significant big-screen role. With a colorful backdrop of Bourbon Street and Storyville, New Orleans concerns the culture clash between emerging ragtime and "jass" and highbrow society, the latter keeping careful company with the Big Easy's fast underground. Arturo De Cordova is Nick, the suave gambling maven who runs the jazz-joint Storyville. Dorothy Patrick plays Miralee, a young socialite who falls for the music, the scene, and Nick -- against the wishes of her imposing rich mother. Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman make appearances as themselves, while Billie Holiday plays Endie, maid to the society family, but Storyville singer by night; New Orleans is at its best in its half-dozen musical sequences with these stars. Satchmo's ebullience and Billie Holiday's iconic cool, beautifully contrasted in a duet, are the rewards of this portrait of a bygone age. Click here for current SALE price: |
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by Louis Maistros Signed copies available exclusively on the net here at Louie’s Juke Joint, just click this link to order! Quotes: "Louis Maistros has written a lyrical, complex, and brave novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off. He is a writer to watch and keep reading, a writer to cherish." "The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result." “The Sound of Building Coffins is easily one of the finest and truest pieces of New Orleans fiction I've ever read.” “One has to write with considerable authenticity to pull off a story steeped in magic and swamp water that examines race and class, death and rebirth, Haitian voodoo, and the beginnings of jazz in 1891 New Orleans...The plot is complex and magical, grounded in the history of the city, without being overly sentimental. There is a comfort with death as a part of life in this work that reveals deep feeling for the city and its past....Highly recommended for all fiction collections, especially where there is an interest in jazz." Signed copies available exclusively on the net here at Louie’s Juke Joint, just click this link to order! |