Bluesy cornetist Chris Kelly, most popular with the downtrodden and ratty, “always ended his performances with the hymn ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ played, contrary to modern practice, as a ‘sacred song’—slowly” (p. 169).
New Orleans
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A few years ago I started noticing many of my photos were getting uploaded to Wikimedia Commons–which was perfectly legit as I’d uploaded them to flickr using a Creative Commons license that allowed anyone to use my images so long as I received attribution. The Wikimedia uploads, mostly pictures of musicians, second line parades and politicians, were diligently attributed to me and increased the likelihood someone would see them. I liked the idea there was some guy out there who thought my photos were worth the effort–his effort, slight as it may have been.
At some point I finally connected that the guy uploading my pics to Wikimedia was one of my flickr contacts, Infrogmation. I poked around and found he was quite active in Wikimedia and Wikipedia, and judging by some of his photos, he seemed to play a little trombone. He didn’t shoot with a high end camera but he had a decent one (Canon PowerShot) and a patient eye and he covered a lot of ground (a good example of his dogged work is his series documenting Banksy’s graffiti art around New Orleans). He also uploaded photos he inherited of family members from the 1920s and 1930s and he had a good feel for oddball but revealing historical ephemera:
From Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans by Charles B. Hersch (University of Chicago Press, 2008, pages 180-182):
The small group transformation of ragtime through the blues tradition, hauling it onto the streets where it marched, can be seen in a performance of High Society Rag by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, featuring a young Louis Armstrong. This tune defined New Orleans jazz, for as Lee Collins put it, ‘at that time when you heard a clarinet play High Society you didn’t ask him where he was from. You knew he was from New Orleans …’
Please go here to read part 1 of my interview with Joseph Crachiola. It sounds like…
Joseph Crachiola is from a small town outside Detroit that got swallowed up by the suburbs (same story for me, except replace Detroit with Chicago). He worked 15 years for suburban Detroit newspapers and 22 years as a corporate photographer before he got bought out and decided to move to New Orleans about 2 years ago. He recently served as road manager for the Pinettes Brass Band in Turkey, and photographed the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy.
Just like New Orleanians need to repeat that it was LEVEES, not Katrina, that devastated New Orleans, we need to keep repeating that the public school system was shattered, not “rebuilt”… 
We are still not OK, six years later.
Congratulations to B2L2 contributor G Bitch for winning the 2011 Ashley Award at the Rising Tide Conference in New Orleans yesterday.
Amendment 6 – Right to Speedy Trial, Confrontation of Witnesses. Ratified 12/15/1791. In all criminal prosecutions, the…
A Sixth Anniversary Redux (Email written less than six months after Katrina. Lest we forget how things…
crossposted at The G Bitch Spot State education department asks board to yank Abramson’s charter–nola.com/Times-Pic In a…
It was the last day of jury duty for this particular cattle call. No one wanted to be chosen – especially for the murder case requiring a voir dire that day. Maybe an additional month! Maybe sequestered in an Airline Highway motel! Oh, god, how bad could this semiannual nightmare get?
A student documentary about the history of New Orleans jazz.