Walking with legends

"Barry Martyn has been an exemplar of New Orleans jazz for over 40 years. What makes this drummer and band leader unique is that he was born in England and was the first white musician in America to join a black musician's union. Having performed and toured with some of the best New Orleans musicians, Martyn mentions in this memoir of a jazz life players who are far from household names-the book's greatest asset. Even among jazz aficionados, many of these players have gone unheralded, as New Orleans jazz is almost a world unto itself. Jazz musician and author Burns (Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance) tape-recorded over 40 hours of Martyn's stories and recollections. However, owing either to Burns's editing or to the difficult conversion of conversation into print, Martyn's stories are recounted in a very clipped style, and the project might have fared better as a film in which his tales could be heard."--Library Journal. Drummer, record producer, bandleader, jazz researcher, and cigar-chomping raconteur Barry Martyn is a New Orleans original who happens to have been born in England. Implausible though this may seem, it makes perfect sense to members of the New Orleans traditional jazz community, who view themselves as an extended family based on merit as much as nativity. For more than fifty years, Martyn has been a fixture in the Crescent City's jazz scene, laying down the beat for generations of celebrated musicians and avidly promoting the city's unique musical heritage around the world. In Walking with Legends--based on over forty hours of interviews with Martyn by fellow British jazz enthusiast and author Mick Burns--Martyn reflects upon his life in jazz and offers a window into a musical world that few have understood, let alone witnessed from the inside.