Posted in Musical context, New Orleans on February 7, 2008 | No Comments »
I just recently mentioned the Trombone Shorty version of “SJI,” so I thought I’d pass along this: A recent NPR piece on Trombone Shorty. No mention of “SJI,” sadly, but interesting comments from writer Larry Blumenfeld, pillar of the N.O. music community Bob French, and Trombone Shorty’s brother James Andrews (also a pillar of the [...]
Posted in Musical context, New Orleans on February 6, 2008 | No Comments »
By way of WFMU’s Beware of The Blog, I came to this online exhibit by the Tulane University Hogan Jazz Archive. The subject is Riverboat Jazz, and it’s pretty interesting.
It’s sort of set up like a slideshow, and doesn’t take all that long (20 minutes?) to read through, so I recommend taking a peek. But [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context, Versions on January 3, 2008 | No Comments »
I received an email a little while back from a reader in California, who wondered if there might be a connection between Dr. John’s 1982 “Touro Infirmary” — which I wrote about here — and Muggsy Spanier’s “Relaxin’ At The Touro.”
From what I was able to learn online, Spanier was born in Chicago in 1906 [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context, Versions on December 28, 2007 | Comments Off
For a while now, bit by bit, I’ve been working my way through “The Folkways Collection,” a 24-part (!) Podcast series about Folkways Records. Today I hit episode nine, “The Blues.” About halfway through, Josh White’s “Free & Equal Blues” came up; the narrator explained the context, which was a protest/satire of the absurd practice [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context, Versions on December 27, 2007 | Comments Off
My first reaction to this was: Why did it take so long for an “SJI” ringtone to emerge?
But the truth is, I’m a set-the-phone-to-vibrate-only kind of guy, so I don’t know if this is really the first “SJI” ringtone or not.
And of course I’m afraid I won’t be purchasing it. But you can hear the [...]
Posted in Letters From New Orleans book, Musical context, New Orleans on October 29, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Salon reports on something I find truly baffling: Police busting up jazz funeral processions in Tremé. You have to click through an ad to read the piece, but it’s worth it. Apparently a funeral involving a couple dozen musicians and “roughly a hundred” paraders, for the recently deceased tuba player for the New Birth Brass [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Antecedents and Variations, Musical context, Q&As, Versions on September 4, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Something like a year and a half ago, I received an email from composer (and blogger) Daniel Felsenfeld, who suggested that I look into the work of Ezra Sims. Specifically, Felsenfeld told me, Sims had written some pieces partly based on Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary” – “mostly because of the microtones involved.”
At the time, [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context on July 11, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Offbeat ran a long but interesting article recently about the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. There’s a brief mention of “SJI,” which I’ll get to in a bit. I visited New Orleans a couple of times while I was a Texas college student, and on both occasions visited Preservation Hall. I didn’t know anything about jazz, [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", In performance, Musical context, Versions on June 27, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Back in February, Wynton Marsalis & Friends (Wycliffe Gordon, Victor Goines, Walter Blanding Jr.) did a set of Louis Armstrong Hot Fives numbers for Jazz At Lincoln Center; that performance is archived online here. “SJI” pops up early in the second half of the roughly hour-long set.
During occasional breaks in the show, Marsalis talks about [...]
Posted in "St. James Infirmary", Musical context, New Orleans on June 13, 2007 | Comments Off
New Orleans-based music magazine Offbeat published a lengthy wrapup of Jazz Fest, and if you go to this link and scroll down to the heading “John Swenson,” you’ll see the bit of it that’s of interest to me:
Of the many traits and quirks that make up the eccentric and often occult nature of New Orleans [...]
[Or: The Point of this Site]
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a third version.
And now, this site: A place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song that readers (from Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the U.S.) have sent me. This may lead to a fourth and significantly expanded version of the essay, some day. Also on this site: Plenty of tangents.
Never heard "St. James Infirmary"? Start here.
The most recent version of my "St. James Infirmary" essay is now a few years old. But it's still a fairly decent overview of what I know about the song, and why I'm interested in it. You can read it either in the book Letters from New Orleans (see below), or in the archives of The Gambit, the New Orleans weekly that published the piece as a book excerpt when LfNO came out.
This site is a partial spinoff of the book Letters from New Orleans, published by the unstoppable Garrett County Press. My interest in "St. James Infirmary" is the subject of one essay in the book. All author proceeds from the book still go to post-Katrina relief efforts, so I think it's okay for me to say: You ought to buy it.
