Randy Fertel

Randy Fertel has contributed to NPR and Huffington Post, and has taught the literature of war and of exile at the New School for Social Research and at Tulane University. He is cofounder of the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-Telling, co-sponsored by the Nation Institute and awarded every spring at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. His book, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir, is forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi. For more information, go to http://www.gorillamanofneworleans.com

Articles

The Birth of Jazz and the Jews of South Rampart Street

By Randy Fertel | October 4, 2011

In popular imagination, jazz emerged from the bordellos of Storyville, the legendary red-light district where piano-players like Jelly Roll Morton entertained the prostitutes and their sporting men. But South Rampart itself was a prior birthplace to jazz along with neighboring Back a’ Town…. Like thrice-born Dionysius, jazz had two mothers, for a while simultaneously: according to the late jazz historian Tad Jones, South Rampart was “the spot for jazz.”