George Lewis (July 13, 1900 – December 31, 1968) was one of the Jazz musicians who didn’t leave New Orleans in the 1920s. He stayed and played with the Black Eagle Band , Buddy Petit , the Eureka Brass Band , Kid Rena , The Olympia Orchestra and other New Orleans groups. He was with Bunk Johnson in a group led by Evan Thomas in the early 1930s, but had a day job throughout most of the decade.
When Johnson was “re-discovered” in 1942, Lewis became part of Bunk’s band, playing with him on and off until 1945 and leading his own sessions during 1943-45. Lewis returned to New Orleans in 1946. He played locally with his own group and in 1950, Look magazine wrote an article about him. That exposure led to him becoming one of the most popular figures of the Dixieland revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
Redhotjazz.com was a pioneering website during the "Information wants to be Free" era of the 1990s. In that spirit we are recovering the lost data from the now defunct site and sharing it with you.
Most of the music in the archive is in the form of MP3s hosted on Archive.org or the French servers of Jazz-on-line.com where this music is all in the public domain.
Files unavailable from those sources we host ourselves. They were made from original 78 RPM records in the hands of private collectors in the 1990s who contributed to the original redhotjazz.com. They were hosted as .ra files originally and we have converted them into the more modern MP3 format. They are of inferior quality to what is available commercially and are intended for reference purposes only. In some cases a Real Audio (.ra) file from Archive.org will download. Don't be scared! Those files will play in many music programs, but not Windows Media Player.
