‘Oh! Didn’t He Ramble!’
Tom Jacobsen, the author of three important studies of contemporary New Orleans jazz, died Jan. 15, at his home in St. Louis, Mo. He was 81.
His most recent book was The New Orleans Jazz Scene Today: A guide to the musicians, live jazz venues, and more released in April 2016 by Missouri’s bluebird publishing. That book followed The New Orleans Jazz Scene, 1970-2000, a personal retrospective published in 2014 by the Louisiana State University Press.
Having studied clarinet as a teenager, Jacobsen enjoyed the music of reed players such as Dr. Michael White, Aurora Nealand, Tom Fischer and the late Pete Fountain, but he also wrote often about brass players like Duke Heitger, Trombone Shorty, and Wendell Brunious and singers such as Meschiya Lake, John Boutté, and the Pfister Sisters.
His final book gives special attention to New Orleans’ burgeoning brass band scene, from the Algiers BB to the Stooges BB to the all-female Pinettes.
This “feel-good music,” he wrote, now influenced by Uptown funk and hip-hop, “is clearly in tune with today’s young people—both black and white—and there is little
