Tom Jacobsen has lived many lives. He’s an archeologist, an author, a teacher and one of America’s foremost experts on the subject of New Orleans jazz.
Born, raised and educated in Minnesota, Jacobsen earned a Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania before embarking on his first career. He logged 26 years on the faculty of Indiana University and studied prehistoric archaeology in Greece and the Aegean Basin. To that end, he worked in Greece for three decades, including 25 years as director of the excavations at Franchthi Cave which dated back to the late Stone Age.
But ever since he played clarinet and saxophone as a teenager, he has been devoted to the upbeat improvisational American music known as jazz. In the early 1950s, he was introduced to the sounds of the Big Easy via broadcasts of the New Orleans Jazz Club over the powerful radio station WWL. That Second Line syncopation stayed with the professor even as he journeyed halfway around the world to pursue his digs.
Then, after he retired from IU as a professor emeritus in 1992, Jacobsen refocused on the birthplace of jazz. Having served as a visiting professor at Tulane in 1988-89, Jacobsen fell in love with New Orleans. He lived there for a quarter century, and over those years he became deeply involved in the local music scene.
He has penned three significant studies of the state of ja
