If you care about jazz in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans is required reading. For once, the tired cliché about a work that provides a “new perspective” on its subject matter is literally true. The interaction between Louis Armstrong and the world he grew up in is what this book is about. What you’ll find here is a remarkable portrait of New Orleans in the early days of jazz. It is far more detailed and better grounded for its conclusions than anything that has preceded it.

Thomas Brothers, the author of Louis Armstrong In His Own Words, has probably made better use of the collection of oral histories in Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archives than anyone else who ever stuck his head in its stacks. Brothers went well beyond the Hogan archives in his seven years of research on this project. That’s reflected in the 14 pages of bibliography and some 1500 individual citations the book contains, but the result of all this scholarship is much more than a work for scholars. It gives us a vivid portrait of a special part of New Orleans at a special time.

Brothers’ thesis is that Armstrong was not so much a product of what he calls “the familiar story of jazz as an American musical gumbo, a melting pot of many different ethnicities,” as he was of the neighborhood where he grew up and the people who lived there. Louis, he writes, “was shaped by total immersion in the central traditions of African-American vernacular music.” “Vernacular” usually means the language of the streets and of the lower levels of society, but Brothers uses it to describe the music of the streets where Louis lived. This was not the world of “downtown” Creoles of Color. This side of Canal Street was the home of what Brothers calls “plantation immigrants,” country black people who came to New Orleans in the last decades of the 19th century, bringing with them the earthy traditions of their kind of church music, their kind of blues, and dances and rhythms that at the very least could be described as carrying a strong African flavor.

“Creoles,” he told me, “are not at the center of the origins of jazz. It’s coming from the plantations, it’s coming from uptown, its coming from the people Louis Armstrong grew up with.” What about all of those other influences traditionally seen as shaping jazz in its formative years? “Jazz,” he says, “is not just one thing. It meant different kinds of music to different people, but what I am talking about is the influence on Louis Armstrong.”

Brothers says the key to his work other than Armstrong’s own writings is still the Hogan Archives, the interviews with early jazz musicians done mostly in the 1950s, lovingly assembled by people who were as passionate about the music as the men and women who played it. “Without the Hogan Jazz Archives,” he says, “I think the book simply would not have been possible.” Hogan Curator Bruce Raeburn says that while other scholars have made extensive use of this material, Brothers gave himself time not only to read and listen to it, but also to digest it. Brothers’ achievement, Raeburn says, was that he was able to “connect the dots,” that is relate information from one interview to another in a way that no one else had taken the time to do.