George Lewis And His Band

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George Lewis (13 July 1900 – 31 December 1968[1]) was an American jazz clarinetist who achieved his greatest fame and influence in his later decades of life. Gary Giddins describes him as "an affecting musician with a fat-boned sound but limited technique".[2] George Lewis' legal name was George Louis Francois Zenon. He was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. Lewis was playing clarinet professionally by 1917. He played with Buddy Petit and Chris Kelly regularly, and sometimes with trombonist Kid Ory and many other band leaders, seldom traveling far from the greater New Orleans area. During the Great Depression he took a day job as a stevedore, continuing to take such music jobs after hours as he could find. In 1942 some jazz fans and writers came to New Orleans to record the legendary older trumpeter Bunk Johnson. Bunk picked Lewis for the recording session. Previously almost totally unknown outside of New Orleans, Lewis impressed many listeners, and he made his first recordings under his own name for American Music Records, a label created by Bill Russell to document the music of Bunk Johnson and other surviving older jazzmen in New Orleans. Although purists such as Alan Lomax held Lewis up as an exemplar of what jazz was like before commercialism, Lewis was, in Gary Giddins words, "no dinosaur". When Lomax brought him on a Rudi Blesh's radio show in 1942, he proceeded to play the solo from Woody Herman's then-recent hit "Woodchopper's Ball"; his hosts

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