Thomas Brothers

Thomas Brothers is Professor of Music at Duke University, where he teaches jazz, African-American music and late medieval music. He holds a Ph. D. degree in music from the University of California at Berkeley.  His most recent book is entitled Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (W. W. Norton 2006).  He has also published Chromatic Beauty in the Late-Medieval Chanson (Cambridge University Press 1997), Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words (Oxford University Press 1999), an edition of nineteen documents authored by Armstrong, and many articles on jazz and late medieval music.    His awards include a fellowship for study of race and music at the John Hope Franklin Institute (2001-2002), a fellowship for studying New Orleans at the National Humanities Center (2003-2004) and a fellowship for the study of fifteenth-century music at Villa I Tatti in Florence Italy (1999-2000).  He is currently working on a book that follows Louis Armstrong from 1922, the year he arrived in Chicago, through the mid 1930s.

Photograph by Sandra Press.