The most distinctive feature of New Orleans architecture is the “iron lace,” which adorns the famous second-story balconies of the French Quarter. The fancy filigrees and rococo patterns, cast in solid metal by some long forgotten artisan 150 years ago, embody the city in important ways. Much of it was spared when the levees broke almost exactly one year ago. The musical equivalent of iron lace is in the playing of the great clarinetist George Lewis, who could weave the most intricate patterns in the air, but whose delicate designs were firmly grounded in the fundamentals and the blues, as if they too had been molded from iron.

Lewis (1900–68) was a key player in the movement of the 1950s that has come to be known as the New Orleans Revival. In the early 1940s, jazz fans discovered that many of the original pioneers of jazz, who had, in some cases, been playing since the turn of the century, were still living and occasionally working in the Crescent City. Lewis and his colleagues began to be recorded, first strictly by historians, then by record producers and concert promoters who had discovered that there was a worldwide market for “authentic New Orleans jazz.” Lewis was the dominant figure in the Revival, especially after the death of trumpeter Bunk Johnson in 1949.

Now, Lewis is a leading character in a beautiful book about the city and its jazz, “Song for My Fathers: A New Orleans Memoir in Black and White,” by Tom Sancton.The book is a highly personal account of what could be called the second (and final) stage of the New Orleans Revival, which was officially launched with the opening of Preservation Hall in the French Quarter in 1961. The first club designed to present the music to its fans, Preservation Hall — which was built in 1750 as a private residence — became the focal point of activity in the last years of Lewis and his colleagues and bandsmen, such as the trombonist Jim Robinson and the drummer Joe Watkins.

Mr. Sancton grew up in New Orleans, immersed in the music that his father, a journalist, taught him to love. Preservation Hall opened when Mr. Sancton was 12, the perfect age to come under Mr. Lewis’s spell and decide that he wanted to play the clarinet just like him. Initially, however, the young Mr. Sancton was convinced that he was both the wrong age and the wrong race to be able to play in Lewis’s traditional style.

Fascinatingly, it was the example of Sammy Rimington, then a 19-year-old British clarinetist, who taught him otherwise. Mr. Rimington had managed to replicate Lewis’s iron lace sound so fully that even Lewis, upon hearing one of Mr. Rimington’s recordings, is said to have thought it was his own playing. Thanks to Mr. Rimington’s example, the young Mr. Sancton soon began absorbing as much from the New Orleans veterans as he could.

Eventually, he became a capable musician (as he demonstrated this year in a guest appearance at the JVC Jazz Festival), but Mr. Sancton also inherited his father’s gift for journalism — indeed, he spent most of his professional career as the Paris bureau chief of Time magazine. In “Song,” he is equally forthcoming in relating the stories of, and his experiences with, the men who made the Hall happen — the art dealer and entrepreneur Larry Borenstein, who provided the real estate for Preservation Hall at 726 St. Peter St., and Allan and Sandra Jaffe, who provided the legwork (their son, Benjamin Jaffe, continues to run it today), as well as the eccentric historian, musician, and supreme collector, Bill Russell, surely a unique character in American scholarship.

The book’s most valuable passages are Mr. Sancton’s vivid, first-hand descriptions — the first I have ever read — of what it was like to play in one of New Orleans’s legendary street parades. He was both the first young and white man to be hired as an official, permanent member of Harold Dejan’s famous Olympia Brass Band. His career with that group began eventfully: On Mr. Sancton’s first march through a rough neighborhood, one local character pulled out a gun and shot a woman in the leg. Mr. Sancton was apparently the only one who was disturbed by this; the parade was only temporarily interrupted and the rest of the band seemed accustomed to it.

Not long after Mr. Sancton left New Orleans to attend Harvard, his two most important mentors — “Creole George” Guesnon and George Lewis — passed away, and their funerals are recounted in detail. The book actually begins with the finish, or the postscript rather, in which his father, still feisty in his 90s last September, prepares to move back to the post-Katrina wreckage of a house that still hadn’t been properly repaired since Hurricane Betsy damaged it 40 years before.

Among the buildings damaged by Katrina was Preservation Hall. But the legendary haunt, now 256 years old, was diligently rebuilt and repaired, and reopened for business in April. According to Mr. Sancton, the side of New Orleans that has called the Hall a musical home since its inception as a jazz club “had mostly faded into history long before Katrina struck.” Now, more than ever, Preservation Hall will stand for a city that should not itself be allowed to fade into history.