LOUIS ARMSTRONG
With dazzling virtuosity on the trompet and an innovative singing
style. Satchomo was the fountainhead of a thoroughly original
American sound.
Pop. Sweet papa Dip. Satchmo. He had perfect pitch and perfect
rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could be as lofty as a
moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thug dying
in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in Jazz, he was a
small man. But the extent of his influence across Jazz, across American
music and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one
of the few sho can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and
Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to
riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis
Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such
pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the
airplan, the telephone.
That is why Armstrong remains a deep force in our American
expression. Not only do we hear him in those trumpet players who
represent the present renaissance in jazz-- Wynton Marsalis, Wallace
Roney, Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove, Nicholas Payton--- we can also
detect his influence in certin rhythms that sweep from country-and-
western music all the way over to the chanted doggerel of rap.
For many years it was thought that Armstrong was born in New
Orleans on July 4, 1900, a perfect day for the man who wrote the
musical Declarationof Independence for Americans of this century.
But the estimable writer Gary Giddins discovere the birth certificate
that proves Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901. He grew up at the bottom,
hustling and bustling, trying to bring something home to eat, sometimes
searching garbage cans for food that might still be sruitable for
supper. The spirit of Armstrong's world, however, was not dominated by
the deprivation of poverty and the dangers of wild living.
What stuck him most, as his memoir, Satchmo: My life in New
Orleans, attests, was the ceremonial vigor of the people. Ranging
from almost European pale to jet black, the Negroes of New Orleans
had many social clubs, parades and picnics. With rags, blues, snippets
from opera, church music and what ever else, a wide breadth of rhythm
and tune was created to accompany or stimulate every kind of human
involvement. Before becoming an instrmentalist, Armstrong the child
was either dancing of pennies of singing for his supper with a
strolling quartet of other kids who wandered New Orleans freshening up
the subtropical evening with some sweetly harmonized notes.
He had some knucklehead in his soul too. While a genial, fountain
of joy, Armstrong was a steet boy, and he had a dirty mouth. It was
his shooting off a pistol on New Year's Eve that got him thrown into
the Colored Waifs' Home, an institution bent on refining ruffians,
It was there that young Louis first put his lips to the mouthpiece
of a cornet. Like any American boy, no matter his point of social
origin, he had his dreams. At night he used to lie in bed, hearing the
masterly Freddie Keppard out in the streets blowing that golden horn,
and hope that he too would someday have command of a clarion aound.
The sound developed very quickly, and he was soon known around
New Orleans as formidable. The places he played and the people he
knew were sweet and innocent at one end of the spectrum and rough at
the other. He played picnics for young Negro girls, Mississippi
riverboats on which the white people had never seen Negroes in
tuxedos before, and dives where the customers cut and shot one another.
One time he witnessed two women fighting to the death with knives.
Out of those experiences, everything from pomp to humor to erotic
charisma to grief to majesty to the profoundly gruesome and
monumentally spiritual worked its way into his tone. He became a beacon
of American feeling.
From 1920 on, he was hell on two feet if somebody was in the mood
to challenge him. Musicians then were wont to have "cutting sessions"
---battles of imagination and stamina. Fairly soon, young Armstrong was
left alone. He also did a little pimping but got out of the game when
one of his girls stabbed him. With a trout sandwich amound his effect,
Armstrong took a train to Chicago in 1922, where he joined his mentor
Joe Oliver, and the revolution took place in full form. King Oliver and
his Creole Jazz Band, featuring the dark young powerhouse with the
large mouth, brought out the people and all the musicians, black and
white, who wanted to know how it was truly done. The most impressive
white musician of his time, Bix Beiderbecke, jumped up and went glassy-
eyed the first time he heard Armstrong.
When he was called to New York City in 1924 by the big-time
bandleader Fletcher Henderson, Armstrong looked exactly like what he
was, a young man who was not to be fooled around with and might slap
the taste out of your mouth if you went too far. His improvisations set
the city on its head. The stiff rhythms of the percussive and the
soaring. He soon returned to chicago, perfected what he was doing and
made one record after another that reordered American music, such as
"Potato Head Blues "and "I'm a Ding Dong Daddy." Needing more space for
his improvised line, Armstrong rejected the contrapuntal New Orleans
front line of clarinet, trumpet and trombone in favor of the single,
featured horn, which soon became the convention. His combination of
virtuosity, strength and passion ws unprecedented. No one in Western
music---not even Bach---has ever set the innovative pace on an
instrument, then stood up to sing and converted the vocalists. Pops.
Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo.
The melodic and rhythmic vistas Armstrong opened up solved the
mind-body problem as the world witnessed how the brain and the
muscles could work in perfect coordination on the aesthetic spot.
Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a genius from
New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new
terms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted
popular songs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of
sentimentality and elevated to serious art. He brougt the change agent
of swing to the world, the most revolutionary rhythm of his century. He
Learned how to dress and became a fashion plate. His slang was the
lingua franca. Oh, he was something.
Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded
like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and
every chool of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the
basic of the idiom---swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms.
While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as
different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald,Sarah Vaghan,
Frank Sinatra, Elivis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common
as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his
majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow
and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave
of the future that is the station of all great art.
Armstrong traveled the world constantly. One example of his
charming brashness revealed itself when he concertized before the King
of England in 1932 and introduced a number by saying,"This one's for
you, Rex: I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You." He had a
great love for children, was always willing to help out fellow musicians
and passed out laxatives to royalty and heads of state. However well
he was received in Europe, the large public celebrations with which
West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late '50s were far more
appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.
He usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his
way. But he didn't accept everything. By the middle '50s, Armstrong
had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of
minstrel figure, and embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when
cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back
becaouse he smiled too much and wasn't demanding a certain level of
respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President
Eisenhower for not standing behind those balck children as school
integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a
peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained
singular. Such is the way of the truly great: they do what they do in
conjunction or all by themselves. They get the job done. Louis Daniel
Armstrong was that kind.
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