Louis Armstrong

Diese Musik in meiner Werbung Louis Armstrong

"If it hadn't been for jazz, there wouldn't be no rock and roll."

BIOGRAPHY

Born in extreme poverty in the Back o’ Town section of New Orleans, Armstrong was raised till age five by his grandmother his mother having to resort to lowly jobs, which probably included prostitution. He nonetheless had a loving home, though he was scavenging for food and working, selling coal, from age seven. His love of music was manifest just as early; he stood on street corners, singing in vocal quartets for coins.
Armstrong’s delinquency got him sent to the Colored Waifs’ Home, but there he was given good discipline and received his first music lessons on cornet. Upon his release, in 1915, he sought older musicians from whom he could learn more. Top cornetist Joseph "King" Oliver schooled Armstrong musically and gave him the kind of fathering that he had never had. Years later, after Oliver had gone to Chicago, he sent for his disciple to join him in his Creole Jazz Band, which had a long residence at the Lincoln Gardens.

Chicago and Oliver also gave Armstrong the chance to record (in 1923). His ears also became attuned to a multiplicity of musical styles in the wide-open town. He met a woman, a formally trained pianist, Lil Hardin; once they married, she convinced him to take a job with the hardest-driving New York orchestra Fletcher Henderson’s. It taught him musical discipline, though Armstrong showed it his already-unique, relaxed yet fiery solo style.

From fall 1925, when Armstrong returned to Chicago a consummate professional, through 1928, he produced a body of recorded work that no jazz-combo leader has ever matched. His Hot Five (including Lil Armstrong) music struck even talented musicians as unlike anything that had hitherto been played. Armstrong’s improvisation on such as "Heebie Jeebies" (the first record of a scat vocal) and "Cornet Chop Suey" was outdone in spring 1927, when his group was expanded to the Hot Seven and by which time he had switched from cornet to trumpet. Here, "Wild Man Blues", "Potatohead Blues", and "Weary Blues", featured Armstrong soloing more. By the end of the year, the combo reached a pinnacle with "Struttin’ with Some Barbecue" and "Hotter than That". (His unaffected, soft yet vital singing, on other tracks, had an appeal just as radical.)

The 1928 recordings, with Earl Hines, had an even richer feel; Armstrong’s trumpet sound deepened emotionally, and the trumpet piano exchanges on "Tight Like This", "West End Blues", and "Weather Bird" showcased a true indigenous art, with an unprecedented level of musicianship at the service of complex, improvised statements.

If Armstrong’s soloing had no higher peaks to scale, his celebrity, great as it was at the dawn of 1929, had just begun to grow. He returned to New York and soon started recording backed by an eleven-piece band. His first Victor and Bluebird recordings were in 1932; his hilarious "Hobo, You Can’t Ride This Train", with Chick Webb, was a hit off his first session. By the end of ’33, he had cut nearly thirty sides for the labels, including one of the earliest versions of "When It’s Sleepy Time Down South", which became his anthem. Armstrong also deployed the song medley for Victor, which had pioneered in the long-playing record, for which the medley was the perfect showcase and vice-versa.

Armstrong became a star in Harlem, playing in clubs and even performing in revues. One of these was Hot Chocolates, which in an earlier incarnation had gone to Broadway. The next year he went to Hollywood and made the first of dozens of appearances in the movies. But the sensitive Armstrong was still ill-at-ease with the presence of gangsters in the entertainment business, and he never accepted the still-present Jim Crow laws.

Armstrong decided to spend much of 1933 and 1934 in Europe, where he was received as a celebrity to be accorded every respect. Upon his return to the US, he was financed with a new big band. It recorded more than a hundred sides over the next five years, placing Armstrong at the heart of the Swing Era. His personal celebrity rose even higher, with increasingly prominent music scenes in films and as the host of his own, nationally broadcast radio program. He also published (in 1936) the first version of his autobiography.

The war years weren’t a very fruitful time for Armstrong, though he did marry (in 1943, for the fourth time) and move with his wife to a row house in Queens. Intermittent recordings followed until a 1947 Town Hall concert augured Armstrong’s being featured at the front of a small combo of all stars, playing the "good ol’ good ones", mostly his beloved New Orleans repertoire (e.g., "Back o’ Town Blues"; he also sang his beloved "Rockin’ Chair"). Victor recorded the concert and then brought back the participants three weeks later, to its studio, to reprise its success. A sextet was settled on for Armstrong. It was eventually staffed with supporting rather than star players, and this was his performing context for the rest of his career.

More artistically satisfying in Armstrong’s last quarter century was his LP production, which included tributes to composers W.C. Handy and Fats Waller; a musical autobiography, in which he reprised his Hot Fives and Sevens; and albums on which he embraced the challenge of the great American songbook, including an album of duets, with Ella Fitzgerald, of songs from the Gershwins’ "Porgy and Bess".

The US’s love affair with Armstrong wasn't a certainty before his all-stars started logging miles, especially overseas: a big tour of Europe was succeeded by a State Department–sponsored trip, in 1956, to (pre-independence) Ghana; a tour of South America followed, and so did a return to Ghana. But the crowning recognition at home was the 1957 Edward R. Murrow feature-film documentary, Satchmo the Great.

After that, while he could have, like Duke Ellington, accepted honors and commissions from institutions, he chose to make an array of pop records that found him ever wider audiences. His 1955 pop treatment of "Mack the Knife" with Lotte Lenya augured his Sixties embracing of true pop repertoire, with the unprecedented, No. 1 hit, "Hello, Dolly!" in ’63, and then another No. 1, in the UK, with "What a Wonderful World" in ’66.

The simple Queens house which, with his wife’s death, was bequeathed to the city will soon be a walk-in museum.