Daniel Louis
"Satchmo" Armstrong was born at the turn of the 20th century in New Orleans,
Louisiana. After his father had deserted his family in New Orleans,
the child Louis helped to support his mother and sister by delivering coal
to prostitutes and lifting food out of hotel garbage cans and selling it.
When he was ten, he fired a pistol in the street
in celebration of New Year's Eve. This offense brought arrest and
confinement in the Colored Waifs Home for Boys. "It was, " he later
said, "the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Me and music
got married at that home." There, Peter Davis, a music instructor,
began teaching Louis to read music and play the bugle and cornet.
Louis soon joined the Home's brass band which performed at picnics, funerals,
and other events.
After his release from the Home, Louis worked
as a newsboy and in a junkyard. All the while, he was playing the
cornet in various honky-tonks. One night, Bunk Johnson failed to
show up at Madranga's . Louis sat in for him and was heard by none
other than the king himself, Joe Oliver. Oliver liked what he heard,
took Louis under his wing, and gave him cornet lessons. Armstong
always looked back upon Oliver as the greatest Jazz performer he had ever
known and the greatest single influence upon his own development.
"Joe Oliver taught me more than anyone," Armstrong recalled.
By 1922, Oliver had established himself in Chicago
as the leader of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. He asked Armstrong
to join him as second cornetist. Together they made incomparable
music, as each inspired the other to unparalleled flights of musical fancy.
Armstrong made his first records with Oliver's band on the Gannett label.
In 1924, Armstrong married Lillian Hardin. She
was a prime force in getting Louis to leave Oliver's band, feeling as she
did that the time had come for Armstrong to emerge as a Jazz personality
in his own right. Between 1924 and 1925, Armstrong played solos,
switching from cornet to trumpet, with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra
at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, which Louis J. Becker had opened
up at 1658 Broadway on December 13, 1919. In New York, Armstrong
made more recordings.
He was back in Chicago in 1925. For the
next four years he made history there. First he played in his wife's
band, "Lil's Hot Shots." Then he formed his own Jazz group, the "Hot
Five." They played at the Dreamland Cafe in 1925 and 1926 and made
recordings for OKeh which many Jazzmen used as a basic course for their
own further education.
Armstrong was now at the pinnacle of his fame
and artistry, with few equals. It was in Chicago that he initiated
his "scat" singing -- singing nonsense syllables in place of words and
vocally simulating instrumental sound. Some say this came about accidentally
when, during a 1926 recording session, Armstrong forgot the lyrics of a
song and had to improvise vocal sounds. Scat singing henceforth became
one of the highlights of Armstrong's performances.
His art at improvisation was so formidable that
even Virgil Thomas, the distinguished serious composer and music critic,
was lead to remark that it combined "the highest reaches of instrumental
virtuosity with the most tensely disciplined melodic structure and the
most spontaneous emotional expression, all of which in one man you must
admit is pretty rare."
David
Ewen - All the years of American Popular Music
