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
