In my first blog about the origin of the word Jazz I discussed how the term for the music came about. I find it only fitting to talk about how Jazz music as we know it today came about and the only way to do so is to go back to one man, Louis Armstrong.
Louis Daniel Armstrong was born a poor child in the city of
On New Year's Eve young Louis, out with his friends, decided to have a little fun while celebrating the holiday and pulled out a gun from his clothing. Aiming straight up into the air he fired the gun and got the expected attention of all the people and then was promptly arrested. He was sentenced to the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs which is where he received his first formal instruction in music. Upon his arrival at the boys home Louis was already a self taught horn player and thought that his skills were good enough to earn him the right of being the leader of the Boy's Home band.
When released from the Waifs Home Louis would follow any band he could soaking up the music. At the time pickup bands would roam the city streets performing for various events such as funerals and parties and young Louis would be right there watching and listening intently, learning. One of the people that Louis met at this time was the man who would become his mentor, Joe "King" Oliver. King Oliver was the trumpet player in Kid Ory's band which at the time was the best band in all of
Louis's first trip on the famous river found him working with Fate Marable's band on the paddle boat the St. Paul and an incident that he witnessed would forever help him identify what was important in life, he writes;
"David Jones starved himself the whole summer we worked on the St. Paul. He saved every nickel and sent all his money to a farm down South where employees and relatives were raising cotton for him and getting away with as much of his money as they could, since he was not there to look after his own interests. Every day he would eat an apple instead of a good hot meal. What was the result? The boll weevils ate all of his cotton before the season was over. He did not even have a chance to go down and look his farm over before a telegram came saying everything had been shot to hell. After that David Jones used to stand at the boat rail during every intermission looking down at the water and thinking about all the jack he had lost. I often said to Fate Marable:
"Fate keep an eye on David Jones. He's liable to jump in the water most any minute."
This incident taught me never to deprive my stomach. I'll probably never be rich, but I will be a fat man."
What really started Joe into giving Louis his own chorus, and this is what Joe Oliver told me, was that one night they were playing and this guy Johnny Dunn walked in who was cracked up to be a hell of a trumpet man in those days. Johnny Dunn was with a big show and the people were clamoring to hear what he would play. He walked on to the stand and said to Louis, Boy! Give me that horn. You dont know how to do. That made Joe Oliver real angry and he told Louis, Go get him. Louis blew like the devil. Blew him out of the place. They looked for Johnny Dunn when Louis finished but he had skipped out. They never found him in there again. So that was when Joe started to turn Louis loose by himself.
Yeah, Pops said and he handed it to him.
Mind if I blow it?
Right, Pops said. Got your mouthpiece?
So the guy put his mouthpiece in and sounded C on Pops horn and then a C on his own horn. He ran the scale on his horn then he ran the scale on Pops. It was all the same. It was no trick horn. It was just the man, the difference of the man.
I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, its always come first, but the music aint worth nothing if you cant lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, cause what youre there for is to please the people.
A few months before Louis died his doctor urged him to cancel a show in New York telling him he needed to conserve his energy and that he was to sick to perform. Louis told him:
My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to B-L-O-W that H-O-R-N, The people are waiting for me, I got to do it Doc, I got to do it."
Louis Armstrong died quietly in his sleep at his home in
"What he does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul."
-- Leonard Bernstein on Louis Armstrong
"I think that anybody from the 20th century, up to now, has to be aware that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong, we'd all be wearing powdered wigs. I think that Louis Armstrong loosened the world, helped people to be able to say "Yeah," and to walk with a little dip in their hip. Before Louis Armstrong, the world was definitely square, just like Christopher Columbus thought."
-- South African trumpet legend Hugh Masekela
-- Armstrong disciple Nicholas Payton
"Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation."
-- Ellis Marsalis
"Armstrong is to music what Einstein is to physics and the Wright Brothers are to travel."
-- "Jazz" documentary producer Ken Burns
"(Armstrong was) the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong."
-- Dan Morgenstern -
"It's
-- Tony Bennett
"If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original."
--Duke Ellington
"In my opinion, Louis Armstrong is the greatest trumpet stylist of all time and has influenced every trumpet player of his time and long after"
-- Al Hirt
"He left an undying testimony to the human condition in the
-- Wynton Marsalis
"You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't already played"
-- Miles Davis
"Jazz is not - never has been - a one man show. But if I had to vote for one representative for jazz, that one would have to be Louis Armstrong"
-- Art Hodes
"Louis Armstrong could only happen once - for ever and ever. I, for one, appreciate the ride"
-- Bobby Hackett
"All we can do is be glad we live in the same century as Louis Armstrong"
--Wynton Marsalis
"I'm proud to acknowledge my debt to the 'Reverend Satchelmouth' ... He is the beginning and the end of music in
-- Bing Crosby
"Americans, unknowingly, live part of every day in the house that Satch built"
-- noted critic Leonard Feather
"If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love"
-- Mahalia Jackson
"Louis is not dead, for his music is and will remain in the hearts and minds of countless millions of the world's peoples, and in the playing of hundreds of thousands of musicians who have come under his influence."
-- Dizzy Gillespie;
"He could play a trumpet like nobody else, then put it down and sing a song like no one else could."
--Eddie Condon
--Louis Armstrong
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