Music: Louis the First

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The brown-skinned man with the golden horn pursed his scarred lips, blew a short stream of incredibly high, shining notes and then carefully laid the trumpet down. “There’s a thing I’ve dreamed of all my life,” he graveled, “and I’ll be damned if it don’t look like it’s about to come true—to be King of the Zulus’ Parade. After that I’ll be ready to die.”

This week few mortals were closer to heart’s desire than Jazz Trumpeter Daniel Louis Armstrong. At 48, he was on his way back to the town where he was born, to be monarch for a day as King of the Zulus in New Orleans’ boisterous Mardi Gras. For the first time in its 33-year history, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club (founded primarily to assure dues-paying members a decent burial) had gone out of town for its carnival king. From its cross-section membership in the past had come Mardi Gras kings who were porters, shopkeepers and undertakers, but Trumpeter Armstrong was big-time royalty, even a world figure. Many jazz experts, who can be as snooty and esoteric as existentialists or the followers of a Bach cult, solemnly hail him as the greatest musical genius the U.S. has ever produced.

In the five-and six-man combinations in which Armstrong has worked much of his life, he has had to earn that kind of praise—and without the carefully arranged six-and eight-horn brass choirs of the big bands to smother sour notes for him. Playing without written arrangements, bending the melody around on his own, then blending in with the others when the clarinet or trombone soars off on the lead, Louis has wrung raves even from longer-haired critics. The New York Herald Tribune’s Virgil Thomson once said that Louis’ style of improvisation made him “a master of musical art comparable only to the great castrati of the 18th Century.”*

Just Follow the Crowd. Among Negro intellectuals, the Zulus and all their doings are considered offensive vestiges of the minstrel-show, Sambo-type Negro. To Armstrong such touchiness seems absurd, and no one who knows easygoing, nonintellectual Louis will doubt his sincerity. To Jazz King Armstrong, lording it over the Zulu Parade (a broad, dark satire on the expensive white goings-on in another part of town) will be the sentimental culmination of his spectacular career, and a bang-up good time besides.

As stubby (5 ft. 8 in., 175 Ibs.) Louis Armstrong speaks of his role on Shrove Tuesday (March 1), his expressive eyes shine with excitement and amusement. Dressed in long, black-dyed underwear and grass skirt and wearing a green velvet cape and gilt cardboard crown, the King sets out on a riotous 20-mile, all-day parade. He winds through the streets of the Negro district, stopping at the shops of parade sponsors, holds court, sees that his loyal Zulu subjects are refreshed with beer and potato salad.

The King alone drinks champagne, and a flunky keeps his cup filled all day. When the spirit moves him, his majesty throws largess in the form of coconuts; Louis has stocked more than 2,000 of them. Waiting for him on a reviewing stand in front of the Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home stands the Zulus’ Queen (this year, attractive, brown-skinned Bernice Oxley, ticket taker at the Ace Theater). In a room where the caskets have been pushed back to the wall, she receives her lord’s champagne toast. After the parade the long night of jazz-filled, carnival pandemonium begins.

To his worried wife Lucille, who wonders how she can stay in touch with him through all this, 1949’s King grandly replies: “Baby, just follow the crowd.”

Telling What Comes Naturally. In that crowd there will be many who remember Louis Armstrong and his music, for he and New Orleans jazz grew up together. Louis says: “Jazz and I grew up side by side when we were poor.” The wonder is that both jazz and Louis emerged from streets of brutal poverty and professional vice—jazz to become an exciting art, Louis to be hailed almost without dissent as its greatest creator-practitioner.

A generation of quibbling, cult-minded, critical cognoscenti has called New Orleans jazz many things, from “a rich and frequently dissonant polyphony” to “this dynamism [which] interprets life at its maximum intensity.” But Louis grins wickedly and says: “Man, when you got to ask what is it, you’ll never get to know.” In his boyhood New Orleans, jazz was simply a story told in strongly rhythmic song, pumped out “from the heart” with a nervous, exciting beat. To Trumpeter Louis, jazz is still storytelling: “I like to tell them things that come naturally.”

Up from Jane Alley. From the place Louis and jazz were born, there was no direction to move but up. The music, at first a restless, syncopated blend of African dance rhythms, Negro blues, brass-band marches, and French Creole songs and dances, spent its raucous teens in brothels, cheap saloons and street parades. Armstrong came up from Jane Alley, a squalid, “back-o’-town” lane in what was then the toughest section of uptown Negro New Orleans. His parents were the nearly illiterate grandchildren of slaves, his father a worker in a turpentine factory, his mother a domestic. Never quiet, Jane Alley became a bloody ground on Saturday nights with razors flashing in the darkness and drunken curses ripping through the night. In the morning, police would come by to pick up casualties.

When Louis was five his mother took him away from Jane Alley, moved some 18 blocks to Liberty Street, near Perdido in the old third ward. Socially it was the shortest of steps, but it was up, and for Louis it was decisive: near by were the Fisk School, where he learned to read & write, and honky-tonks like Sicilian Henry Matranga’s place and thickly packed Funky Butt Hall, where both the syncopation and the dancing were strident and brassy.

City Full of Jazz. At night, the hot, insistent rhythm came at him from every direction. In the daytime, there was jazz in the streets. Band members would pile into advertising wagons (with the trombonist on the tail gate for freedom of reach) and engage in music battles with other bands; the winner was chosen by acclamation and rode off with crowds following. At Negro funerals, the bands played to & from the cemetery—doleful spirituals on the way out, such frenzied affirmations as High Society and Oh, Didn’t He Ramble! on the way back.

Louis listened to all of the Negro jazz pioneers: men like Clarinetists Alphonse Picou and Sidney Bechet, Trombonist Kid Ory, Pianist Jelly Roll Morton and Cornetist Bunk Johnson. But Cornetist Joe (“King”) Oliver was his favorite: “Soon as I heard him I said ‘there’s mah man!'” At first, Louis just listened. He ran errands, hawked bananas, ground up old brick and sold it to prostitutes for scouring their front steps on Saturday mornings. When he was eleven, he also started a street quartet in which he sang tenor, picked up loose change by serenading through the red-light district. Says Armstrong: “A drunk come along, and maybe he’d give us a dollar. The grown folks were workin’ for a dollar a day then.” Only his mother was still calling him Little Louie. To everyone else he was Dippennouth or Satchelmouth. Satchelmouth was soon shortened to Satchmo, and it stuck. (Armstrong still favors the name, has emblazed it on his stationery. His specially blended cologne is Satchmo.)

In the quartet Little Louis was a tenor, but his ambition in 1913 was to sing bass. His change of mind began one New Year’s Eve, when he was twelve. To celebrate, he had hauled his father’s old .38 revolver out to the street and fired it off. He was picked up and taken to juvenile court where, he remembers, the magistrate told him that while he wasn’t a bad boy he might get to be one if he kept playing around Perdido Street at night. Louis was packed off to ihe Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, a New Orleans reform school.

Whatever he felt about the place then, he now remembers the Waif’s Home with great affection. “I could do just about what I wanted and we ate regular. I feel at home there even now. I might end up there an old man some day, seein’ over those boys like Professor Davis did.” Best of all for Louis, “Professor” Davis taught him to read music a bit, and play, first the tambourine and drums, then the bugle, finally a battered pawnshop cornet. Unable to keep the small, smooth mouthpiece on his big lips at first, Louis filed grooves in it and mastered Home, Sweet Home.

Mahogany Exodus. Louis was a natural. He could blow clear and true, hitting the notes hard and clean. He never had to squeeze for a high one. But for three years after he got out of the Waif’s Home (his mother got “a big white man” to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn’t turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga’s joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe (“there’s mah man”) Oliver came around to listen.

In November 1917, with the U.S. at war, Storyville and jazz were handed a stunning jolt. At the Navy’s request, New Orleans clamped down on the disease-ridden “District,” put it permanently out of business. New Orleans witnessed an exodus unique in U.S. history. Hundreds of prostitutes streamed from their cribs carrying their belongings. Establishments like Lulu White’s renowned Mahogany Hall (one of Louis’ most prized recordings is Mahogany Hall Stomp) closed for good, and so did scores of “in mills and honky-tonks that had prepared a home for jazz music and jobs for its musicians.

In the dispersal that followed, some Storyville musicians put away their instruments for factory work and many moved away. A few, like Joe Oliver, headed north for Chicago. But Satchmo Armstrong stayed on in New Orleans for a while. With Oliver gone, Louis began to get his due as the finest cornet in town. At 18 he married a girl named Daisy Parker and bought himself a membership in the Zulus.

Life with Daisy had its ups & downs, and on a Mardi Gras day just 30 years ago, Daisy threatened Satchmo with a razor as he stood at the corner of Liberty and Perdido Streets in full Zulu court regalia. Louis had had enough. He took a job playing with Fate Marable’s band on the Mississippi River excursion boats Dixie Bell and Sidney. The pay was the unheard of (for Satchmo) sum of $55 a week. Says he: “I had so much money I just plain didn’t know what to do with it.” They played such old Storyville favorites as Sugar Foot Stomp, Willie the Weeper and Coal Cart Blues, and Louis held the gay crowds spellbound when he sang the relatively new Basin Street Blues:

Won’t-cha come along wit’ me

To the Mississippi?

We’ll take the boat—to the Ian’ of dreams,

Steam down the river, down to New Orleans.

Joe Sent for Me. Armstrong’s two years on river boats spread his fame up & down the Mississippi. When he came back to New Orleans, he was met at the landing by cheering crowds. Among them, a young white trombone player from Texas named Jack Teagarden waited at the gangway to say hello, asked to shake hands with Louis. Teagarden, soon to become a great name in jazz himself, remembers his first look at Louis: “[He] wasn’t much to look at. Just a little guy with a big mouth. But, man, how he could blow that horn!” Louis soon found that his horn had been heard all the way to Chicago: Joe Oliver sent for him and in 1922 Louis went north—in a land just getting used to flappers, bathtub gin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Warren G. Harding and jazz itself.

Armstrong bowled them over in Chicago. His tone was unsurpassed for purity —and stayed that way even up around F and G above high C; he had such sheer power that he could blow as many as 300 ceiling notes in succession. The songs that came from his shiny horn ranged from the most mournful of blues to the explosive abandon of numbers like Muskrat Ramble.

Louis, a modest man, makes no bones about what he owes to Joe Oliver in the Chicago days: “We never had to look at each other when we played, both just thinkin’ the same thing. And he’s the one that stopped me playin’ all those variations—what they call bebop today. ‘You get yourself a lead [melody] and you stick to it,’ Papa Joe told me. And I always do.” It was the kind of jazz that didn’t take written arrangements, if a man had “a lead” and could “cut loose from the heart.”

“No Musician Today.” So far as the U.S. public was concerned in the ’20s, there were a good many other ways of playing jazz. Paul Whiteman, with his 30-piece band and his smooth arrangements of Tin Pan Alley hit tunes and minor classics (The Song of India), was “King of Jazz,” and his music and records were far better known than the small-band New Orleans variety. But after Louis arrived in Manhattan in 1924, and persuaded Fletcher Henderson to let him “open up” on his horn at Broadway’s Roseland Ballroom one night, jazz musicians of all existing varieties flocked to listen.

Then came tours that took Louis to the West Coast and points between. He switched from cornet to trumpet (chiefly because the longer horn “looked better”). In 1926, when he dropped some lyrics on the floor during a recording session, he quickly substituted nonsense syllables, and added “scat-singing” to jazz. He had formed “Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five” (Satchmo, Clarinetist Johnny Dodds, Trombonist Kid Ory, Johnny St. Cyr on the banjo and second wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on the piano) to make recordings of his best numbers for Okeh. When he played Chicago, such youngsters as Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Eddie Condon, who were to help create the “Chicago school” of jazz, sat and listened worshipfully. All of them now make their bow to Louis. Says Drummer Krupa: “No band musician today on any instrument, jazz, sweet, or bebop, can get through 32 bars without musically admitting his debt to Armstrong. Louis did it all, and he did it first.”

In 1930, Hollywood heard about him and put him in the first of a half-dozen films (his latest: A Song Is Born).

As Big as Mussolini. When Armstrong went abroad in 1932, Europe turned out to be as much of a cinch as Chicago. At London’s Palladium, George V did Armstrong the honor of attending in person. Louis repaid the compliment with a grinning bow to the royal box: “This one’s for you, Rex.” In Italy he relished seeing his own picture blown up to the same size as Mussolini’s, hanging on the opposite side of the theater doorway (“Mussolini was big stuff in those days”).

Louis liked Europe well enough to return in 1933 and stay for two years. He still thinks the British are the best appreciators of jazz in the world (“Man! They know more about my records than I do”). Next to the British, he ranks the French, who call his kind of music le jazz hot. Last year, when he went to France for the Jazz Festival at Nice (TIME, March 8), President Vincent Auriol himself sent Louis a large Sevres vase. But after each trip abroad Louis says: “Europe’s fine, but I sure get homesick for the ol’ U.S.A.”

“That Bop.” With his present six-man outfit, the All-Stars, and 267-lb. Singer Velma Middleton, he was playing to dine & dance audiences of 1,000 a night last week in Vancouver, B.C. Most of his band, like Armstrong, had been musically famous for more than two decades, though they were only in their early 405; Trombonist Jack Teagarden, Pianist Earl (“Father”) Hines, Clarinetist Barney Bigard and Drummer Sidney (“Big Sid”) Catlett. The only youngster, 25-year-old Arvell Shaw played bass fiddle. When Louis and his All-Stars swung into West End Blues, Confessin’ or Rockin’ Chair, it was hard for oldtimers to believe that Louis or jazz were ever better.

Louis gives the back of his hand to the latest variety of jazz, bebop (or bop). The boppers, who know the way he feels, tend to speak of him in the past tense. “Nowadays,” says Negro Bop Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, “we try to work out different rhythms and things that they didn’t think about when Louis Armstrong blew. In his day all he did was play strictly from the soul—just strictly from his heart. You got to goforward and progress. We study.”

Louis likes playing from the soul. Says he: “That bop is nice to listen to for a while but not all night. It’s not jazz—all them variations—it’s more an exercise. You’ve got to have that lead, too . . .”

“Just a Synopsis.” With his present (and fourth) wife, pretty onetime show girl Lucille (“Brown Sugar”) Wilson, Satchmo makes his “regular home” in a twelve-room house in a mixed white-and-colored neighborhood in Corona, borough of Queens, New York City.

No sophisticate, he shows signs of becoming a big-city hypochondriac, although he denies it. His dressing table is littered with a weird assortment of pills, salves, balms and medicines with which he experiments constantly. But the big-city preoccupation with racial problems is not in his key. He says: “I know where the discrimination is, so I avoid those cities. Anyone who goes huntin’ for discrimination is a glutton for punishment.” A simple man whose main life is his music, he has occasional fits of sullenness and sometimes falls into a temperamental rage, but usually he is gay, good-humored and gabby about small things.

He is meticulously neat, and says, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve spent my last nickels to keep my shirts clean. Musicians are lazy, don’t seem to care how they look. Some of them are dirty. I don’t hold with that.” Last week in Vancouver, he had 16 $150 suits hanging in his hotel-room closet.

On the road, his schedule has long ago hardened into routine. After the show, which is usually over between 2 and 4 a.m., he goes out for a “snack,” accompanied by Brown Sugar, his valet, “Doctor” Pugh, and whatever old friends and acquaintances want to join the party. The snack usually comes to a huge portion of ham & eggs, with potatoes, hot biscuits, hominy grits and coffee on the side. When complimented on his appetite, Satchmo replies: “Man, that’s just a synopsis.”

Louis likes his sleep, eight or nine hours of it, but he can do with four, “if I lay on my back.” He once read that Heavyweight Max Baer recommended sleeping that way, earnestly agrees that “it’s the only kind of sleep that eases you off.” The first thing he does on arising is to turn on two or three radios, one in each room, and they stay on all day. Louis doesn’t care what the program is (“I can get something out of any of them”). Apparently, sweet, slurred stuff is just as acceptable to him as hot jazz. His favorite “listening band” for years has been Guy Lombardo’s—and Louis doesn’t care how many jazz pedants faint when they hear it; “Guy Lombardo advertises the ‘sweetest music this side of heaven’ and that’s what he plays.”

Money doesn’t worry Louis any more than his taste in music. He leaves all that to his manager and friend—a man Louis, with a kind of plantation politeness, still calls “Mister” Glaser. Joe Glaser, a tough, smart ex-fight manager, pays Louis’ income tax, looks after his insurance, protects him from lawsuits and handles all the financial details of the band, including payment of the other men. Louis has never read his contract, never questioned Glaser’s plans for him. Glaser says: “I’m Louis and Louis is me. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.” One thing he has done is to make sure that happy-go-lucky Louis Armstrong will never be in need. Should Satchmo have to lay down his gleaming horn tomorrow, Glaser says, he would collect $864 a month for life.

But Louis is still mighty fit, and expects to keep fit for a long time. How long does he think he cal last? “Right until I get to the Pearly Gates, I hope.” When he gets to those gates he is going to pay his respects, he say, to another famous trumpeter. Says Louis: “I’m gonna blow a kiss to Gabriel.”

*In early operas such emasculated male soprano songbirds as Senesino and Farinelli embellished their arias beautifully and at will, until Gluck in the second half of the 18th Century put them in their place with pinpoint notation, made them stick to the score.