Stomping Off With Satchmo

WHEN I WAS A KID my dad gave me a trumpet for Christmas, and told me to do whatever I wanted with it. Play it, put it in the closet, my choice. I chose the former, and athough I took lessons and played in the band throughout school, I never became very good at it. No regrets, good experiences. It just turned out that I prefer listening to music to trying to create it. Quite naturally I developed into a fan of certain famous trumpet players. My favorites were Al Hirt and Louis Armstrong. I still love them both. Maybe I was expressing some deeply embedded New Orleans vibe, previously unknown to me. There was something special about Louis. His race, his smile, and his gravelly singing voice appealed to me, notwithstanding the fact that to this day I consider Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan to be the worst singers in popular American cultural history. Go figure; they are probably still laughing all the way to the proverbial bank, in their respective realms of reality. Armstrong biographer Ricky Ricardi has written three books about Armstrong, including one about his early life and career, titled "Stomp Off, Let's Go", after a song title. (Its prounced either "Lewis" or "Looie", your choice. He usually used the former, but not always. Fans go both ways. The latter is the way the French say it.) He claimed he was born in 1900; records "seem" to indicate that he was born a year later, on July 4th, according to Ricardi. The third ward in the "big easy" was so violent that it was known as "the battlefield". From the small flat he shared with his mother and sister, the child Armstrong heard gun fights and screams of agony deily. Ricardi says it is a miracle he survived childhood when many other black kids didn't, as if a cornet playing guardian angel hovered over him. Louis maintained throughout his life that he didn't know whether his mother and sister were prostitutes; he knew. He tried pimping, but his lady shot him in the shoulder, and he showed off the scar the rest of his life. He spent a year and a half in a juvenile detention center for no particular reason other than to keep him off the streets, which, strangely, arguably, might have been the best thing that ever happened to him. There, he got stability, three squares a day, discipline, and an opportunity to develop a variety of skills, including music, which he chose to exploit on the cornet. He always thought of himself as a singer first and foremost, and according to Ricardi would have had a career as a vocalist had he never picked up the ax. Yes, his distinctive voice turned out to be a benefit. By the time he was nineteen he may hae been the best trumpet/cornet player in the world. He wanted to sing and play both, but since he didn't play guiter, had to alternate. Problem was, nobody had ever done that before. It was one, or the other. He wouldn't be disuaded, and his voice to horn back to voice style made him famous, and, eventually, helped earn him the title as the inventor of jazz, of modern American music. His unique status as America's first pop music superstar gave him a unique opportunity to speak out against segregation, and he received much criticism for failing to do so with suffient vigor. However, he spoke out. He accused President Eisenhower of having "no guts' for his failure to publicly endorse the civil rights movement, and he generally refused to perform in front of segregated audiences. Better than nothing. After all, President Eisenhower was in a much better position to assist in rights rights than a poor black trumpet player and black pimp from New Orleans. There was more than enough blame to go around. No American presidnet until Kennedy addressed the issue forcefully, and Kennedy, only late in his presidency. His jazz ensembles, the "Hot Five" and the "Hot Seven", were releasing recordings by 1925, which can still be heard today, with rewarding clarity. You simply have to hear them, especially his first big hit "The Heebie Jeebies", in which Louis begins with an earbending thirteen second solo intro, then sings his heart out, up tempo, joyfully. During the 2020 pandemic, there was on an online Louis Armstrong Heebie Jeebie challenge, and musicians all over the world tried to knock out the famous, hopelessly complicated cornet riff. If anybody succeeded, nobody ever knew. "Cornet Chop Suey" came soon thereafter. Louis got the nickname "satchmo", short for "satchel mouth" because he once briefly stored coins in his mouth for momentary safekeeping. While recording "Heebie Jeebie", the story goes, he dropped the sheet lmusic, and couldn't remember the lyrics, so, in desperation, resorted to singing in half words and nonsense syllables. Thus was invented "scat singing", which in 1926 was spelled "skat". This account has been confirmed. (scat, for "shit", perhaps?). I developed a fairly passable impersonation of his singing voice, which I still, from sheer love and admiration, occasionaly show off today, at the risk of a sore throat. I remember seeing him perform on the "Ed Sullivan Show", and I recall once when he took questions from the live studio audience, to everyone's delight. "Hello Dolly", and "What A wonderful World", both big hits late in his life, were not among my favorites. He died when I was sixteen, in 1971, but not really.