The Top 20 Male Jazz Vocalists-4

The Top 20 Male Jazz Vocalists-4

Black history month-Louis Armstrong

"Louis Armstrong was the greatest of all Jazz musicians. Armstrong defined what it was to play Jazz. His amazing technical abilities, the joy and spontaneity, and amazingly quick, inventive musical mind still dominate Jazz to this day."

 Armstrong was from a very poor family and was sent to reform school when he was twelve after firing a gun in the air on New Year's Eve. At the school he learned to play cornet. After being released at age fourteen, he worked selling papers, unloading boats, and selling coal from a cart. He didn't own an instrument at this time, but continued to listen to bands at clubs.

 By 1917 he played at dive bars in New Orleans' Storyville section. In 1919 he left New Orleans for the first time for St. Louis. He played on Mississsippi river boat lines.  In 1921,  he returned to New Orleans and  in 1922 Louis was invited by his mentor Joe Oliver,  to join his band in Chicago. This was a dream come true for Armstrong and his amazing playing in the band soon made him a sensation among other musicians in Chicago. The New Orleans style of music took the town by storm and soon many other bands from down south made their way north to Chicago.

 He moved to New York in 1924 to play in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. During that time he also did dozens of recording sessions with  numerous Blues singers, including Bessie Smith's 1925 classic recording of "St. Louis Blues."  In 1925 Armstrong moved back to Chicago.

Armstrong recorded his first Hot Five records. This was the first time that Armstrong had made records under his own name.  Strangely, the band never played live, but continued recording until 1928. That year Louis met his future manager, Joe Glaser.  Hired in 1935,Glaser guided Louis' career for the rest of his life. He had Armstrong's complete trust...including total control of Louis' schedule and finances. As Louis toured the world decades later, his many letters to Joe were a combination of descriptions of sightseeing trips, "personal encounters" (his wives rarely traveled with him) and pleas to "send money."

By 1929 Louis was becoming a very big star and was almost always on the road. He crisscrossed the U.S. dozens of times and returned to Europe playing in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland and England. In 1935 he returned to the U.S. and hired Joe Glaser to be his manager.  Glaser was allegedly connected to the Al Capone mob, but proved to be a great manager and friend for Louis. The band was renamed " Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra" and was one of the most popular acts of the Swing era. Glaser put the band to work and they toured constantly for the next ten years.

During this period Armstrong became one of the most famous men in America.   For the next nine years the Louis Armstrong Orchestra continued to tour and release records, but as the 1940s drew to a close the public's taste in Jazz began to shift away from the commercial sounds of the Swing era and big band Jazz. 

The so-called Dixieland Jazz revival was just beginning and Be Bop was also starting to challenge the status quo in the Jazz world. The Louis Armstrong Orchestra was beginning to look tired and concert and record sales were declining. Critics complained that Armstrong was becoming too commercial. So, in 1947 Glaser replaced the orchestra with a small group that became one of the greatest and most popular bands in Jazz history. The group was called the Louis Armstrong All-stars and over the years featured exceptional musicians like Jack Teagarden and Earl Hines. The band toured extensively travelling to Africa, Asia, Europe and South America for the next twenty years until Louis' failing health caused them to disband.
Armstrong became known as America's Ambassador of Swing.

In 1963 Armstrong scored a huge international hit with his version of "Hello Dolly". This number one single even knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts. In 1968 he recorded another number one hit  "What A Wonderful World". He co-starred in a major motion picture, "High Society" with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. In 1971 the world's greatest jazz musician died in his sleep at his home in Queens, New York.

Here is Louis Armstrong, late in his career, singing on television his hit "What A Wonderful World."

 
 

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POPS: A LIFE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG

From the new biography of Louis Armstrong (Lewis not Louie), POPS: A LIFE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG by Terry Teachout, here are several notable excerpts;

1- "His trumpet playing was a revelation and, indeed, a revolution, an audacious breaking away from the New Orleans collaborative, contrapuntal jazz style in which he had grown up. his achievement shook the jazz world to its foundations. No one had ever played quite this way before."

2- Artie Shaw: "I heard this cascade of notes coming out of a trumpet. No one had ever done that before." Pianist Teddy Wilson, summing up Armstrong's style, said: "... [he]... had this high development of balance. Lyricism. Delicacy. Emotional outburst. Rhythm. Complete mastery of his horn."

3- "Armstrong was also a uniquely gifted singer, with an unmistakable gravelly voiced style, who left his imprint on popular singing for decades to come."

4- "He became an onstage clown, mugging and grinning, wiping away sweat with his ever-present white handkerchief, Uncle-Tomming as hard as he could. Armstrong had sold out, taken the easy path, led by his evil manager, gangster Joe Glaser. He could still hit any number of high C's to excite musically ignorant crowds, but, as jazz people would put it, Pops was no longer saying anything with his horn. Jazz had moved on."

5-"He saw himself not just as a musician or a singer, but also as an all-around entertainer, in the old flamboyant style. He believed it was his job to please an audience by any means, a view not shared by a younger generation of black musicians, especially beboppers like Miles Davis."

One reviewer's comment; "Pops" is is a serious attempt to set straight the tangled story of Armstrong's career and to ascertain his rightful place in American popular culture. The author examines claims and counterclaims made about Armstrong's deservedly high status as a trumpet player and singer and makes hard judgments, some of them going against the grain of received critical opinion."