Satchmo by Gary Giddins

Author:Gary Giddins [GARY GIDDINS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2012-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Armstrong never revealed whose voice he heard on the phone; it may have been Rockwell or Connie Immerman or their gangland sponsor, Owney Madden, who had a distinctive voice and was alive and well long after Armstrong wrote Goffin—as was the increasingly powerful Rockwell. In any case, Louis had humored the thugs, but he had no intention of going to New York. Collins managed to sneak him out to Louisville on the eve of the Kentucky Derby, where—even on the run—he managed to make history by leading the first black band ever to play the Roof Garden of the Kentucky Hotel. From there, the band toured the Midwest and the South, including Armstrong’s first return to New Orleans, where he played Suburban Gardens—a white nightclub in Jefferson Parish—for three months, visited the Waif’s Home, and presided over a baseball team named after him. The boys were so proud of the uniforms, emblazoned with the name ARMSTRONG, and so nervous about tarnishing them, that their playing suffered—much to the chagrin of the team’s sponsor. The visit itself was tarnished on the night he opened at Suburban Gardens, when a radio announcer said, “I haven’t the heart to announce the nigger on the radio.” With the quick-wittedness that made him legendary, Armstrong asked the band for a chord, calmly took the microphone in hand, and did his own introductions. Similarly, when his appearance before a black audience was cancelled without reason, he made sure the black community got word of his promise to make a secret trip to New Orleans to play only for blacks—a vow he kept in 1935, when he slipped into town to play a black dance hall called the Golden Dragon, and was gone before the press ever knew about it.

In the fall of 1931, the band passed through Chicago again, to record. Although Armstrong avoided playing New York and Chicago for most of the next four years, his discography does not indicate much of a disruption in his career because the records he made that year were, as he said, among his best. “Sleepytime Down South” would soon become his theme song. “(I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead) You Rascal You” also became an Armstrong trademark, especially after it was reprised the following year in a Betty Boop cartoon in which his disembodied head wails it at a fleeing white figure. Armstrong said that at a 1932 concert in England, he dedicated it to George V with the words, “This one’s for you, Rex.” It’s a motley group we hear on those Chicago sessions, a comedown from the spit-and-polish band on the West Coast, but Louis is a blithe spirit, whether he’s crooning “When Your Lover Has Gone” or scaling peak after peak on “Chinatown,” the latter a vaudeville tune that—like so much other unlikely material—would become a jazz standard after Louis showed everyone how to make it work. His glissando-break on “Lazy River,” following a whirlwind double-time vocal, is so precipitous that skeptical musicians accused him of using a slide trumpet.

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