Two years later he went to New York to play with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, the top African American band of the time. Moving to a prosperous Chicago in 1922, Armstrong joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and began recording, making his first real money. He began his extended trumpet solos and also nourished his distinctive singing style, using his voice almost as creatively as his horn. He called this his University in these years he learned to read music and follow written arrangements.Īrmstrong’s music developed exponentially in the 1920s. By age 18 he was playing in Fate Marable’s New Orleans Band on the riverboat circuit. For a minor infraction he was sentenced to 2 years detention at the Colored Waif’s Home, where he joined the Home band. He wore a Star of David for the rest of his life in their honor.Ī 5th grade dropout, Armstrong sang with other boys in the streets outside New Orleans honky tonk clubs. His father abandoned them and by age 7 he was doing odd jobs for a local Jewish family, the Karnoffskys, who treated him kindly and helped him buy his first horn, a cornet from a pawn shop. Louis Armstrong was born to a 16-year-old mother in New Orleans on Aug(not July 4, 1900, as he loved to tell). And if you need one figure to sum up music, race, culture and innovation….it’s Louis Armstrong”. Writer and researcher Ricky Riccardi of the Louis Armstrong House Museum has said, “ There wouldn’t be a Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Beatles, Chuck Berry, Louis Jordan or Ray Charles without Louis Armstrong. Crossing into popular culture as the decades wore on, Armstrong appeared in a number of Hollywood movies, including High Society and Pennies From Heaven, both with Bing Crosby, and Hello, Dolly with Barbra Streisand. Over his long career Armstrong worked with many, many jazz and blues greats like Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey, Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines and Nat King Cole. Louis Blues to 1967’s What a Wonderful World. Armstrong is the only musician to have recorded hits across five decades his roster of Grammy-winners ranging from 1925’s St. With the rhythmic swing of his horn playing and his free-wheeling vocal style he helped take jazz from a music of collective improvisation to one of virtuoso solos, developing with his distinctive, gravelly voice the scat singing that eventually wound its way into today’s rap. The influence of Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) on the quintessentially American idiom of jazz was enormous. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.” “ The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.
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