The history of jazz starts like a funeral procession and develops into a swinging dance party.
In New Orleans, before 1900, there was music, but like everywhere in the US, the black music scene was subdued in the wake of slavery.
In contrast to other southern states, New Orleans managed its slavery system differently. This was due to colonial Spanish and French influences which took a more liberated view of slavery than the strict economic practises of British slavers. In New Orleans, slaves had some legal rights, and were considered more like family members.
When slavery ended after the American Civil War in 1865, life continued much as it had before in New Orleans. Black people were still second class citizens, but they were people with musical instruments, and African traditions that lived on in lively funerals and public places, like the African farmers' market at Congo Square.
Congo Square was an area in the Treme District, north of the French Quarter. If you look for Congo Square today, you'll find it in Louis Armstrong Park.
In the original Congo Square, slaves were allowed to set up a produce market, sing, dance, and play music, especially on Sundays. At the time, New Orleans slaves could purchase their freedom. They could also buy and sell goods in the square in order to raise money to escape slavery.
After slavery ended, there was still segregation, which limited employment opportunities. Many blacks were able to find work in entertainment, as dancers for minstrel shows and vaudeville. Black pianists played in clubs, and brothels, especially when ragtime became popular.
To early European musicians, the instruments of New Orleans musicians in the 1800s must have looked strange - jugs and whistles, washboards and washtubs, boxes beaten with sticks, and a drum made by stretching skin over a flour-barrel. After the Civil War, African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes.
One African tradition that was carried on in New Orleans was the unique New Orleans practise of enjoying funerals. Funerals played a big part in the birth of jazz. The instruments used in funeral bands became the basic instruments of later jazz bands, ie. brass instruments, with reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale, and a variety of drums.
In New Orleans, a funeral procession of solemn mourners was led by a parade of musicians. They would play sad music for a while, spirituals, hymns, and slow marches, but there comes a time in every New Orleans funeral when the tempo picks up, and people feel like dancing to the music.
By 1900, funeral marches had become a popular social scene. And we know how musicians love an audience. As the years passed, the funerals got bigger and better, and the musicians were itching to play music that would get the crowd dancing.
Funeral parades had their favourite stars in those early years. The pop stars of the day wound up playing for local clubs in the French Quarter, and in brothels and bars of the red-light district around Basin Street, which was known as Storyville.
The music was great, and people loved it, but the music didn't even have a name yet. Around 1900, they called it Jass. Jass had roots in blues music and ragtime, but it kept changing and evolving into something totally original.
Jass - The Building Blocks of Jazz
True to its African roots, Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Different artists kept developing these techniques in the late 1800s, but it didn't come together as an integrated whole until the1920s, when Louis Armstrong and his friends put it all together and added swing.
Before Louis Armstrong came on the scene, a few notable players in the early years helped form and shape the new music. These early players are still remembered as the forerunners, and the originators, of this unique musical style.
In the mid-1800s, a white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands into wealthy salon piano music. It wasn't jazz yet, but it was like a preview of what was to come, and a forerunner of Ragtime.
Ragtime was first popularized by the entertainer Ernest Hogan, whose hit songs appeared in 1895. Two years later, Vess Ossman recorded a medley of songs as a banjo solo known as Rag Time Medley.
This was way back, when recording was done through a bellows instead of a microphone, and produced on round cylinders instead of vinyl records or CDs. Very few people could afford to be recorded in those days. How these early black musicians got recorded is both a miracle, and a mystery.
On the music publishing front, a white composer, William H. Krell, published Mississippi Rag, in 1897, as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece. In the same year, Tom Turpin published Harlem Rag, the first ragtime composition published by an African-American.
Scott Joplin's Original Rags, a ragtime medley for piano, was published in early 1899, preceding his Maple Leaf Rag by a year.
Joplin had an international hit with Maple Leaf Rag. It was ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious seventh chords. The syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time.
The Originator of Jazz - Stalebread Lacoume
There's a gravestone in a New Orleans cemetery dedicated to Stalebread Lacoume, The Originator of Jazz.
The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band was an early New Orleans band, regarded by some as the first jazz band. The Razzy Dazzy band was basically a group of young street urchins, led by Stalebread Lacoume.
Other members of the group were Whiskey Benrod, Monk Bussey, Cajun Bussey, Harry Gregson, a boy known as Warm Gravy, another player called Chinee, and a singer they called Family Haircut
The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band performed in the streets of Storyville in the 1890s and early 1900s. On one occasion, another band used their name for a performance at the Haymarket Dancehall. The original band members pelted the stage with rocks, leading the venue's owner to change the name of the second band on all advertising to the Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band,
As far as we know, this is the first time the word jazz was used in connection with music. And this is how Stalebread Lacoume became famous, as the leader of the first jazz band, and the originator of jazz.
The Father of Jazz - Buddy Bolden
Charles "Buddy" Bolden (1877-1931) was a cornet player, who is regarded as a key figure in the development of New Orleans ragtime "Jass" music, which later came to be known as Jazz.
Many early jazz musicians credited Bolden and his band members with being the originators of what came to be known as "jazz", though the term was not in common use, until after Bolden's brief career ended.
As he was the best horn player in town, and the most popular band leader from 1895 to 1907, Buddy Bolden is called the Father of Jazz, and the First King of Jazz.
Unfortunately, Buddy Bolden was incapacitated by schizophrenia, and stopped playing music professionally in 1907.
If you take a tour of Louis Armstrong Park in the French Quarter today, you'll see a statue of Buddy Bolden. The statue has three personalities, in recognition of Buddy's psychological problems, and as a tribute to his multidimensional approach to music.
Bolden could read music but he preferred playing by ear. He created an exciting and novel fusion of ragtime, rural blues, black sacred music, and marching-band music. He rearranged typical dance band music of the time to accommodate the blues.
Bolden's band is credited with creating the big four, the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. String instruments became the rhythm section, and the front-line instruments were the cornet, clarinet, and trombone.
Bolden developed a looser, more improvised version of ragtime, and added blues rhythms. His band was the first to have brass instruments play the blues. He is also said to have incorporated sounds from gospel music that he heard in churches.
Some of Buddy Bolden's compositions, such as Careless Love, and My Bucket's Got a Hole in It, are jazz classics and are still played today.
Bolden often closed his shows with an original song, "Get Out of Here and Go Home". For more polite gigs, the last number would be changed to Home, Sweet Home.
One of the most famous Bolden numbers is a song called Funky Butt (known later as Buddy Bolden's Blues), which represents one of the earliest references to the concept of "funk" in popular music.
Someone has observed that Bolden's "Funky Butt" was really a reference to the sexual odour of an auditorium packed full of sweaty people, dancing close together and belly rubbing.
Bolden was known for his powerful and loud, "wide open" playing style. King Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Freddie Keppard, and other early New Orleans jazz musicians were inspired and motivated by his virtuoso playing.
Original Dixieland Jass Band
In New Orleans, both white and black musicians were respected, although they may have had different audiences. One white marching band leader named Papa Jack Laine used both blacks and whites in his marching band.
Papa Laine was also known as the "Father of White Jazz" because of the many great players who passed through his band, including future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, like Nick LaRocca.
Nick LaRocca, (1889-1961) established himself in the public eye as the leader of the Original Dixieland Jass Band.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band is the first recorded jazz band, with their recording of Livery Stable Blues in 1917. These recordings were a big hit, and made the band into celebrities.
With this impressive start to his career, LaRocca started billing himself as the First Man in Jazz.
LaRocca is also the composer of one of the most recorded jazz classics of all-time, Tiger Rag. Despite his accomplishments, it's difficult to assess La Rocca's contributions to jazz because of his exaggerated self-promotion.
In the 1950s, Larocca wrote angry letters to newspapers, radio, and tv shows, stating that he was the true and sole inventor of jazz music. Doing this damaged his credibility, and provoked a backlash against him and his reputation.
LaRocca made claims that he was "The Creator of Jazz", "The Christopher Columbus of Music", and "The most lied about person in history since Jesus Christ". It sounds a bit crazy, and that's the way his claims were viewed by the jazz community.
Still any assessment of contributions to Jazz would have to acknowledge that Nick La Rocca was important in taking jazz from a regional style to international popularity. He was also the leader of the most influential jazz band of the early period, from 1917 to 1921.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band is now regarded as one of the seminal groups in the formation and development of jazz. ODJB compositions have been covered by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Joe Jackson. The influence of the ODJB on the history and development of jazz is undeniable.
KING OLIVER
Before Louis Armstrong and Sydney Bechet, there was King Oliver.
Joe Oliver (1885-1938), also known as King Oliver, was a cornet player and bandleader. He had a creative playing style and is remembered for his pioneering use of mutes in jazz.
He wrote many tunes, which are still played today, including Doctor Jazz, Canal Street Blues,
and Dippermouth Blues. He was also a mentor for young musicians, and a teacher of Louis Armstrong.
King Oliver liked Louis Armstrong's playing, and gave him his job in Kid Ory's band when he left New Orleans for Chicago. A few years later Oliver called on Louis Armstrong again, to come to Chicago to play with his band. Louis remembered Oliver as "Papa Joe" and considered him his idol and inspiration.
In his autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Armstrong wrote: "It was my ambition to play as King Oliver did. "I still think that, if it had not been for Joe Oliver, Jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator of jazz in his own right".
As a player, Oliver took great interest in altering his horn's sound. He pioneered the use of mutes, including the derby hat, plumber's rubber plunger, bottles and cups. His recording of Wa Wa Wa, with the Dixie Syncopators, can be credited with giving the name wah-wah to such techniques, and was the inspiration for Wah Wah Pedals.
Oliver left New Orleans for Chicago in 1918 to search for work, after the cops closed the speakeasies in Storyville. By 1922, he was leading his own group in Chicago, King Oliver and The Creole Jazz Band, which had a steady gig at the Royal Gardens Cabaret.
Creole Jazz Band personnel included Oliver on cornet, his protégé Louis Armstrong on second cornet, Lil Hardin (later Armstrong's wife) on piano, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Baby Dodds on drums, Honoré Dutrey on trombone, and William Manuel Johnson on bass.
Recordings made by the Creole Jazz Band in 1923 for Gennett, Okeh, Paramount, and Columbia demonstrated the serious artistry of New Orleans jazz, and brought it to the attention of a much wider audience.
In 1927 the band went to New York, but Oliver disbanded the group to do freelance jobs. He reformed the band in 1928, and recording for Victor Talking Machine Company. They had modest success, until the downturn of the economy made it difficult to find bookings.
Fewer gigs, coupled with Oliver's diminishing ability to play, as a result of suffering from gum disease, caused him to stop working in music by 1937.
Gum disease is a horrible affliction for a cornet player. Oliver's gums were rotting from the inside out, because his favourite meal was sugar sandwiches. Like a spoiled child, the King always got his way, and eventually, it killed him.
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought hardship to Oliver. Even at the best of times, his business acumen was less than his musical ability. Managers stole money from him, and he asked for more money than the Savoy Ballroom was willing to pay - losing the job. He also lost an important engagement at New York City's famous Cotton Club when he held out for more money. Young Duke Ellington took the job and catapulted to fame.
When he couldn't play music anymore, Oliver became stranded in Savannah, Georgia, where he pawned his trumpet and showbiz suits. He ran a fruit stall, then he worked as a janitor. Joe Oliver died in poverty in a Savannah rooming house in 1938. He's buried in Woodlawn Cemetary in the Bronx. Louis Armstrong attended his funeral.
Jellyroll Morton, The Original Creole Jazz Band & Sydney Bechet
Afro-Creole pianist, Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. In 1905, he composed Jelly Roll Blues, which on its publication in 1915 became the first jazz arrangement in print.
Morton was an innovator in the evolution from the early jazz form, known as ragtime to jazz piano, and he could perform all kinds of music in either style.
Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race combo, and then in 1926, he formed Jelly Roll's Red Hot Peppers. In 1938, he made a series of recordings for the Library of Congress, in which he demonstrated the difference between ragtime and jazz.
Morton's solos, were closer to ragtime, and were not strictly improvisations over chord changes, as in later jazz. His use of the blues was also significant in his sound.
Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band was highly popular in New Orleans' Storyville, but they found a larger audience in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1922 they became the first black jazz band to make recordings in that area.
Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was one of the first important soloists in jazz, beating trumpeter Louis Armstrong to the recording studio by several months. His erratic temperament hampered his career though, and it was not until the late 1940s that he earned public acclaim.
Bechet was a self taught musician. Starting as a 16 year old, in 1913, he played in the Olympia Band with King Oliver. He left New Orleans at age 17 to go on tour, and by age 22, he was performing in New York City. Soon after, he was touring Europe and Russia.
There was a reason for his worldwide acclaim. Sydney Bechet created a vibrational sound with his instrument like no other musician. Even today, people play Sydney Bechet's recordings, and marvel at the sound. No one sounded like Sydney Bechet. He was an original. When Sydney Bechet plays his music, time stands still.
In Paris, Bechet joined the theatrical Revue Nègre, with Josephine Baker, in 1925. Unfortunately, Bechet was jailed in Paris when a woman, passing by, was wounded during a shoot-out involving Bechet, on a public street.
The most common version of the story, as related in Ken Burns's documentary film Jazz, is that the shoot-out started when another musician told Bechet that he was playing the wrong chord. Bechet challenged the man to a duel by saying, "Sidney Bechet never plays the wrong chord".
Louis Armstrong & Swing Jazz
Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), also called Satchmo and Pops, was an American singer, trumpeter, composer, and film actor who was one of the most influential figures in jazz.
Louis Armstrong's career spanned five decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s. He performed in every era of jazz history. In 2017, he was inducted into the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame.
Stalebread Lacoume may have been the Originator of Jazz, Buddy Bolden, The Father of Jazz, Nick Larocca, claimed to be the First Man in Jazz, and Joe Oliver was The King of Jazz, but Louis Armstrong became the best known and the best loved jazz musician the world has ever known.
That's pretty good for a fatherless child, who grew up in a neighburhood called The Battleground.
Armstrong told people he was born on July 4, 1900, but his true birth date is August 4, 1901. He was born to Mary Albert and William Armstrong. Mary Albert gave birth to Louis Armstong at home, when she was about sixteen. His father, William Armstrong abandoned the family shortly after.
He spent his youth in poverty in a rough neighborhood known as The Battlefield. While selling coal for a Jewish merchant, he heard neighbourhood spasm bands, groups that played music out of household objects. And he heard early sounds of jazz from bands that played in brothels and dance halls, like Pete Lala's, where King Oliver performed.
He sometimes did odd jobs for a family of Jews, the Karnoffskys, who were immigrants to America from Lithuania. Knowing he lived without a father, the Karnoffskys fed him often, and helped when the boy needed assistance with something, things a father should be doing.
Louis Armstrong's first musical performance may have been alongside Karnoffsky's junk wagon. To distinguish Karnofsky junk from other vendors, Louis played with a tin horn to attract customers. Morris Karnoffsky invested in Armstrong's talent, with an advance toward the purchase of a cornet from a pawn shop.
In his memoir, Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, he described how this immigrant family was also subject to discrimination by "white folks" who felt that they were better than Jews.
He wrote, "I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that white folks were handing the poor Jewish family that I worked for." He wrote about what he learned from them: "how to live a real life, with determination." Louis Armstrong wore a Jewish Star of David pendant his entire life.
When Armstrong was eleven, he dropped out of school. He joined a quartet of boys who sang in the streets for money. He also got into trouble.
Childhood is difficult for a poor black kid, living in The Battlefield. He was arrested for shooting a gun, and sent by the court to a Colored Waif's Home, which was run like a military-style juvenile prison. Lots of beatings. No mattresses to sleep on. Bread and molasses for dinner every day.
The man who ran the home, Captain Jones, recruited a musician, Peter Davis, to organize music lessons and a cadet marching band. Davis gave Armstrong his first formal music education, and chose Armstrong as the leader of the boy's band.
With this band, Armstrong attracted the attention of local bandleader, Kid Ory, and gave him an excuse to meet King Oliver.
Armstrong got out of juvenile jail in 1914, but he was virtually homeless, as the rest of the family had their own problems, ie. lots of children and not enough money to go around. He had to share a bed with his mother and sister.
He sought work as a musician, and found a job at a dance hall owned by Henry Ponce, with connections to organized crime. He met the six-foot tall drummer Black Benny, who became his protector and his guide around Storyville.
When Armstrong played in brass band parades in New Orleans, he listened to the music of local musicians such as Kid Ory and his idol, King Oliver. When the police shut down the red light district of Storyville in 1919. King Oliver decided to leave town, and seek his fortune in Chicago.
Oliver resigned his position in Kid Ory's band, and told Ory to hire Armstrong as his replacement. At the time, Louis was playing in different bands on riverboats, travelling up and down the Mississippi, and learning how to read music.
Louis Armstrong was a popular horn player in those days, and he was busy. One notable gig was playing as King Zulu, in the Zulu Social and Pleasure Club. Social and Pleasure Clubs were organized to form parade bands and design costumes for Carnival.
The Zulu Club, with Louis Armstrong as King Zulu, was one of the most popular social and pleasure clubs in the Treme district, on the edge of the French Quarter and Storyville, where Louis Armstrong would also play.
Then in 1922, Armstrong followed his mentor to Chicago to play in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. He earned a reputation in "cutting contests", to see who could blow more notes faster.
At this point in his life, seeing signs of professional success, Armstrong married the band's piano payer, Lil Hardin. Lil urged him to seek more prominent billing and develop his style apart from the influence of Oliver.
Lil also encouraged him to play classical music in church concerts to broaden his skills, and to dress more stylishly. Her influence eventually undermined Armstrong's relationship with King Oliver, especially concerning his salary. The King sometimes didn't pay his musicians.
Armstrong and Oliver parted as friends in 1924, and Armstrong was invited to play in New York City with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, the top African-American band of the time. His influence on Henderson's tenor sax soloist, Coleman Hawkins, is clear, in listening to records made by the band during this period.
With his gravelly deep voice, Armstrong also became a popular singer, demonstrating dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody for expressive purposes. He was also skilled at scat singing. Louis Armstrong basically created Skat as a recognized style of music.
Armstrong was renowned for his voice and stage presence almost as much as for his trumpet playing. But his influence extends well beyond jazz. By the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general.
Like Jelly Roll Morton in the early years, Armstrong is credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness in favor of swing notes. Armstrong, perhaps more than any other musician, developed the rhythmic technique of swing in jazz and broadened the jazz vocabulary to feature solo players.
The Hot Five
In 1925, Armstrong returned to Chicago largely at the insistence of his wife, Lil, who wanted to expand his career and his income. In publicity, she billed him as "the World's Greatest Trumpet Player". It was a hard reputation to live up to, but he worked at it.
For a time he was a member of the Lil Hardin Armstrong Band, and he was working for his wife.
Then he formed the Louis Armstrong Hot Five Band, which recorded the hits, Muggles, and Potato Head Blues. The word "muggles" was a slang term for marijuana, something Armstrong used often during his life.
Louis Armstrong tells a funny story of how he and President Richard Nixon were travelling into the same airport at the same time. Nixon was a fan of Armstrong's, and requested that they meet, just to say hello.
Louis Armstrong and the president had a brief chat in the airport lounge, and eventually, their people pressed them to go through customs and find their cars. As they were parting, Nixon told Louis, "If there's anything I can ever do for you, just ask."
Louis said, "You can help me now, by carrying my trumpet through customs. I have a lot of bags."
Nixon was happy to oblige, and carried Louis Armstrong's trumpet through customs and past the police. Armstrong never told the president, but the trumpet case was full of marijuana.
Perhaps as a side effect of the marijuana, Louis began singing scat - vocal jazz improvisations, using nonsensical words. He was the first to record scat, on the Hot Five recording, Heebie Jeebies, in 1926.
The recording was so popular that the group became the most famous jazz band in the United States, even though they had not performed live to any great extent. Young musicians across the country, black and white, were turned on by Armstrong's new type of jazz
The Hot Five included Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Johnny St. Cyr (banjo), Lil Armstrong on piano, and usually no drummer. Over a twelve month period starting in 1925, the Hot Five quintet produced twenty-four records.
In the first half of 1927, Armstrong assembled his Hot Seven group, which added drummer Baby Dodds, and tuba player, Pete Briggs, while keeping most of his original Hot Five lineup. John Thomas replaced Kid Ory on trombone. Later that year he organized a series of new Hot Five sessions which resulted in nine more records.
Louis Armstrong as a Vocalist
Armstrong returned to New York, in 1929, where he played in the orchestra for the musical, Hot Chocolates, an all-black revue written by pianist Fats Waller and Andy Razaf.
While playing in the orchestra pit, he also made a cameo appearance as a vocalist, stealing the show with his rendition of Ain't Misbehavin. His version of Ain't Misbehavin' became his biggest selling record to date. Louis Armstrong was finally in the money, or at least his managers were.
Armstrong's famous interpretation of Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust became one of the most successful versions of this song ever recorded, showcasing Armstrong's unique vocal sound and his innovative approach to singing pop standards.
The gravelly coloration of his voice became a musical archetype that was endlessly imitated. His resonant, velvety lower-register tone and bubbling cadences on songs such as Up A Lazy River exerted a huge influence on younger white singers like Bing Crosby.
The economic depression of the 1930s was a difficult time for jazz musicians. The Cotton Club closed in 1936. Many musicians stopped playing as club dates evaporated. Bix Beiderbecke died. Fletcher Henderson's band broke up. King Oliver made a few records but otherwise stumbled along until he died. Sidney Bechet became a tailor, later moving to Paris. Kid Ory returned to New Orleans and raised chickens.
Armstrong moved to Los Angeles in 1930 to seek new opportunities. He played at the New Cotton Club in Los Angeles with Lionel Hampton on drums. The band drew the Hollywood crowd, which could still afford a lavish lifestyle.
Radio broadcasts from the club connected with younger audiences outside the city. Bing Crosby and other celebrities were regulars at the New Cotton Club, which is where these progressive jazz collaborators met.
Armstrong was contracted to perform his music in movies, including Crosby's 1936 hit, Pennies from Heaven. In 1937, Armstrong substituted for Rudy Vallee on the CBS radio network, and became the first African American to host a sponsored, national broadcast.
Having spent many years on the road, Armstrong finally settled in Queens, New York with his fourth wife, Lucille, in 1943. With New York as his home base, over the next 30 years, Armstrong played more than 300 performances a year.
For the rest of the jazz world, business declined after world war two. Bookings for big bands tapered off, due to changes in public tastes. Ballrooms closed, and there was competition from television, and from other types of music which became more popular than big band music. Louis couldn't afford to take his big band on the road anymore.
But also during the 1940s, a revival of interest in the traditional jazz of the 1920s made it possible for Armstrong to return to the small-group musical style of his youth.
Following a highly successful small-group jazz concert at New York Town Hall in 1947, Armstrong's manager, Joe Glaser dissolved the Armstrong big band and established a six-piece traditional jazz group, featuring Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines and other top musicians, most of whom were previously leaders of big bands.
This group was called Louis Armstrong & The All Stars. They may have been the best band in the world, at that time.
The All Stars included, at various times, Jack Teagarden, Trummy Young, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Ed Hall, Arvell Shaw, Billy Kyle, Barney Bigard, Marty Napoleon, Big Sid Catlett, Cozy Cole, Tyree Glenn, Barrett Deems, Mort Herbert, Joe Darensbourg, Eddie Shu and percussionist Danny Barcelona.
During this period, Armstrong made many recordings and appeared in over thirty films. He was the first jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time magazine, in 1949.
By the 1950s, Armstrong was a widely beloved American icon and cultural ambassador who commanded an international fanbase. However, a growing generation gap became apparent between him and younger jazz musicians who emerged in the postwar era, such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins.
The postwar generation regarded their music as an abstract artform, and considered Armstrong's vaudevillian style, half-musician and half-stage entertainer, outdated and stale.
Like the saying goes, the best revenge is success. In 1964, after two years without setting foot in a studio, Louis Armstrong recorded his biggest-selling record ever, Hello, Dolly.
Armstrong's version of Hello Dolly remained on the Hot 100 charts for 22 weeks, longer than any other record produced that year, and went to No. 1 making him, at 62 years of age, the oldest person ever to accomplish that feat. In the process, he dislodged the Beatles from the No. 1 position they had occupied for 14 consecutive weeks with three different songs.
Then Louis Armstrong outdid himself yet again, recording his best loved song, and his message to the world - "
What a Wonderful World."
Armstrong kept touring well into his 60s, even visiting the communist bloc in 1965. He toured Africa, Europe, and Asia under the sponsorship of the US State Department, earning the nickname, Ambassador Satch. But by 1968, he was approaching 70 and his health began to fail.
Armstrong made his last recorded performances on a 1968 album, Disney Songs The Satchmo Way. He died in 1971, at age 70, as one of the most accomplished musicians the world has ever known.
Jazz Eras & Jazz Styles
Jazz has gone through many phases and many styles. It's like every decade has created a new style of jazz.
Before 1920, it was Jass Music and Ragtime.
The 1920s were still baby years for jazz, but finally, Jazz got its name and a style of playing that meant it wasn't ragtime anymore.
The 1920s was the era of Dixieland Jazz. And Dixieland has never died.
If you want to hear traditional New Orleans Dixieland Jazz, you can still hear it played everywhere, starting with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, all the way up to Souperjazz.
After the birth of Jazz in Dixieland in the 1920s, the 30s became the era of Swing Jazz. The 30s have also been called the Jazz Age because Jazz was the most popular music in the 1930s.
As audiences for jazz music kept growing, jazz went in 2 directions, black jazz and white jazz, and both were highly successful.
Where Louis Armstrong kept pushing the boundaries of New Orleans Jazz in the direction of Swing, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and other white bandleaders added their own personal touches to a whole new kind of swing jazz - Big Band Swing Jazz.
Dance-oriented big bands dominated the hit parade. The pop repertoire was expanded with Kansas City Jazz, a swinging bluesy, improvisational style, and Gypsy Jazz, a style that emphasized musette waltzes.
Benny Goodman was an outstanding clarinet player, and one of the most magical musicians of the Swing Era. There are Benny Goodman songs, like Boys and Girls, and Sing, Sing, Sing, that are still among the best songs ever recorded.
But the man who started big band swing jazz in a serious way was Paul Whiteman, a friend of the theatrical composer, George Gershwin.
Paul Whiteman became a hit in California, and signed with Victor Talking Machine Company in 1920. Whiteman became the top bandleader of the 1920s, giving "hot jazz" a white component. Whiteman hired some great musicians, who later turned into great bankleaders, including Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey.
Whiteman was also famous for his orchestral jazz, and how he was able to combine jazz rhythms with symphonic sounds. He premiered George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, elevating jazz in the public eye, as a respectable musical form.
Whiteman's success with big band jazz arrangements inspired black musicians to follow suit, including Duke Ellington, who opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1927, and Earl Hines, who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe in Chicago in 1928.
Around that time, Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman developed the "talking to one another" formula for "hot swing music".
During this time, from 1920 to 1933, Prohibition in the United States banned the sale of alcoholic drinks. Speakeasies became venues for the underground music scene, and a launching pad for the "Jazz Age".
Mixed with alcohol during the prohibition years, Jazz developed a reputation as being an immoral influence on society. After 1933, when prohibition was cancelled, public judgement lightened a bit, but jazz has kept its edgy persona to this day.
The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the big swing jazz sound included bandleaders and arrangers, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Fletcher Henderson, Glenn Miller, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Jimmy Dorsey and Tommy Dorsey,
Social restrictions regarding racial segregation eased over time, in America. Bandleaders began to recruit black musicians, and black bandleaders hired white ones. In the mid-1930s, white Jewish bandleader, Benny Goodman hired black pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join his groups. Jazz was showing America how to achieve racial integration, in a positive way.
The 1940s - American Music & Bebop Jazz
In the 1940s, Duke Ellington's music transcended the bounds of swing, combining jazz and art music in a natural synthesis. Ellington called his music "American Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe musicians who impressed him as "beyond category."
Kansas City Jazz Band saxophonist, Lester Young, marked the transition from big swing bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. An early 1940s style known as jump blues used small combos, uptempo music, and blues chord progressions, drawing on boogie-woogie from the 1930s.
In the 1940s, bebop-style performers were shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music." Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form, thus lessening its potential popularity and commercial appeal.
Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos. Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This led to a highly syncopated music with a complex rhythms.
The most influential bebop musicians included Charlie Parker (saxophone), Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk (piano), Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown (trumpet), and Max Roach (drummer).
In the late 1940s, there was a revival of Dixieland, harking back to New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of jazz classics by Louis Armstrong and King Oliver from the 1930s.
The Dixieland revival was a godsend for some musicians, especially those who began their careers playing in the traditional style, like Bob Crosby's Bobcats, Wild Bill Davison, Eddie Condon, and Max Kaminsky. They simply returned to their roots, or continued playing what they had been playing all along.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it.
The 1950s - Cool Jazz
By the 1950s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced with a tendency toward calm and smoothness, with the sounds of cool jazz, which favoured long, linear melodic lines.
The starting point was a collection of 1949 and 1950 singles by Miles Davis, released as the Birth of the Cool (1957). Later cool jazz recordings by musicians such as Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Gerry Mulligan had a lighter sound that avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of 40s bebop.
Miles Davis went on from Cool Jazz to explore Fusion Jazz. Jazz fusion uses syncopation, complex chords, mixed meters, odd time signatures, and harmonies.
Modal jazz was developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation.
The 60s & 70s - Fusion Jazz
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, using electric instruments and amplifiers to achieve the stage sound of rock musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.
In 1969, Miles Davis fully embraced the electric instrument in jazz, with Silent Way, which can be considered his first fusion album. Composed of two side-long suites, and edited heavily by producer, Teo Macero, this album would become influential in the development of ambient music.
The 1980s - Smooth Jazz & Jazz Radio
In the 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called Smooth Jazz became popular, creating significant radio airplay. Thanks to Smooth Jazz, plus every other style in the jazz repertoire, there are now jazz radio stations in every major city around the world.
The next development, in recent years, is online jazz radio programming, like Jazz.fm in Toronto.
In these online jazz radio stations, it's now possible to hear everything, every style of jazz, going back to Dixieland, Swing, Bebop and beyond.
Jazz Around The World
The Jazz world is now so large that jazz can offer something for everyone, from Dixieland to Swing to a dozen different styles of jazz, not to mention jazz vocals, acid jazz, progressive jazz, house jazz, and jazz dance parties.
Other styles and genres, such as Afro-Cuban and Latino Jazz, are now available at jazz festivals, and in nightclubs around the world. The latest pop dance craze is Electro-Swing, another creative style of music from the world of jazz.
Jazz is not easy to describe, or pin down to one point of view, because Jazz encompasses a wide range of music, in several styles, from ragtime to rock fusion, all spreading over 100 years.
On the other hand, it can be said that Jazz does have a special relationship to timing, defined as 'swing'. As Duke Ellington said, It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
The origin of the word jazz and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning "peppy and energetic".
The earliest written record of the word Jazz is a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times in which a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch which he called a jazz ball "because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it". The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune,
Musician Eubie Blake was interviewed In a 1916 New Orleans Times-Picayune article about "jass bands", Blake offered his recollection of the original meaning of the term, saying: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called J-A-Z-Z. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'.
Blake talked about the difference, saying that "Jazz was a dirty word back then, and if you knew what it meant, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies."
The American Dialect Society named Jazz the Word of the Twentieth Century.
However we look at it, and no matter what style of jazz appeals to us most, Jazz is a fascinating form of music, and a billion dollar industry.
If you visit a different jazz festival every day, you won't have enough time in a year to visit every jazz festival in the world,
