Why Did Louis Armstrong Sound Like That

“I can’t think of another American artist who would fail his own talent like that. What’s the matter?” asked a biographer of Louis Armstrong, “The sheer weight of his success and the commercial pressures of its participants,” added the agency. The glamor owner – as well as many African Americans – decried him as a salesman or an “Uncle Tom.” When he died in 1971, he was considered to have reached the pinnacle of his years. 1920 with Hot Five as well as Warm Seven, a series of innovative small band recordings, and in decline ever since.A new book, Ricky Riccardi’s Rhythmic Heart: The Big Band Years of Ricky Riccardi Louis Armstrong, charted this apparent fall from grace, but revealed a much more complicated reality.In the mid-1930s, Armstrong began working with Joe Kapp, a svengali maker who prided himself about keeping “beats on the multitude.” Singer transitions from respected Dixieland jazz to populist music: collaborations with Bing Crosby, Hawaiian instruments, syrup romance, Iberian mariachis and B-rated comedies. At record pace, Armstrong would become America’s first black multimedia star, and often hated for it: Gunther Schuller, the famous American jazz critic, received considered that “the dreaded tentacles of commercialism” had left a “waste land” in Armstrong’s career of more than 40 years. “The band behind him is disgusting. Nothing could do more harm to such a great artist. One reviewer writes in Metronome magazine. “Armstrong is no longer the driving force in hot jazz… [and] chose to broadcast exclusively to the box office,” published Music and Rhythm. American-Americans found Armstrong still in more trouble. The handkerchief-carrying character – cheerful, loves silly jokes – he perfected has an echo of “Uncle Tom,” a cheerful black man doing the bidding of a white master. Columbia University in New York, remains divided. While praising Armstrong as “one of the greatest men of the 20th century”, he was “outraged by his presentations… At the time of the rise of Malcolm X, the power of Martin Luther King, media examples like Muhammad Ali and others, it’s Armstrong – the kind of guy who goes back in time, to this border simulator he played. I became a black American. Armstrong’s reputation has improved since then, but there is still plenty of room for recovery – and especially among the elite. Riccardi, director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, recalls that his master’s at Rutgers University in jazz history spent just two hours on Armstrong during the entire program. “I’ve gone to college now, and everyone knows every Charlie Parker solo in every key. I said, ‘OK, how many of you have ever seen Louis Armstrong?’ Empty faces. “Riccardi’s book spans from 1929 to 1947, when Armstrong became the biggest pop star in the world. But contrary to the usual complaints of critics – who have described the period in quasi-Faustian terms – Riccardi considers Armstrong’s break from jazz copyright the real achievement of man. Just Can’t Tan! For one, passing (or “sold out”) as an African-American in the 1930s was hardly a ticket to gold and glitz. Right at the start, Armstrong was jailed and kicked out of California for smoking marijuana; He is then chased from Chicago by gun-wielding gangsters and forced to go with standing armed guard. During his tour of the deep south, Armstrong was repeatedly turned away from motel rooms, struggled to get gigs from racist advocates, and harassed by police. He was sent to prison again during a stopover in Memphis, after followers questioned the band’s fine suits, “luxury-looking cigarette cases” and that the man’s white wife The manager is sitting on the bus. less challenging. On his first night in London in 1932, Armstrong couldn’t go to bed until 5 a.m. because hotels didn’t accept black guests. Critics have written about “rhythmic jungle noises,” “hippo morphology,” “gorilla roars,” and “primitive calls of wild African black ancestors.” However, as Riccardi emphasizes, meeting the culture in the middle meant that Armstrong could change things from within. The list of first people he oversees is astounding. Knockin’ a Jug, which featured black and white musicians, was one of the first US integrated recordings. That same year, he cut his first integrated duet, Rockin’ Chair, with white singer Hoagy Carmichael. Black and Blue, the 1929 B-side song on Okeh Records’ “popular music” list (a label that had previously marketed him for the “disc”), has been called the first honest protest song. of American music against racial inequality. the now-lost film Ex-Flame was shot in California in 1930 and stars Armstrong alongside trombonist Lawrence Brown, pianist Henry Prince, saxophonist Les Hite and 22-year-old drummer Lionel Hampton . Photo: Jack Bradley Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum During his tour of New Orleans, his hometown, Armstrong handed out cash on the street, bought a radio set for the orphanage where he grew up, and was the first African-American to make his own announcement on city radio. In his first for black musicians, he published an autobiography, Swing That Music, in 1936. The following year, he was the first African-American to host a national radio show and featured in a Hollywood movie. For O’Meally, a Columbia satirist who grew up cynical, Armstrong’s importance to racial equality was simply “incalculable.” At the same time, cultural advocacy from within can raise difficult questions. His theatrical character—later heavily questioned by African-Americans in the 1950s and 1960s—seems to fit the copycat stereotype created by a skeptical white media. African-American critic Gerald Early said: “He upset a lot of black people, and Miles Davis, still fond of Armstrong, resented his taste for ‘clown’. In Pennies from Heaven, the launch pad for Armstrong’s multimedia success, he plays an uncountably mentally challenged farmer. Soon after, he was given a Tarzan cape in one movie and was even directly named Uncle Tom in another. He admits that the dynasty turned against him in the 1960s, but African-Americans were once in full support of Armstrong. “The black press, they didn’t stop praising his personality” while he was famous, he said. “They love performance art. They love everything. And I think that’s what always makes Armstrong rank [with the Uncle Tom allegations, because] that personality, his smile, his humour, his jokes, his humour, all the non-musical aspects of his theatrical character, were perfected in front of a black audience. “I wouldn’t judge Armstrong,” O’Meally said. “The dexterity of his balance meant that he sometimes fell, he faltered, and contradicted what Martin Luther King and others were trying to do.” Read more: why does rust take so long to load | Top Q&A Testing the boundaries of jazz music will always involve racing as well. “Jazz is an extension of the black voice, the black style, the movement,” says O’Meally. And even as Armstrong moved away from jazz and seemed to love white audiences, O’Meally discovered the unchanging black essence of his music: “the feeling of the surrounding audience,” no also the whites wing, where he was how jazz itself influenced Armstrong. Catherine Russell is a jazz singer and the daughter of Luis Russell, who was the conductor of Armstrong’s band, which featured the song Song of the Islands, a 1930 Hawaiian muzak single considered by some to be “the cult of the world”. the beginning of the end”. Jazz has always been a mix of “high art” and “folk art,” she said, and Armstrong never influenced a particular allegiance to either. . Big Butter as well as Egg Man, Irish Black Bottom, Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa: the Warm Five tackle the everyday raws of blues, bringing New Orleans street humor to the song. Things would change in the 1940s. Led by Dizzy Gillespie as well as Parker in New York, the newbebop’s sound pays little attention to the need for easy listening. It’s harsher, more gritty, highly improvised, and is seen as a direct challenge to what Gillespie calls Armstrong’s “Uncle Tom sound”. He fears that its “strange notes” and “Chinese music” are only for other musicians, and that the consequences will soon be felt. You can pinpoint the bebop sprout from the 1960s, when it blossomed in the discordant free-jazz scene: a sound so harsh and abrasive, the narrative that black audiences were geared toward those More accessible alternatives in other genres. If musicians had followed Armstrong’s open-minded approach more closely, one wonders where jazz might have gone, and how popular it is today. Sid Catlett grew up at a nightclub in the late 1940s. Photo: Courtesy of Louis Armstrong House Museum However, mixing genres, as Armstrong did, can dilute jazz’s musical core. Crucially, the closer jazz moved to pop music and mainstream institutions, Visions of Jazz critic Gary Giddins fears, the greater its reliance on “big money,” donations from Corporate and government grants can gnaw at its inner authenticity: the energy that fueled its “glorious eruptions” of the last century. But playing on the court is often what keeps jazz music alive and drives innovation in its own right: think Davis’ experiments with funk, the rise of jazz fusion in the 1970s, or how most jazz musicians these days make money playing other genres. Then it is called sold out; “I don’t see Armstrong turning his back on the revolution. He screwed it up at the beginning and then stepped aside and kept going,” O’Meally said. And no matter how big or big the music business gets, nothing can kill jazz, he insists. Its musical identity – chord experimentation, blues music, playing with the concept of time – is as influential as ever. Even hip-hop, O’Meally says, is “one of the extensions of Louis Armstrong’s world,” pointing to Biggie Smalls’ famous way of learning jazz. But in doing so, he secured his place in history. Roy Eldridge, “Hot Lips” Page, Henry “Red” Allen, Rex Stewart: The 20th century had a lot of trumpet gods, but sadly they were much forgotten. O’Meally concluded: “As the world is ready to define what modernism means, we will realize that the transition away from 19th-century musical forms, vocal and instrumental, is what African-Americans have achieved,” O’Meally concluded. “Armstrong leads the band.” Read more: Why can’t my iPhone find traces

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