L'Etoile
People think of Louis Armstrong as Pops, the gentle grandfather figure singing corny Christmas songs and yuking it up with Prime Ministers and Potentates. But before he becoming a global superstar and roving ambassador for Brand America Armstrong ruled as King of Jazz for the two decades that Jazz dominated popular music. The equivalent of Rakim and Jay-Z and Kayne and Kendrick rolled up in a fat ass joint. A concept intimately familiar to Louis. He required his Hot 5 and Hot 7 bands to smoke up prior to recording. When Louis hit the stage for a cutting contest, he played like a fiend, like he had metal fingers, bringing doom to rival players. And before Jazz stardom his story is straight hood.
Born 1901 South Rampart Street, New Orleans. Neighborhood called the Battlefield. Exit father. Raised by a rotating combination of grandmother, mother and a Lithuanian Jewish family the Karnoffskys. The Karnoffskys hawk junk from a cart, deliver coal and suffer harassment from white Catholics and Protestants. Age 6 working for them Louis looks to attract customers by playing a tin horn. He sings along with the Slavic lullabies to put the Karnoffsky children to bed. The love of the Karnoffsky family stays with him. He wears a Star of David all his life. The father provides the money for Louis to purchase a cornet from a pawn shop.
Age 11, drops out of school, hangs out on the corners, sometimes with a boys singing quartet, sometimes playing games people play. Bunk Johnson later claimed he taught Louis to play cornet at Dago Tony’s honky tonk. Keep in mind that Bunk Johnson’s name was Bunk and few agreed with the claim. Louis later said Joe “King” Oliver tought him. New Year’s Eve 1912. Louis participates in the moronic New Orleans tradition of discharging a fire arm into the air at midnight. This earns him a year and a half term at the Colored Waif’s Home. Harsh, militaristic, lots of corporal punishment, no mattresses. Peter Davis runs a band program at the home, teaches Louis and makes him bandleader. Upon release he starts to pick up some small time music gigs. He finds out pimpin’ ain’t easy when his prostitute Nootsy stabs him with a knife. His mother then chokes Nootsy nearly to death. He goes back to the simpler trade of delivering coal in Storyville. This puts him in a swirling musical milieu that consists of ruffians making sounds out of found objects in spasm bands busking on the sidewalks, early Jazz cats “playing hot” in jook joints and saloons, Ragtime piano professors in the bordellos and uniformed orchestras in upscale brothels like Mahogany Hall. By age 17 Bunk Johnson, King Oliver and the town’s top trombonist, Kid Ory, recognize Louis as a rising star. Buddy Bolden discovered Kid Ory as a teenager but his youth prevented him from joining the Bolden band. Around 1910 Ory and Joe Oliver form a group that becomes the hottest band in New Orleans. The fall of Storyville and the greatly diminished number of working stages brings hard times for New Orleans musicians. 1918. King Oliver joins the exodus to Chicago making way for Louis to take his place in both Kid Ory’s band and the prestigious Tuxedo Brass Band. 1919. Kid Ory leaves New Orleans for Los Angeles.
Soon after Ory’s departure Fate Marable hires Louis for his riverboat band. Drummer Zutty Singleton, later a member of the legendary Louis Armstrong Hot Five, said joining Marable’s band meant “going to the conservatory.” Marable ran a disciplined unit. He required his players to play a wide ranging repertoire, to be able to play by memory, by ear and by reading sheet music. He wrote complex arrangements and tightly controlled performances. Marable meant to keep the Riverboat customers happy and dancing. Many alumni of his band went on to populate the Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Duke Ellington big bands. Louis already has chops as a soloist from cutting with Oliver and Ory. With his natural charm, street hustler’s cunning and broadening musical ability he can really move the audience. Marable allows him the rare honor of improvising solos and some singing and banter with the crowd. The Jazz scene is heating up and the new capitol is Chicago. After gigging around for a couple of years King Oliver has formed a new group, the Creole Jazz Band, with fellow New Orleans migrants. 1922. Oliver invites Armstrong to join the band. Unusual for a Jazz ensemble to feature two cornets. But Oliver knows what he’s doing. The bands of the day play restrained, steady, straight time. The Creole Jazz Band will rip it up, two soloists, improvising, bobbing and weaving, unexpected interplay. Same idea the Rolling Stones' guitarists will have forty years later.