Armstrong Louis Quotes

If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.

I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

What we play is life.

Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doing to it, and all I'm saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby - love. That's the secret.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays, Glenn Miller on Fridays, and Mozart on Sundays. Unless it was raining. If it's raining, it's always Billie Holiday.

If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know." Louis Armstrong

‎We all go Do, Re, Mi, but you've gotta find all the other notes yourself.

There's some folks, that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.

The Bright Blessed Day, the Dark Sacred Night

And if Mozart is for Sundays, who do you listen to the rest of the week?" "Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays. And Glenn Miller on Fridays, unless it's raining. If it's raining, it's always Billie Holiday." "What about Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday?" I asked. "Those days are quiet. Unless it's raining.

I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.

What a wonderful world.

Man, if you have to ask what it [jazz] is, you’ll never know.

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.

I liked old time music but what i meant by that was the period from the 1930s through the 60s, nothing before and little after.  Performers like fats waller, Sinatra, billie holiday, louis armstrong, rosemary clooney, ella, sammy Davis Jr, dean martin... If the lyrics weren't stupid. Words were important.

When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong’s when a reporter asked him what jazz is: “Lady, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

What is Jazz? Dude, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

If it sounds good, it is good.

Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.”    - Louis Armstrong

Think of this: If it weren’t for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no van Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong. The civilization that devises the infrastructure to allow these wonderful things to be created is essentially a product of war—death and suffering—and commerce—deceit and inequality. Even your liberty to discuss the shortcomings of your own species has its foundations in blood and hardship.” “That’s a depressing thought,

NEW ORLEANS JAZZ: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Louis Armstrong, “Heebie Jeebies,” February 26, 1926 Louis Armstrong, “Potato Head Blues,” May 10, 1927 Louis Armstrong, “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” December 9, 1927 Louis Armstrong, “West End Blues,” June 28, 1928 Sidney Bechet, “I’ve Found a New Baby,” September 15, 1932 Sidney Bechet, “Wild Cat Blues,” June 30, 1923 Johnny Dodds, “Perdido Street Blues,” July 13, 1926 Freddie Keppard, “Stock Yards Strut,” September, 1926 Jelly Roll Morton, “Black Bottom Stomp,” September 15, 1926 Jelly Roll Morton, “Sidewalk Blues,” September 21, 1926 King Oliver, “Dipper Mouth Blues,” April 6, 1923 King Oliver, “Froggie Moore,” April 6, 1923

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

The Pope was such a fine little fella, you know.

There are some who say that the big bang theory says nothing about why it started to bang. I say look around you. What do you the holy see? Love baby love!

Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: choose your music carefully. Avoid Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World", from the Polaroid or Kodak or whichever commercial, and the songs "Turn Around" and "Sunrise, Sunset" and - there are thousands more. Avoid Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," and this one, Eric Clapton's song about his son. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sneaked up on me one time. The music doesn't have to be sentimental. Springsteen can be dangerous. John and Yoko. Bjork. Dylan. I become overwhelmed when I hear Nirvana. I want to scream like Kurt Cobain. I want to scream at him. Music isn't all that does it. There are millions of treacherous moments. Driving along Highway 1, I will see a peeling wave. Or I will reach the fork where two roads meet near Rancho Nicasio, where we veered to the left in carpool. A shooting star on a still night at the crest of Olema Hill. With friends, I hear a good joke - one that Nic would appreciate. The kids do something funny or endearing. A story. A worn sweater. A movie. Feeling wind and looking up, riding my bike. A million moments.

Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing 'What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue —all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it's because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there’s just nothing else you’re going to taste that’s as sweet.

We were singing for Dr. Du Bois' spirit, for the invaluable contributions he made, for his shining intellect and his courage. To many of us he was the first American Negro intellectual. We knew about Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. We were proud of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. We memorized the verses of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen, but they were athletes, musicians and poets, and White folks thought all those talents came naturally to Negroes. So, while we survived because of those contributors and their contributions, the powerful White world didn't stand in awe of them. Sadly, we also tended to take those brilliances for granted. But W.E.B. Du Bois and of course Paul Robeson were different, held on a higher or at least on a different plateau than the others.

I lay my body down in another city, another hotel room. Once Louis Armstrong and his band stayed here. Later the hotel fell to trash. New money resurrected it. Under the red moon of justice, I dream with the king of jazz.

Back home, he sleeps in Clarence’s bed. Then he moves across and arranges the pillows beside the ghost of his wife. All three of them lie down together. The pulse of Louis Armstrong sounds out from the record player, the notes moving tenderly through his torment.

In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King's march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, "They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.

And when she told us her wedding song - of course, they've already picked their wedding song, and of course, it's "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong - I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models.

I see trees of green Red roses too I see them bloom For me and you And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see skies of blue And clouds of white The bright blessed day The dark sacred night And I think to myself What a wonderful world The colors of the rainbow So pretty in the sky Are also on the faces Of people going by I see friends shaking hands Saying how do you do They're really saying I love you I hear babies cry I watch them grow They'll learn much more Than I'll ever know And I think to myself What a wonderful world Yes, I think to myself What a wonderful world Ooh, yes

Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one’s own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.

The wild notes of tuba and trumpet and trombone rattled and hummed through the trees. In the first group of musicians, there were kids as young as fourteen playing the tuba and one kid who probably couldn’t drive banging a bass drum. They stomped together in rhythm to the music. Two ladies had dressed up in what looked like princess outfits. They wore white gloves and socks with tassels.

La última noche estábamos tocando para los típicos imbéciles de primera clase, llegó el momento de mi solo, empecé a tocar y a las pocas notas oí el piano que me acompañaba, como un susurro, con dulzura, pero tocaba conmigo. Continuamos juntos, y yo tocaba lo mejor que sabía, vamos, que no era Louis Armstrong, pero tocaba francamente bien, con Novecento detrás de mí, siguiéndome a donde fuera, como él sabía hacer. Nos dejaron continuar durante un rato, a mi trompeta y a su piano, por última vez, diciéndonos allí todas las cosas que no puedes ser dichas con palabras.

Everyone in the room—all Franco-French white kids, it occurred to me—knew their Louis Armstrong inside and out, knew the names of the songs, had their favorites. That is phenomenal, I thought. “How do you guys know so much about black music?” I asked. “Are you kidding?” Stéphane, replied, assuming, I think, that I was implying only an American could be so well versed. “This is something the whole world knows. Practically everything except classical is black music!” I refilled my glass with the brandy, which, I noticed, tasted an awful lot like Hennessy—better, though.

Amelia was instantly distracted when she heard one of her favorite songs: What a Wonderful World made famous by Louis Armstrong. The woman singing did the song justice as she sang: I see trees of gree, red roses, too. I see them bloom, for me and you. And I think to myself. What a wonderful world! Before she could blink an eye, Rick pulled her into his arms in a waltz position. He gave her a wink and said flirtatiously, “May I have this dance, my love?” As they danced to the rhythm of the music, Amelia said, “Don’t ever stop flirting with me, no matter how old we get.” “Never!

Danny’s Song” by Kenny Loggins “Reminder” by Mumford & Sons “Barton Hollow” by The Civil Wars “Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkel “I and Love and You” by The Avett Brothers “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele “Can’t Break Her Fall” by Matt Kearney  “Stillborn” by Black Label Society “Come On Get Higher” by Matt Nathanson “I Won’t Give Up” by Jason Mraz “This Girl” by City & Colour “My Funny Valentine” by Ella Fitzgerald “Dream a Little Dream of Me” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong “Stormy Blues” by Billie Holiday “I would be Sad” by The Avett Brothers “Hello, I’m Delaware” by City & Colour “99 Problems” by Hugo (originally written and performed by Jay-Z) “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons “Let It Be Me” by Ray LaMontagne “Rocketship” by Guster “Don’t Drink The Water” by Dave Matthews Band “Blackbird” by The Beatles

Richard Durham was a black writer whose credits in radio would run a gamut from Irna Phillips serials to prestige plays for such as The CBS Radio Workshop. But in Destination Freedom Durham wrote from the heart. Anger simmers at the foundation of these shows, rising occasionally to a wail of agony and torment. On no other show was the term “Jim Crow” used as an adjective, if at all: nowhere else could be heard the actual voices of black actors giving life to a real black environment. There were no buffoons or toadies in Durham’s plays: there were heroes and villains, girlfriends and lovers, mothers, fathers, brutes; there were kids named Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, who bucked the tide and became kings in places named Madison Square Garden and Ebbets Field. The early historical dramas soon gave way to a more contemporary theme: the black man’s struggle in a modern racist society. Shows on Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver gave way to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the lives of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Nat King Cole. The Tiger Hunt was a war story, of a black tank battalion; Last Letter Home told of black pilots in World War II. The stories pulled no punches in their execution of the common theme, making Destination Freedom not only the most powerful but the only show of its kind.

A fost odată Louis Armstrong, cântând la frumoasa lui trompetă în noroaiele din New Orleans. Înaintea lui fuseseră muzicienii trăsniţi care mărşăluiau la paradele oficiale şi transformau marşurile în ragtime. Pe urmă a apărut swingul şi Roy Elridge, viguros, viril, scoţând din trompetă valuri de forţă şi logică şi subtilitate - se apleca asupra ei cu ochi sclipitori şi cu un zâmbet minunat şi trimitea sunetele prin radio să legene lumea jazzului. Sosise apoi Charlie Parker, care copilărise doar cu maică-sa într-o căsuţă de lemn din Kansas City, unde cântase la saxofon alto printre buşteni, repetând în zile ploioase, mergând în oraş să-i vadă pe bătrânii interpreţi de swing Basie şi Benny Moten cu a lor Hot Lips Page şi celelalte, Charlie Parker plecând de acasă şi sosind în Harlem, întâlnindu-se cu nebunul de Thelonius Monk şi cu celălalt smintit, Gillespie, Charlie Parker la începuturile carierei sale, când cânta învârtindu-se în cerc. Puţin mai tânăr decât Lester Young, tot din K. C., un scrântit de geniu, sumbru, a cărui muzică acoperea toată istoria jazzului. Când îşi ţinea saxofonul în sus, în poziţie orizontală, scotea cel mai formidabil sunet. Pe urmă părul îi crescu şi deveni mai leneş şi saxul îi coborî mai jos, ajunse în sfârşit să-l ţină vertical, şi acum, când purta pantofi cu talpa groasă ca să nu mai simtă cărările tari ale vieţii, instrumentul îi zăcea rezemat de piept, iar el sufla lejer şi scotea fraze tot mai simple. Aceştia erau copiii bopului din noaptea americană.

Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. “Mona Lisa, men have named you,

Jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong suggested that the premier visit a jazz club to experience “the swingin’ feel of freedom.

Miles Davis dijo que cualquier pieza que se tocara a la trompeta había sido ya interpretada por Louis Armstrong.

It don't matter about all that anyway," Armstrong added. "You think it do, but it don't. A man ain't just his one talent. Lil Louis needs you. And Jones look to you like you his brother. You got the talent of making others your kin, your blood. Music, well that's different. I reckon it got its own worth, but it ain't a man's whole life." "Aww hell, Louis," I thought. "Ain't nothing else I want.

A good crowd had formed along the sidewalk and the concrete ledge that bordered Louis Armstrong Park. The anticipation was dizzying...New Orleans had the big-boy parades and [Jackson & Billy] couldn't wait to attend a second line...

The most effective people concentrate on their “areas of excellence,” that is, on the things they do best and on those high-impact activities that will advance their life-work. In being so consumed by the important things, they find it easy to say no to the less-than-worthy distractions that clamor for their attention. Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in the game’s history, did not negotiate his contracts, design his uniforms and prepare his travel schedules. He focused his time and energies on what he did best: playing basketball, and delegated everything else to his handlers. Jazz great Louis Armstrong did not spend his time selling tickets to his shows and setting up chairs for the audience. He concentrated on his point of brilliance: playing the trumpet. Learning to say no to the non-essentials will give you more time to devote to the things that have the power to truly improve the way you live and help you leave the legacy you know in your heart you are destined to leave.

Think of this: If it weren’t for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no van Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong. The civilization that devises the infrastructure to allow these wonderful things to be created is essentially a product of war—death and suffering—and commerce—deceit and inequality. Even your liberty to discuss the shortcomings of your own species has its foundations in blood and hardship.

The Waifs' Home was an old building which had apparently formerly been used for another purpose. It was located in the country opposite a great big dairy farm where hundreds of cows, bulls, calves and a few horses were standing. Some were eating, and prancing around like they wanted to tell somebody, anybody, how good they felt. . . .When I got out of the wagon with the other boys the first thing I noticed was several large trees standing before the building. A very lovely odor was swinging across my nostrils. "What flowers are those that smell so good?" I asked. "Honeysuckles," was the answer. I fell in love with them, and I'm ready to get a whiff of them any time.

The human smile derives from the nervous grin found in other primates. We employ it when there is a potential for conflict, something we are always worried about even under the friendliest circumstances. We bring flowers or a bottle of wine when we are invading other people’s home territory, and we greet each other by waving an open hand, a gesture thought to originate from showing that we carry no weapons. But the smile remains our main tool to improve the mood. Copying another’s smile makes everyone happier, or as Louis Armstrong sang: “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.

A friend dropped in on him after a gig and asked what was new. "Nothin' new," he said. "White folks still ahead.

Read them through once a day, and keep an inner ear cocked for any shifts in attitudes or beliefs. BASIC PRINCIPLES Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life—including ourselves. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives. We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity. Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.” THE TALMUD Great improvisors are like priests. They are thinking only of their god. STÉPHANE GRAPPELLI MUSICIAN What we play is life. LOUIS ARMSTRONG Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes. PETER

So don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.

Porter’s next new Hollywood work, MGM’s High Society (1956), was second-division Porter. It hit his characteristic points—the Latin rhythm number in “Mind If I Make Love To You,” the charm song full of syncopation and “wrong” notes in “You’re Sensational.” Porter even turned himself inside out in two numbers for Louis Armstrong, “High Society Calypso” (the Afro-Caribbean anticipation of reggae had just begun to trend in America) and, in duet with Bing Crosby, “Now You Has Jazz.” And the film’s hit, “True Love,” is a waltz so simple neither the vocal nor the chorus has any syncopation whatever. This is smooth Porter, the Tin Pan Alley Porter who wants everyone to like him, even the tourists. Everything about High Society is smooth—to a fault. Armstrong gives it flair, but everyone else is so relaxed he or she might be bantering between acts on a telethon. These are pale replicas of the characters so memorably portrayed in MGM’s first go at this material, The Philadelphia Story, especially by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In their first moment, the two are in mid-fight; she breaks his golf clubs and he starts to take a swing at her, recalls himself to manly grace, and simply shoves her self-satisfied mug out of shot. This is not tough love. It’s real anger, and while Philip Barry, who wrote the Broadway Philadelphia Story, is remembered only as a boulevardier, he was in fact a deeply religious writer who interspersed romantic comedies with allegories on the human condition, much as Cole Porter moved between popular and elite composition. Underneath Barry’s Society folderol, provocative relationships undergo scrutiny as if in Christian parable; his characters are likable but worrisome—and, from First Couple Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly on down, there is nothing worrisome in this High Society.

The spirit hits them and they follow (My italics) Louis Armstrong Mumbo Jumbo [Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō, “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away”: mā-mā, grandmother+gyo, trouble+ mbō, to leave.] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

Louis Armstrong put out a jazz song in 1935 called “Old Man Mose” about an old guy who had “kicked the bucket.” His pals knocked on his door and couldn’t get any response. I listened to it just now and was amused and delighted by how upbeat and joyful the song was. But that’s Louie and the joy he brought to everything he sang and played (even, and perhaps especially, in his so-called old age when he continued to play almost every night in towns and wide spots in the road, all over the country.) Louie’s love of life seemed to increase the older he got, and loving life is what we’re talking about here.

Though city authorities renamed the airport after a prominent African American, Louis Armstrong, the names of the surrounding towns and streets date back much further. The old River Road sweeps past the poor, primarily black town of Destrehan, before entering the town of Kenner, where the airport is located. The River Road becomes Third Street, then Jefferson Highway, and finally South Claiborne Ave. Don’t bother looking for Charles Deslondes Boulevard or Quamana Avenue. And don’t spend much time looking for historical markers of the 1811 revolt. There’s only one, across the street from a McDonald’s in Norco, nearly forty miles outside of the city center.

Louis Armstrong Airport, which sits on the site of the former Kenner and Henderson plantation.

The sound of their evolving jazz dialect formed a cultural fulcrum that no outraged protester or government-issued desegregation order could begin to achieve.

musical stage for more than half of that century, forging melodic models that hadn’t existed and elevating jazz into a pulsating force for spontaneity and freedom.

The Negro,” Duke explained, “is not merely a singing and dancing wizard but a loyal American in spite of his social position. I want to tell America how the Negro feels about it.” And he did, as did his friends Armstrong and Basie.

If lots more of us loved each other, we’d solve lots more problems. And then this world would be a gasser.

Race, for once, fell away as America listened rapt.

The scenery was luminescent and the women desirable.

With little else to do I rode my Vesper motor scooter from Harbel to Roberts Field. Perhaps there might be some excitement around the airport, but no such luck. Eric Reeves the Station Master and Air Traffic Controller was in the tower and was in communications with the incoming airliner. Everything was quiet in anticipation of a Pan American Clipper's arrival. On the ground floor all was quiet except for a solitary passenger in the terminal. Apparently he was waiting for the next flight out, which wasn't due for another two hours. As I approached him, I could see that he looked familiar…. I immediately recognized him as a world class trumpet player and gravel voiced singer from New Orleans. He must have seen the look on my face and broke the ice by introducing himself as Louie Armstrong. "Hi," I answered, "I'm Hank Bracker, Captain Hank Bracker." I noticed that he was apparently alone sitting there with a mountain of belongings which obviously included musical instruments. Here was Louis Armstrong, the famous Louie Armstrong, all alone in this dusty, hot terminal, and yes he had a big white handkerchief! He volunteered that the others in his party were at the club looking for something to eat. With no one else around, we talked about New Orleans, his music and how someone named King Oliver, a person I had never heard of, was his mentor. At the time I didn't know much about Dixie Land music or the Blues, but talking to Louie Armstrong was a thrill I'll never forget. In retrospect it’s amazing to find out that you don’t know what you didn’t know. I found out that he actually lived in Queens, NY at that time, not too far from where my aunt and uncle lived. I also found out that he was the Good Will Ambassador at Large and represented the United States on a tour that included Europe and Africa, but now he was just a friendly person I had the good fortune to meet, under these most unusual circumstances. His destination was Ghana where he, his wife and his band the All Stars group were scheduled to perform a concert in the capitol city of Accra. Little did I know that the tour he was on was scheduled by Edward R. Murrow, who would later be my neighbor in Pawling, New York. Although our time together was limited, it was obvious that he had compassion for the people of the "Third World Nations," and wanted to help them. Although after our short time together, I never saw Louie again but I just know that he did. He seemed to be the type of person that could bring sunshine with him wherever he went.…

Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96 His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.” The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.” Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106 He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell em

There were still exciting groups on the horizon: Ben Pollack, Isham Jones, Red Nichols, and Ted “Is Ev-rybody Happy?” Lewis provided an early training ground for many of the stars of the swing era, which was just around the corner. Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, and Chick Webb had started or were soon to start bands in the mid- to late 1920s, and Duke Ellington was already one of the most respected names in the industry.

We permit a new future to enter the room with these startling encounters. A young boy from Austin, Texas, Charles Black Jr., stood and knew it when he was just sixteen years old, thinking he was going to a coed social at the Driskill Hotel in his hometown in 1931. It was a dance, the first in a session of four, yet he remained transfixed by an image that he had never seen before. The trumpet player, a jazz musician whom he had not heard of, performed largely with his eyes closed, sounding out notes, ideas, laments, sonnets, “that had never before existed,” he said. His music sounded like an “utter transcendence of all else created.” He was with a friend, a “ ‘good old boy’ from Austin High,” who sensed it too, and was troubled. It rumbled the ground underneath them. His friend stood a while longer, “shook his head as if clearing it,” as if prying himself out of the trance. But Charles Black Jr. was sure even then. The trumpeter, “Louis Armstrong, King of the Trumpet” as it turned out, “was the first genius I had ever seen,” Black said, and that genius was housed in the body of a man whom Black’s childhood world had denigrated. The moment was “solemn.” Black had been staring at “genius,” yes, “fine control over total power, all height and depth, forever and ever,” and also staring at the gulf created by “the failure to recognize kinship.” He felt that Armstrong, who played as if “guided by a Daemon,” all “power” and lyricism, “opened my eyes wide, and put to me a choice”—to keep to a small view of humanity or to embrace a more expanded vision—and once Black made that choice, he never turned back. This is what aesthetic force can do—create a clear line forward, and an alternate route to choose.

Larry Page probably never listened to early Louis Armstrong records, in which the notion of time is reinvented. Armstrong threw away the classical meanings of time, which he had learned in the marching bands of New Orleans, and replaced it with a slippery push-pull syncopation that would come to define the idea of swing. Perhaps we can get a small insight from this into the culture clash between the nerds and the artists. The time clock in a computer is unforgiving, but a great musician often plays behind the beat.

Billie Holiday Her imperfect life led to her becoming a legendary performer with a continuing influence on American music. Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1015 she became a songwriter and jazz singer with an unmistakable vocal style. Although she had a limited range her delivery, tempo and natural skills, held the attention of a devoted following. Influenced by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith her success as a pop singer with the Benny Goodman Band started with "Riffin' the Scotch", which sold 5,000 copies. She continued with Count Basie and Artie Shaw and was recognized throughout the 1930s and the 1940s with songs such as “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “God Bless the Child.” Plagued with abusive relationships, drug and alcohol addiction, and even a short prison sentence she still rose to the top of the charts. Her predictable deterioration and eventual death on July 17, 1959 was caused by cirrholis of the liver.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain't never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

ORIGIN OF JAZZ It was 1906. People were coming and going as usual along Perdido Street in a poor neighborhood of New Orleans. A five-year-old child peeking out the window watched that boring sameness with open eyes and very open ears, as if he expected something to happen. It happened. Music exploded from the corner and filled the street. A man was blowing his cornet straight up to the sky and around him a crowd clapped in time and sang and danced. And Louis Armstrong, the boy in the window, swayed back and forth with such enthusiasm he nearly fell out. A few days later, the man with the cornet entered an insane asylum. They locked him up in the Negro section. That was the only time his name, Buddy Bolden, appeared in the newspapers. He died a quarter of a century later in the same asylum, and the papers did not notice. But his music, never written down or recorded, played on inside the people who had delighted in it at parties or at funerals. According to those in the know, that phantom was the founder of jazz.

Once the list is developed, pick a dozen names from the list, which are a mix of both current and past celebrities. Then pose the problem and ask, “How would this situation be handled by…” • Donald Trump • Lady Gaga • Muhammad Ali • Bette Midler • Napoleon • Louis Armstrong • Gustave Eiffel • Renoir • Thomas Edison • Madam Curie • Hillary Clinton • Ronald Reagan • Big Bird • Donald Duck • Plato

But unceasing innovation is a vital part of jazz for several reasons, not all of them strictly musical. Since its inception, jazz has been a statement by its principally black players of their lives and social situation in this country. It is descended from the coded field songs of the slaves, which acted as catharsis for their pain and indignity. When Louis Armstrong became the first great jazz soloist, his music spoke for all those blacks who, like Louis, had moved north with fresh hopes as well as new disappointment. Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Lester Young announced a changing, more prideful attitude among blacks of the Thirties. Likewise, the music of the great jazz musicians of the bop revolution, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, spoke for the new militance of those young blacks who had fought in World War II and expected America to be a new country after defeating the forces of bigotry and fascism.

A man ain't never seen greatness till he set eyes on the likes of Armstrong. That the truth. Those hooded lids, that blinding smile: the jack was immense, majestic. But something else too: he looked brutally human, like he known suffering on its own terms. His mouth was shocking. He done wrecked his chops from the pressure of hitting all them high notes over the years. He lift a handkerchief to his mouth, wipe off a line of spittle. I seen something in him then: a sort of devastated patience, a awful tiredness. I known that look. My mama had it all her life.

Today you ain't no kind of horn player you don't acknowledge some debt to Hieronymus Falk. He was one of the pioneers: a German Louis Armstrong, if you will.

denna låt är en av de finaste låtar jag någonsin hört. herremingud va texten är vacker. det som händer vid 7:39 och efteråt är helt magiskt. denna värld förtjänar inte justin vernon, tänk att han skrivit både denna och re:stacks <3 The hills speaking softly to brag The rain is so quiet it's sad In liberty it rains so loud we can't hear It's so hard to see outside when it rains down here The arches hold together St. Louis And the mighty Mississippi splits right through us Before my arches rebuild, they must have a song But I can't proceed until the rain is gone Blue grey background on those moss green pines Heavy grown raindrops clinging to the electrical lines Floating in an atmosphere of truth and hidden lies Sometimes out here, I feel like my heroes can save my life Through the window of this ricket rail car And I see the world scene by scene The silver mountains and blue streams I will only ever smell the train steam We hear Louis Armstrong play his horn on the shortwave radio His sound breaks my heart with a stone in my throat Like a sword through a heart, leaking tears onto the ground So hard to see when it rains down here Alone, is where I been leading to be So I, just been sailing the seas The wind can blow me wherever it needs to take me The skipper taunts the sky Thunder and waves crashing into the side It will never break him, it will never save him

Give me a kiss to build a dream on, and my imagination will thrive upon that kiss. Kisses for Mr. Castle - The Hersey Kiss Story

I don’t let my head say nothin’ my head can’t stand

past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night,

It was currently playing an old Louis Armstrong song—“What a Wonderful World.” Born in a generation that thinks cynical and disenchanted is cool, sometimes I’m a little off the beaten track. Oh well.

i am reminded of a song that would not make it on the radio in the timeframe of his current state of unrest. it was by a man named louis armstrong, who did not know the same respect and freedoms as his musical counterparts today. instead of writing about the familiarities that surrounded him, like oppression and racism, he sang a song called "(what) a wonderful world.

Louis Armstrong made the trumpet his mouthpiece. With the instrument, he was as complete as he would have been incomplete without it. Both man and instrument gave us jazz music as soft as velvet. As clear as the last speech of a grumbling thunder in a drizzling, slanting rain of a frugal tropical wet season! And as distinctive as any piece of jazz Satchmo himself, the virtuoso, would have rendered!