Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mahogany Exodus. Louis was a natural. He could blow clear and true, hitting the notes hard and clean. He never had to squeeze for a high one. But for three years after he got out of the Waif's Home (his mother got "a big white man" to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn't turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga's joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe ("there...
...player from Texas named Jack Teagarden waited at the gangway to say hello, asked to shake hands with Louis. Teagarden, soon to become a great name in jazz himself, remembers his first look at Louis: "[He] wasn't much to look at. Just a little guy with a big mouth. But, man, how he could blow that horn!" Louis soon found that his horn had been heard all the way to Chicago: Joe Oliver sent for him and in 1922 Louis went north-in a land just getting used to flappers, bathtub gin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Warren G. Harding...
...Big as Mussolini. When Armstrong went abroad in 1932, Europe turned out to be as much of a cinch as Chicago. At London's Palladium, George V did Armstrong the honor of attending in person. Louis repaid the compliment with a grinning bow to the royal box: "This one's for you, Rex." In Italy he relished seeing his own picture blown up to the same size as Mussolini's, hanging on the opposite side of the theater doorway ("Mussolini was big stuff in those days...
...dine & dance audiences of 1,000 a night last week in Vancouver, B.C. Most of his band, like Armstrong, had been musically famous for more than two decades, though they were only in their early 405; Trombonist Jack Teagarden, Pianist Earl ("Father") Hines, Clarinetist Barney Bigard and Drummer Sidney ("Big Sid") Catlett. The only youngster, 25-year-old Arvell Shaw played bass fiddle. When Louis and his All-Stars swung into West End Blues, Confessin' or Rockin' Chair, it was hard for oldtimers to believe that Louis or jazz were ever better...
...sophisticate, he shows signs of becoming a big-city hypochondriac, although he denies it. His dressing table is littered with a weird assortment of pills, salves, balms and medicines with which he experiments constantly. But the big-city preoccupation with racial problems is not in his key. He says: "I know where the discrimination is, so I avoid those cities. Anyone who goes huntin' for discrimination is a glutton for punishment." A simple man whose main life is his music, he has occasional fits of sullenness and sometimes falls into a temperamental rage, but usually he is gay, good...