Word: horning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Then came tours that took Louis to the West Coast and points between. He switched from cornet to trumpet (chiefly because the longer horn "looked better"). In 1926, when he dropped some lyrics on the floor during a recording session, he quickly substituted nonsense syllables, and added "scat-singing" to jazz. He had formed "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five" (Satchmo, Clarinetist Johnny Dodds, Trombonist Kid Ory, Johnny St. Cyr on the banjo and second wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on the piano) to make recordings of his best numbers for Okeh. When he played Chicago, such youngsters as Bix Beiderbecke...
...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 and jazz itself...
Armstrong bowled them over in Chicago. His tone was unsurpassed for purity -and stayed that way even up around F and G above high C; he had such sheer power that he could blow as many as 300 ceiling notes in succession. The songs that came from his shiny horn ranged from the most mournful of blues to the explosive abandon of numbers like Muskrat Ramble...
...Alley hit tunes and minor classics (The Song of India), was "King of Jazz," and his music and records were far better known than the small-band New Orleans variety. But after Louis arrived in Manhattan in 1924, and persuaded Fletcher Henderson to let him "open up" on his horn at Broadway's Roseland Ballroom one night, jazz musicians of all existing varieties flocked to listen...
...Glaser says: "I'm Louis and Louis is me. There's nothing I wouldn't do for him." One thing he has done is to make sure that happy-go-lucky Louis Armstrong will never be in need. Should Satchmo have to lay down his gleaming horn tomorrow, Glaser says, he would collect $864 a month for life...