Word: musicically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...from Jane Alley. From the place Louis and jazz were born, there was no direction to move but up. The music, at first a restless, syncopated blend of African dance rhythms, Negro blues, brass-band marches, and French Creole songs and dances, spent its raucous teens in brothels, cheap saloons and street parades. Armstrong came up from Jane Alley, a squalid, "back-o'-town" lane in what was then the toughest section of uptown Negro New Orleans. His parents were the nearly illiterate grandchildren of slaves, his father a worker in a turpentine factory, his mother a domestic. Never...
...against their will, staring dazedly into the encroaching darkness. Draped around the husband's weary neck hung a tie decorated with a pin-up girl. "Don't think I am making fun," says Koerner earnestly. "The fellow likes his tie-I happen to like schmaltzy music. We're all the same. How can we say that something else is more important than our illusions...
Telling What Comes Naturally. In that crowd there will be many who remember Louis Armstrong and his music, for he and New Orleans jazz grew up together. Louis says: "Jazz and I grew up side by side when we were poor." The wonder is that both jazz and Louis emerged from streets of brutal poverty and professional vice-jazz to become an exciting art, Louis to be hailed almost without dissent as its greatest creator-practitioner...
City Full of Jazz. At night, the hot, insistent rhythm came at him from every direction. In the daytime, there was jazz in the streets. Band members would pile into advertising wagons (with the trombonist on the tail gate for freedom of reach) and engage in music battles with other bands; the winner was chosen by acclamation and rode off with crowds following. At Negro funerals, the bands played to & from the cemetery-doleful spirituals on the way out, such frenzied affirmations as High Society and Oh, Didn't He Ramble! on the way back...
...could do just about what I wanted and we ate regular. I feel at home there even now. I might end up there an old man some day, seein' over those boys like Professor Davis did." Best of all for Louis, "Professor" Davis taught him to read music a bit, and play, first the tambourine and drums, then the bugle, finally a battered pawnshop cornet. Unable to keep the small, smooth mouthpiece on his big lips at first, Louis filed grooves in it and mastered Home, Sweet Home...