Word: satchmo
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...motorcade swung on down South Rampart Street, and Louis Armstrong, 65, felt like doing a little swinging himself. "These are my old stomping grounds," graveled Satchmo. "Everybody was blowin' good stuff here when I was a kid." Louis came back to his home town on Louis Armstrong Day to play a benefit concert for the New Orleans Jazz Museum. "I used to stand on the corners and play until the cops came along and ran us away," recalled' Louis, fingering the cornet he first learned to toot 52 years ago at the old Waifs Home. Then he grinned...
...Stick with Satchmo." As Davis recounts it in Yes I Can, he acquired his hard-driving habits almost from the cradle. His vaudevillian father took him into his act when he was three, saw him a headliner before his ninth birthday. The hours young Sammy kept were not those recommended by Dr. Spock, but in a way he was luckier than many of his Negro contemporaries. He never dropped out of school because he never dropped in, avoided the ghetto life by staying on the road. He was eight years old before he heard the word "nigger," did not really...
...service with a spirit that was unbroken, determined to scrub out his color as a bar to reaching the top in show business. He began breaking down the taboos that have long circumscribed Negroes, including the rule that colored entertainers must never imitate white celebrities. "You just stick with Satchmo and Step'n Fetchit," begged his manager. But Davis listened only to Davis, joined forces with his father and "Uncle" to form the Will Mastin Trio, soon had his audiences pounding the tables and begging for more as he imitated Sir Laurence Olivier, tough-talked his way through impersonations...
...mighty blast anyway. Cheering throngs of East Berliners, from the youthful hip to the Party drip, shelled out a capitalistic 15 to 25 marks ($3.75 to $6.25) apiece just to soak up all that jazz. Playing to packed houses on his four-week trip behind the Iron Curtain, Satchmo neatly muted the inevitable questions on race and politics ("Some of my best friends are Southern whites," he grinned) and gave the Volk encores and encores of Blueberry Hill and Hello, Dolly! Said he: "I'm an entertainer, and I'll play for anybody who wants to hear...
HELLO LOUIS! (Epic). Cornetist Bobby Hackett, freed from the treacly bondage of those Jackie Gleason albums of a few years back, pays tribute to Satchmo the composer. Louis Armstrong's compositions have always been overshadowed by his virtuoso performances of other people's work, though he has written several hundred pieces, among the better known being Gate Mouth Blues, Brother Bill and Hear Me Talkin' to Ya. Hackett proves to have a real feeling for the Armstrong style, and his cornet solos, backed by authentic-sounding tuba, saxophone, banjo, trombone, piano and drums, are incisive and bouncy...