Word: trombonist
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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...
Louis listened to all of the Negro jazz pioneers: men like Clarinetists Alphonse Picou and Sidney Bechet, Trombonist Kid Ory, Pianist Jelly Roll Morton and Cornetist Bunk Johnson. But Cornetist Joe ("King") Oliver was his favorite: "Soon as I heard him I said 'there's mah man!'" At first, Louis just listened. He ran errands, hawked bananas, ground up old brick and sold it to prostitutes for scouring their front steps on Saturday mornings. When he was eleven, he also started a street quartet in which he sang tenor, picked up loose change by serenading through...
...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, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Eddie Condon, who were to help create the "Chicago school...
...Stars, and 267-lb. Singer Velma Middleton, he was playing to 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...
...Over the Dam." When he arrived in Manchester in 1943, war had reduced the once-famed Halle to only 23 players-and a concert hall blitzed into rubble. He combed the town for players, plucked his first trombonist (a woman) from a Salvation Army band. He rehearsed his neophytes twelve hours a day; the first concert (in the local Methodist mission) was a success. That year he gave 230 concerts; the next he endeared himself to the British with a battlefront tour at Christmas, playing while the Battle of the Bulge was raging a few miles away...