Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
Louis gives the back of his hand to the latest variety of jazz, bebop (or bop). The boppers, who know the way he feels, tend to speak of him in the past tense. "Nowadays," says Negro Bop Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, "we try to work out different rhythms and things that they didn't think about when Louis Armstrong blew. In his day all he did was play strictly from the soul-just strictly from his heart. You got to go forward and progress. We study...
Louis likes his sleep, eight or nine hours of it, but he can do with four, "if I lay on my back." He once read that Heavyweight Max Baer recommended sleeping that way, earnestly agrees that "it's the only kind of sleep that eases you off." The first thing he does on arising is to turn on two or three radios, one in each room, and they stay on all day. Louis doesn't care what the program is ("I can get something out of any of them"). Apparently, sweet, slurred stuff is just as acceptable...
...small gallery at Haverford's (Pa.) Merion Cricket Club to watch 21 topflighters fight it out for the national singles championship. It was like looking down from the observer's roost of an operating room: the walls cold and white, the temperature a chilly 45°. The way the experts played it, squash racquets was a test of tactics and attrition. With slim-throated, roundheaded racquets, they slammed a little black ball around the wooden-walled court. The trick was to stand in midcourt (from which most defensive shots could be readily reached) and run the other fellow...