Swing (music)

Swing Music is a combination of jazz and popular music, with a rhythmic and often repetitive beat. Swing is usually performed by dance bands having eight or more members, often accompanied by a vocalist and/or vocal group.

Wikipedia

The name swing came from the 'swing feel' where the emphasis is on the off–beat or weaker pulse in the music.

Swing music's genesis was the change from ragtime to jazz in the 1910s. Jazz took off with The Original Dixieland Jass Band 's recording of "Livery Stable Blues", which sold a million copies in 1917 and launched jazz as a national phenomenon in the US.

In 1923 Fletcher Henderson begins enlarging jazz ensembles, providing the foundation for swing music. The following year Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, arguably the beginning of big band jazz music. 

The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in 1925, with Louis Armstrong 3rd from left 

The growing popularity of jazz music in the 1920s was enhanced in places where prohibition was not enforced correctly and the speakeasies were very popular, especially in Detroit with the bootleggers. 

In 1925 Louis Armstrong left the Fletcher Henderson band and would add his innovations to New Orleans style jazz to develop Chicago style jazz, another step towards swing.

By the 1930s, Big band jazz had metamorphosed into swing. Swing was less improvised than big band jazz relying more on the written form.

In 1932, jazz composer Duke Ellington wrote "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing," a song that presaged the swing era.

In 1935, Benny Goodman's band ended a cross-country tour in Los Angeles. The tour was very disappointing, but when the band opened in Los Angeles, the youngsters went wild. They absolutely loved the music. It is the "official" start of the Swing Music era. 

Goodman with his band and singer, Peggy Lee, in the film Stage Door Canteen

The most famous swing bands rose to popularity in the 1930s and 1940s and included orchestras led by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller and Count Basie. Their unprecedented success marked the peak of mainstream commercial emergence of swing music.

In 1938 the Archbishop of Dubuque, Francis J. L. Beckman, denounced swing music as "a degenerated musical system… turned loose to gnaw away at the moral fiber of young people", warning that it leads down a "primrose path to hell". His warning was widely ignored.

The great "Swing Era" started to die in the 1940s as the American Musician's Union disastrous strike, and the World War II years took their toll. In December 1946, 13-14 years after Benny Goodman officially started the swing era, the bubble broke. During that month, eight bands called it quits: Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Ina Ray Hutton, Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Harry James and Benny Carter, all disbanded their orchestras.

Charlie Parker

The jazz saxophone giant Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas on August 29, 1920. He was the only child of Adelaide "Addie" (Bailey) and Charles Parker.

In 1939 Charlie Parker (playing at a Harlem jam session) begins experimenting with a style which will be called first ReBop, then Bebop.

Bebop is synonymous with fast improvisation and complicated chord structures and Charlie Parker's exciting alto saxophone flights won him the popular nickname of Bird, yet he played equally creatively in ballads and in heartfelt blues such as "Parker's Mood"'. His broken melodies were rich with surprising accents and highly contrasted rhythms.

Portrait of Charlie Parker in the Three Deuces of New York (N.Y.), in August 1947

The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums, and piano. This was a format used (and popularized) by both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in their 1940s groups and recordings.

In 1949, the New York night club Birdland was named in Parker's honor. Located at 1678 Broadway, just north of West 52nd Street in Manhattan, it was popular with many of the writers of the Beat generation.

Three years later, jazz pianist George Shearing wrote "Lullaby of Birdland", named for both Parker and the nightclub.

The famous jazz musician Miles Davis started out as a teenager playing bebop with Charlie Parker.

Parker married for the first time when he was 15, and had a succession of four marriages throughout his short life.

Parker and his common-law wife, Chan Berg, lived in the ground floor of the townhouse at 151 Avenue B, across from Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village between 1950 and 1954.

151 Avenue B in 2011

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As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while hospitalized after an automobile accident, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. He continued using heroin throughout his life, and it caused him to miss performances and be considered unemployable

At one point, due to his excessive drinking and trouble-making, Parker was banned from the Birdland club that bore his name.

Parker's addiction to heroin ultimately contributed to his death at 34-years-old He passed away in New York City on March 12, 1955 at the age of 34 from cirrhosis, internal bleeding and pneumonia caused by a heart attack, whilst watching The Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show on television.

Charlie Parker's heroin and alcohol addictions were so severe, that after his death, the coroner mistakenly estimated him to be between 50 and 60 years old.

Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Missouri, in a hamlet known as Blue Summit, located close to I-435 and East Truman Road.

Parker's grave at Lincoln Cemetery

A biographical film called Bird, starring Forest Whitaker as Parker and directed by Clint Eastwood, was released in 1988. The movie stemmed from Eastwood's enthusiasm for Bebop.

Sources Comptons Encyclopedia, Artistfacts

Jazz

Instruments such as the clarinet, trumpet, and trombone, discarded by army bands after the American Civil War were taken up by the emancipated slaves and, together with such simple 'minstrel' instruments as the banjo, became the basis of a new sound-jazz.

The first jazz bands were usually made up of one or two cornet players who played the principal melodies, a clarinetist and trombonist who improvised countermelodies, and a rhythm section (piano, banjo, string bass or tuba, and drums) to accompany the horns. These bands played for dancers or marched in parades in the warm Southern climate.

One of the first jazz musicians was the cornetist Buddy Bolden (1877-1931), leader of a band who played in New Orleans streets and amusement parks.

A 1909 song called "Uncle Josh in Society" was the first use of the term jazz (in this instance it was used to refer to ragtime).

The word “jazz” was originally early 20th century US slang for excitement or energy. In 1913 it started to be used to mean nonsense or babble and it was recorded being used for a form of improvisatory music two years later.

By 1915 New Orleans-style bands were starting to enjoy popularity in Chicago. On May 15, 1915, Tom Brown's Band from Dixieland opened up at Lamb's Cafe at Clark & Randolph Streets in the Windy City. This band was the first to be popularly referred to as playing "Jazz", or, as it was spelled early on, "Jass.”

Tom Brown's Band from Dixieland. Source Redhotjazz.com

Tom Brown's Band from Dixieland was formed when Chicago comedian and dancer Joe Frisco was impressed by the music he heard while in New Orleans. He asked New Orlean's trombonist Tom Brown to assemble a group and bring them north for an engagement at Lamb's Cafe in Chicago.
The group comprised Tom Brown, trombone and leader, Ray Lopez, cornet and manager, Paul Mares, cornet, Steve Brown, bass, Gussie Mueller, Yellow Nuñez and Larry Shields clarinet, Arnold Loyacano piano and guitar and Billy Lambert on drums.

Tom Brown's band toured the vaudeville circuit, but they didn't like all of the travel and soon broke up.

The Original Dixieland Jass Band were a group of white New Orleanians who were a sensation during a long engagement in New York City in 1917—18 playing Dixieland music at The Paradise Supper Club.

The Original Dixieland Jass Band 's February 26, 1917 recording of "Livery Stable Blues" was the first jazz single ever issued. It sold a million copies in 1917 and launched jazz as a national phenomenon. (A Black bandleader, Freddie Keppard, had rejected an offer to record because he though others would copy his style.)

Wikipedia Commons

"Livery Stable Blues" was basically a cover of a song that The Original Dixieland Jass Band had heard African-American musicians play in their native New Orleans.  It was the subject of a legal action and the presiding judge ruled that since the song was in bad taste and composed by people who couldn’t actually read or write sheet music, it would be remanded to the "public domain".

The regimental band of the U.S. Army's 369th Regiment (the "Harlem Hellfighters Band") is credited with introducing jazz to Britain and France during World War I. The until-then unknown music provided the first death blow for the British music hall.

F Scott Fitzgerald called the 1920s “The Jazz Age” in his 1922 stories Tales Of The Jazz Age.

In 1923 King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band made the first jazz records of lasting musical significance. Within Oliver's band was his protégé Louis Armstrong The same year marked the recording debuts of such early jazz greats as the New Orleanians Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton.

Jelly Roll Morton got his musical chops playing piano in a brothel - though he told his very respectable great grandmother that he had a job as a nightwatchman. He notated and arrange the free-flowing improvised jazz that he heard in New Orleans and claimed, to the rage of other players, that he was the "inventor of jazz."

Jazz finally entered the mainstream in 1925 with the popular success of Paul Whiteman.

The jazz musician Django Reinhardt was born on January 23, 1910, in a Gypsy caravan in Liberchies, Belgium. He was forced to give up the violin after a caravan fire in 1928 mutilated his left hand. Despite the accident, Reinhardt overcame the handicap and went on to create the 'hot' jazz guitar technique, which has since become a living musical tradition within French Gypsy culture. He is regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, and possibly the most significant jazz talent to emerge from Europe.

Reinhardt in 1946

Benny Goodman's concert on January 16, 1938 at New York City's Carnegie Hall was the first ever performance given by a jazz orchestra in the famed venue. It was considered instrumental in establishing jazz as a legitimate form of music.

The LP,  The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert by Benny Goodman issued in 1950, was the first ever double album, and one of the first records on the new long-playing format to sell over a million copies.

Goodman with his band and singer, Peggy Lee, in the film Stage Door Canteen (1943)

The bebop era, which lasted from about 1945 to 1960, was also the period of cool jazz,  a movement, originating in opposition to hot jazz, in which emphasis was placed on light, unforced playing.

The comic actor Peter Sellers started his career as a drummer with several jazz bands. His first business cards said: ‘Peter Sellers, Drums and Impressions.’

Benito Mussolini’s son Romano Mussolini was a respected Jazz musician who toured internationally with artists including Chet Baker, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie.

American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis released the album Kind of Blue on August 17, 1959. Miles Davis's sextet, featuring saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans, introduced modal improvisation on Kind of Blue. The much acclaimed and highly influential album is the best selling jazz recording of all time.

Coltrane became the most legitimizing exponent of 1960s Free Jazz, a controversial style pioneered by Ornette Coleman and marked by an absence of harmonic sequences and chordal structures.

With 2,221 individual recording credits as of September 15, 2015, Ron Carter is the most prolific jazz bassist of all time. Carter has worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie. He is also a talented cellist and has recorded on that instrument as well. In addition to his work as a jazz musician, Carter is also a professor at the Juilliard School.

Ron Carter

International Jazz Day is an International Day declared by UNESCO in 2011 "to highlight jazz and its diplomatic role of uniting people in all corners of the globe." The idea came from jazz pianist and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Herbie Hancock. It is celebrated annually on April 30.

It is a crime to play jazz in North Korea.

Sources  Compton Encyclopedia, Europress Family Encyclopedia 1999, Daily Express

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915, At the time of her birth, her mother, Sadie Fagan (born Sarah Harris), was just 13.

It is thought her father was Clarence Holiday, who abandoned Sadie when Billie was an infant to pursue a career as a jazz guitarist.

In 1929 Holiday's mother witnessed a neighbor, Wilbert Rich, raping her daughter. Rich was sentenced to three months in jail.

She started singing in the early 1930s in Harlem, New York City, for tips in night clubs, and got a job at Pod's and Jerry's, a famous Harlem jazz club.

Holiday took her professional pseudonym from Billie Dove, an actress she admired, and her probable musician father Clarence Holiday.

The producer John Hammond first heard Holiday in early 1933 and arranged for the young singer  to make her recording debut, at age 18, in November 1933 with Benny Goodman, singing two songs: "Your Mother's Son-In-Law" and "Riffin' the Scotch."

"Riffin' the Scotch," released on November 11, was her first hit, selling 5,000 copies.

A tenor saxophonist called Lester Young often accompanied Holiday on her early recordings. He had been a boarder at her mother's house in 1934 and she got on well with him. Young gave her a nickname, "Lady Day."

In the late 1930s,  Holiday worked as a big band singer with Count Basie and Artie Shaw. She was the first black women to work with a white orchestra when she paired with Artie Shaw in 1938.

Holiday was recording in the late 1930s when she was introduced to "Strange Fruit", a song based on a poem about lynching written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. She laid it down for independent Commodore label on April 20, 1939.

When Holiday's recording of "Strange Fruit" was first released, it was denounced by Time magazine as "A piece of musical propaganda." In 1999, the same publication voted “Strange Fruit” the Song of the Century.

The father of the comedian Billy Crystal, Jack, owned a record shop and booked jazz acts. One of them was Billie Holiday and she became a family friend and his babysitter.

On May 16, 1947, Holiday was arrested for possessing narcotics in her New York apartment. She was sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, popularly known as "Camp Cupcake" and released early in March 1948 because of good behavior.  Holiday said she never "sang a note" at Alderson even though people wanted her to.

At the Downbeat club, in New York.[1] c. February 1947

By early 1959 Holiday had cirrhosis of the liver because of her heavy drinking. She was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York on May 31, 1959 with liver and heart disease.

Holiday's hospital room was raided and even though she was dying, the singer was arrested and handcuffed on narcotic charges.

Billie Holiday died on July 17, 1959 with 70 cents in the bank and $750 strapped to her leg -- a reminder of her life-long fear of poverty.

George Gershwin

George Gershwin was born to Russian Yiddish immigrants Moishe Gershowitz and Roza Bruskina on September 26, 1898 in a second-floor dwelling at 242 Snediker Avenue, Brooklyn.

George's childhood piano teacher refused payment, saying: "I have a new pupil who will make his mark if anybody will. The boy is a genius."

On leaving school at the age of 15, Gershwin found his first job as a "song plugger" for Jerome H. Remick and Company, a publishing firm on New York City's Tin Pan Alley, where he earned $15 a week.

George Gershwin, c. 1935.

His first published song was "When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em". It was published in 1916 when Gershwin was only 17-years-old and earned him $0.50.

Gerswhin scored his first big success with his song, "Swanee", with words by Irving Caesar. Al Jolson, a famous Broadway singer of the day, heard Gershwin perform "Swanee" at a party and decided to record it. Jolson's version became an international hit.

In 1923, bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned Gershwin to write a short composition for a jazz concert. The result was “Rhapsody in Blue” which premiered at Aeolian Hall, New York City on February 12, 1924 and became one of his most acclaimed works.

Gershwin conceived his famous piano concerto while on a train to Boston. He said at the beginning of 1924: "I had already done some work on the rhapsody. It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang that is often so stimulating for a composer."

The premiere of An American in Paris, a jazz-influenced orchestral piece by George Gershwin took place at Carnegie Hall in New York City on December 13, 1928.

George Gershwin's life work culminated in the three act opera Porgy and Bess, which was based on the 1926 novel Porgy by DuBose Heyward. A jazzy fusion of classical opera and Broadway musical, the work was set in the fictional all-black slum dwelling of Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina. It opened on October 10, 1935.

Gershwin loved to entertain guests with his prized collection of movies at his mansion’s built-in cinema.

A live-long bachelor, George Gershwin fell in love with Paulette Goddard, then married to Charlie Chaplin. He was heartbroken that she would not leave her husband for him. When he fell ill, that June, it was written off as stress. Gershwin died a month later, on the morning of July 11, 1937, at the age of 38

The cause of death was a brain tumor, five hours after a failed surgical attempt to remove it. Funerals were held in both Hollywood and New York.

George Gershwin's final song was "Our Love Is Here To Stay." The composer started writing the tune for The Goldwyn Follies shortly before he died. Composer Vernon Duke completed the melody after George's death with the help of Oscar Levant, who remembered the harmonies of the song from when when Gershwin played it at parties.

Source Wikipedia

Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was born to James Edward Ellington and Daisy Kennedy Ellington on April 29, 1899. They lived with his maternal grandparents at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place), NW in the West End neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Daisy and J.E. were both pianists. Daisy primarily played parlor songs and J.E. preferred operatic arias.

Ellington's father worked sometimes as a caterer at the White House.

Ellington's friends noticed that he acted like a gentleman, and gave him a nickname, "Duke"

Despite the fact that both of his parents were amateur pianists, Ellington preferred baseball to piano lessons when he was a child. Sometimes Teddy Roosevelt would ride by on his horse and stop to watch Duke and his friends play.

His first job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators baseball games.

In 1914, Ellington wrote his first song. He had a job in a café, serving soda, using a soda fountain. His song was called "Soda Fountain Rag." He created it by ear as he could not read or write music.

Ellington married his high school sweetheart, Edna Thompson on July 2, 1918, when he was 19.

Shortly after their marriage, on March 11, 1919 Edna gave birth to their only son, Mercer Kennedy Ellington.

Mercer Ellington became a jazz trumpeter and composer. He lead his own bands, many of whose members went on to play with his father, or to achieve independent fame (notably Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Carmen McRae).

Between 1917 and 1919, Ellington started his professional music career. During the day, he had a job painting signs. At night, he played the piano.

In about 1918 he formed a band to play local engagements, and by 1923 he was in New York City leading a small band at the Kentucky Club.

As the leader of his own orchestra, Ellington became the first arranger to integrate "hot' jazz solos within the framework of a written score.

Duke Ellington's orchestra was the house band at the Cotton Club from December 4, 1927, to June 30, 1931. The club gave Ellington national exposure through radio broadcasts originating there.

Ellington poses with his piano at the KFG Radio Studio November 3, 1954.

"Mood Indigo" was first recorded by Duke Ellington for Brunswick Records on October 15, 1930. The song was developed from an instrumental called "Dreamy Blues," written by one of the best musicians in New Orleans in the early 20th century, Lorenzo Tio, Jr. It became a standard of not only Ellington's orchestra, but it has been recorded countless times by musical legends such as Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald.

"Mood Indigo" record by Duke Ellington orchestra

Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got that Swing)," released on February 2, 1932, introduced the word "swing" into the popular lexicon. Ellington was not really trying to do that. He said that "swing" was simply "Harlem for rhythm."

Duke Ellington wrote the score for his 1934 standard "(In My) Solitude" in 20 minutes at a Chicago studio, as he waited for an over-running band to finish their slot.

He wrote nearly 6,000 jazz pieces in total.

He had synesthesia, a neurological condition where he experienced notes as colors and textures.

Ellington lived for years in a townhouse on the corner of Manhattan's Riverside Drive and West 106th Street. After his death, West 106th Street was officially renamed Duke Ellington Boulevard.

Ellington led his band from 1923 until he died of lung cancer on May 24, 1974 aged 75. His son Mercer Ellington took over the band until he died of cancer in 1996. Then Paul Ellington, Mercer's youngest son, took over the band.

His legacy continued to rise after his death, and Ellington was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for music in 1999.

Duke Ellington began working on an opera called Queenie Pie in the 1930s. The story was inspired by the life of Madam C.J. Walker, a prominent African-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. The opera was intended to be a commentary on the beauty industry and the pursuit of success in American society.

Ellington worked on Queenie Pie on and off throughout his career, and he performed some of the music from the opera in concerts and recordings. After his death, several musicians and composers attempted to finish the opera using the materials that Ellington had left behind, but no definitive version has been established. 

Stevie Wonder’s 1977 hit "Sir Duke" was written in Ellington's honor.

Sources Songfacts.com, Wikipedia

Sidney Bechet

Jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer Sidney Bechet was born on May 14, 1897 in New Orleans. Bechet's father Omar was both a shoemaker and a flute player, and all four of his brothers were musicians as well.

He began playing his brother's clarinet at the age of 6 playing at a family birthday party.

Bechet studied clarinet in New Orleans with Lorenzo Tio, Big Eye Louis Nelson, and George Baquet and he developed so quickly that as a child he was soon playing with some of the top bands in the city.

Bechet's primary instruments were the clarinet and the soprano saxophone.

During a 1919-20 tour of Europe with a concert group, Bechet became the first jazz musician to receive critical attention.

He was one of the first important soloists in jazz (beating Louis Armstrong to the recording studio by several months). Bechet recorded "Wild Cat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues". "Wild Cat Blues" is in a multi-thematic ragtime tradition, with four themes, at sixteen bars each, and "Kansas City Man Blues" is a genuine 12-bar blues.

He was with Duke Ellington's early orchestra for a period.

Bechet and Josephine Baker were part of the Revue Nègre, which toured in Europe in 1925. Bechet toured Europe with multiple bands, reaching as far as the Soviet Union in mid-1926

Sidney Bechet in 1922

After being found guilty of assaulting a woman, Bechet was imprisoned in London from September 13 to 26, 1922. He was jailed again in Paris in the late 1920s when a female passer-by was wounded during a shoot-out. After serving time in prison, Bechet was deported to the United States.

After a lean couple of decades, Sidney Bechet's fortunes changed drastically in 1949. He was invited to the Salle Pleyel Jazz Festival in Paris, caused a sensation, and decided to move permanently overseas

In 1953, he signed a recording contract with French Vogue, which lasted for the rest of his life. He recorded many hit tunes, including the international hit "Petite Fleur."

Bechet died in Garches, near Paris, of lung cancer on May 14, 1959 on his 62nd birthday. He is buried in a local cemetery.

Source Allmusic

Bebop

Bebop is a jazz style characterized by a fast tempo and ever-shifting chord changes.

It was developed in the early 1940s by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and other black musicians reacting against swing music.

According to Dizzy Gillespie, the audiences coined the name after hearing him scat the then-nameless tunes to his players and the press ultimately picked it up, using it as an official term: "People, when they'd wanna ask for those numbers and didn't know the name, would ask for bebop."

Many bop pieces were played at the fastest tempos yet heard in jazz. Bop featured many-noted solos and unusual, quickly changing harmonies.

The classic bebop combo consisted of saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums, and piano. This was a format used (and popularized) by both Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in their 1940s groups and recordings.

The famous jazz musician Miles Davis started out as a teenager playing bebop with Charlie Parker.

 

Below is Charlie Parker with (from left to right) Tommy Potter, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Duke Jordan, at the Three Deuces, New York, circa 1945

On April 25, 1955, the United Nation's commission on narcotics releases a report stating "definite connection between increased marijuana smoking and that form of entertainment known as bebop and rebop."

Even though bebop was difficult to sing, a few vocalists such as Sarah Vaughan had the necessary control and wide voice range. 

A biographical movie called Bird, about Charlie Parker, directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, was released in 1988. The film stemmed from Eastwood's enthusiasm for bebop. 

Source Songfacts

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong was born into a very poor family on August 4, 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the grandson of slaves.

Armstrong in 1953

He spent his adult life celebrating the wrong birthday—Louis believed it was July 4th, 1900, but it was actually August 4th, 1901.

Raised by his mother in extreme poverty, Louis did odd jobs for the Karnoffskys, a family of Lithuanian Jews. The Karnoffskys took him in, fed and nurtured him and treated Louis like family. Louis Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant for most of his life, up until the day he died, to commemorate the Jewish family that had taken him in and cared for him as a child.

At the age of 12 Louis served a term for delinquency at the Colored Waifs Home, after celebrating the New Year by running out on the street and firing a pistol that belonged to the current man in his mother's life. The New Orleans Times-Democrat reported that “very few” juveniles had been arrested during the New Year revelry, though “the most serious case was that of Louis Armstrong, a 12 year old negro who discharged a pistol at Rampart and Perdido streets. Being an old offender he was sent to the negro Waif’s Home.”

It was at the Colored Waifs Home, where Louis Armstrong learned to play the the bugle and the clarinet. He eventually became the leader of the home's brass band.

Louis Armstrong started experimenting with scat singing on the mid 1920s recordings, such as "Cornet Chop Suey" and "Skid-Dat-De-Dat." During the recording of "Heebie Jeebies"  on February 26, 1926, Armstrong momentarily lost his place in the sheet music. and begins scatting, The recording of "Heebie Jeebies" is considered a landmark moment in the development of jazz and popular music, as it helped to popularize scat singing and showcased Armstrong's incredible talent and improvisational skills.

Armstrong was fond of smoking marijuana and wrote a song "Muggles" - a slang term for the substance - in 1928. He was arrested for drug possession in New Orleans in 1930, and was jailed nine days for it. 

During a command performance for King George V when touring Europe in 1932, Armstrong forgot he had been told that performers were not to refer to members of the Royal Family while playing for them. Just before picking up his trumpet for one particular number, he announced: "This one's for you, Rex."

He acquired his nickname of Satchmo during his 1932 Grand Tour of Europe. Up until that time Armstrong's nickname was Satchelmouth, but a London music magazine editor, unable to read his notes, wrote "Satchmo" in an article.

Louis Armstrong used laxatives to control his weight, even advocating the procedure in his book Lose Weight The Satchmo Way. 

The 62-year-old Armstrong became the oldest act to top the US charts when "Hello Dolly" reached #1 in 1964. Four years later Satchmo also became the oldest artist to record a UK #1, when "What A Wonderful World" hit the top spot.

He had four wives - Daisy Parker, a prostitute (1918); Lil(lian) Hardin, a jazz pianist who gave him some formal musical education (1924); Alpha Smith (1938); and Lucille Wilson, a showgirl (1942).

Armstrong with Lucille Wilson 1960s

Before marrying his fourth wife, Lucille Wilson, Louis Armstrong made sure that she could cook a satisfactory plate of rice and beans.

Armstrong may have been bulimic as he believed that it didn't matter what you ate, as long as you purged yourself regularly afterwards. He would do that with the help of an herbal laxative called Swiss Kriss.

Armstrong's intuitive genius for improvisation single-handedly shaped the course of jazz, transforming it from an ensemble style to an art of solo improvisation.

His contagious humor and flamboyant style made him an ideal goodwill ambassador for American music. As Armstrong's non-jazz audience grew, he appeared frequently on television making him the most famous jazz musician in the world.

Louis Armstrong once tricked Richard Nixon into carrying several of his bags, which contained drugs through customs for him. In 1958 when Nixon was America’s Vice President and Louis Armstrong was a “Goodwill Ambassador” for the U.S. State Department, Sacho persuaded Nixon to successfully transport bags containing three pounds of marijuana, making the Vice President an unintentional mule.

Louis Armstrong died of a heart attack in his sleep on July 6, 1971, a month before his 70th birthday. 

Source Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc