Last Trumpet for the First Trumpeter

GABRIEL himself might have envied his heaven-splitting, jubilant sound. His glossy face and keyboard-size grin were a national treasure--and a welcome sight in homes that would not dream of entertaining any other member of his race. He was a musical genius, a remarkable technician of the trumpet who went on to even wider fame as a singer. The fact that his voice sounded exactly like a wheelbarrow crunching its way up a gravel driveway made no difference at all. Legends don't need voices.

Louis Armstrong's death last week, two days after his 71st birthday, came as a tragic surprise. In March he had been so ill that it seemed unlikely he would recover. But he did, only recently announcing his return to work (TIME, July 12). His sudden death from heart failure ended a career that spanned the life of jazz. He emerged during its early days, became the first big star to shine in front of a combo. He paved the road over which virtually every jazzman of any importance would walk to fame thereafter.

When jazz began, America had little music to call its own. There were ballads, popular and folk songs, and some symphonic music by American-born but European-oriented composers. Bubbling in the New Orleans melting pot, however, was a disreputable mix of African, Spanish, French and Protestant revivalist musical influences that would mature into a uniquely American idiom. Black music had wandered away from its African grandparents, picked up a few hymn tunes, worked in fields and on railroads, and been sung to make slavery endurable. Around 1900, in the honky-tonks and whorehouses of New Orleans, it became jazz.

Armstrong was born near New Orleans' red-light district on July 4, 1900. Early on, his father decamped with another woman; Mother Armstrong was left on her own. "Whether my mother did any hustling, I cannot say," Armstrong once wrote. "If she did, she certainly kept it out of my sight."

At five he discovered music. The town's most famous honky-tonk dance place, Funky Butt Hall, used to send its band--including Cornettist Buddy Bolden, Trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Joe ("King") Oliver--out on the street to drum up business. Armstrong hung around to listen. By the time he was twelve, he was strolling through the Storyville red-light district singing tenor in a boys' quartet. Taunted one day by a neighborhood tough, he swiped a revolver and charged down Rampart Street, firing shots into the air. He was caught and shipped off to the Colored Waifs' Home for Boys, where he was entranced by the bugle calls and was set to banging the tambourine in the school band.

Admired Bad. The teacher soon moved him to drums, then to alto sax, bugle and cornet. After a year, Armstrong, 14, got out and organized his own little band, playing lead cornet. Mainly he worked the district. "One thing I always admired about those bad men in New Orleans," he recalled with a smile, "is that they all liked good music."

Occasionally he wrote songs. One was called Get Off Katie's Head. Armstrong always claimed he sold it to a team of publishers for a promised $50--a small fortune in New Orleans during World War I. Unfortunately, the trusting composer neglected to sign a contract. Equipped with lyrics, the song became famous as I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate. "They never did pay me for it, never even put my name on it," said Armstrong. He was chastened by the experience, but he never became a really good businessman. He was more thorough about music. He listened to, and learned from, other jazz artists. "The Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Larry Shields and his bunch --they were the first to record the music I played," he said. He even studied opera singers: "I had Caruso records, too, and Henry Burr, Galli-Curci, Luisa Tetrazzini, they were all my favorites. And that Irish tenor, John McCormack--beautiful phrasing."

In the early '20s, Armstrong worked on excursion boats up and down the Mississippi River. Then in 1922, Armstrong's idol. Trumpeter Joe Oliver, hired him for his Chicago band. Critics and audience both fell before Armstrong's horn like the walls of Jericho. His tone could be loud and lowdown. It could murmur suggestively or soar upward with an almost heraldic clarity. It had a physical strength that amazed his rivals: Armstrong threw out high Cs like a Met soprano. And there was always a teasing syncopation and a hint of heartbreak.

Recording companies signed him up, and Armstrong's best cuts came to be regarded as classics. "Ain't nobody played nothing like it since," he said in 1970. "And can't nobody play nothing like it now. My oldest record, can't nobody touch it. I didn't hit no bad notes on any of them." Legend says that Armstrong invented scat singing in 1926: while recording Heebie Jeebies, he dropped the sheet music and began ad-libbing nonsense syllables.

All in Fun. Armstrong safeguarded his lips with a preparation that he felt would help keep them firm. "What's the good of having music in your mind if you can't get it past your pucker?" he asked. The extent of his pucker provided him with his nickname, "Satchmo," a contraction of "Satchel Mouth."

He made nearly 2,000 recordings. Many were brilliant: When It's Sleepy Time Down South, Ain't Misbehavin', Muskrat Ramble, Basin Street Blues, and the inevitable and intoxicating When the Saints Go Marching In. Even in the '60s, when Satchmo and his kind of jazz might both have seemed oldfashioned, he took up the title song from Hello, Dolly!, touched it with his raspy vocal cords, and made his version a favorite all over the world.

Satchmo managed to survive both adulation and wealth without losing his head. On the whole, his minstrel-show appearance and jolly-fat personality made him more popular with whites than with his own race; but if he was loved for the wrong reasons, that never bothered Armstrong. "It's all in fun," he said. "They know I'm there in the cause of happiness." Toward the end of his career, blacks began to accuse him of playing Uncle Tom, forgetting that his style derived from vaudeville, a genre in which both blacks and whites often cultivated an exaggerated Deep South dialect and a toothy, ingratiating grin.

That Note. But Satchmo felt a strong tie with his own. A wealthy man, he lived in a modest (but expensively appointed) house in a deteriorating black neighborhood "to be with my people." He was with them at the end, dying in his sleep at home in Corona, Queens. He lay in state for one day in Manhattan, visited by 25,000 mourners, then was taken back to his own neighborhood for burial. Black and white celebrities --Mayor Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman and Dick Cavett--sat in the sweltering heat of his local church along with musicians and friends who merely loved him. Peggy Lee sang the Lord's Prayer, and Singer Al Hibbler sang Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen. It was reverent, dignified, respectful. But somehow, one felt that Louis would have been more delighted if--after the last encomiums and ritual blessing--a trumpet had blazed and a proud, strutting, joyous band had marched down the aisle belting out

Oh, when the Saints go marching in, Oh, when the Saints go marching in, I want to be in that number . . .

For Louis's legacy was not a message of reverence but of joy. "A note's a note in any language," he used to say. "And if you hit it--beautiful!" Louis hit it.

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