Brief biography of Louis Armstrong (life and work)

Who was Louis Armstrong?

Louis Armstrong, nicknamed "Satchmo", "Pops" and later "Ambassador Satch", was born in 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana. An all-star virtuoso, he rose to fame in the 1920s, influencing countless musicians with his bold trumpet style and unique vocals.

Armstrong's charismatic presence impressed not only the world of jazz, but all of popular music. He recorded several songs during his career, including songs such as "Stardust", "La Vie En Rose" and "What a Wonderful World". Armstrong died at his home in Queens, New York on July 6, 1971.

Louis 'satchmo ("Satchelmouth") Armstrong, the great jazz trumpeter and vocalist in London for his farewell performance in 1970.

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, Louisiana, in an area so poor it was nicknamed “Battlefield.”

Armstrong had a difficult childhood. His father was a factory worker who abandoned the family shortly after Louis was born, and his mother, who was a frequent prostitute, often left him with her maternal grandmother. Armstrong was forced to leave school in fifth grade to begin work.

A local Jewish family, the Karnofskis, gave young Armstrong jobs collecting trash and delivering coal. They also encouraged him to sing and often invited him to their home for meals.

On New Year's Eve in 1912, Armstrong shot his stepfather into the air during a New Year's celebration. and was arrested on the spot. He was then sent to a boys' home with a colored wife.

There he received a musical education on the cornet and fell in love with music. In 1914 he was sent home and immediately began dreaming of a life making music.

Only music

The future star had an unenviable . His parents lived in a poor black neighborhood in New Orleans. When Armstrong was born, it was August 4, 1901, his father left the family almost immediately, and his mother worked a lot, sometimes engaging in prostitution, to feed her son and daughter Beatrice. The children were taken in by their grandmother for a while, but then Louis returned to his mother at the age of 5, but did not feel much love from her.
As a child, Louis earned money on his own : he delivered coal to concert halls and brothels, and was a newspaper seller. At the age of 7, he began working for the Karnofsky family, coal sellers. This was a Jewish family that came to America from Lithuania. Here he was always welcome, and over time the boy practically lived in their house, where he learned good manners and much more, including speaking Yiddish. The area in which the Karnofskys lived was rich in entertainment venues, and free morals prevailed here. Among all this entertainment, the future jazz genius grew up.
At age 11, he was kicked out of school and began singing with street boys to earn money.
One thoughtless act changed the life of 12-year-old Armstrong. He stole a pistol from a policeman , who was another client of his mother, and even managed to shoot with it. As punishment, he was sent to a reform camp for colored teenagers. But it was there that he began playing in a brass band, mastering such musical instruments as the tambourine (a cylinder-shaped drum), the viola (a wind instrument) and the cornet (its ancestor is the post horn, which is a wind instrument and has percussion caps). In the camp I decided to become a musician.
After his sentence expired, Armstrong earns money by playing in various clubs and cabarets, borrowing instruments. Joseph Oliver , drew attention to him . But soon, in 1918, he left for Chicago, and Louis invited Kid Ory to his ensemble.
Armstrong plays in various ensembles and performs in dance halls on ships that carry vacationers along the Mississippi. At the same time, band leader Marable, , explains to Louis the basics of musical notation. And now Armstrong can rightfully be considered a qualified musician.
Oliver “King” did not forget about the talented young man by inviting him to his place. In 1922, he led the orchestra at Chicago's famous Lincoln Gardens restaurant, and participation in this jazz orchestra marked the beginning of Louis's successful musical career. The musician had his first substantial money, with which he was able to buy himself an apartment.
In 1924, Armstrong, on the advice of his second wife, began a solo career , and then they left for New York. Here he works in the orchestra of James Henderson, a talented arranger and composer who contributed to the emergence of the swing movement. Fans of jazz compositions are increasingly coming to listen to Louis perform.
The musician's days are full : he participates in recordings of the ensemble led by K. Williams, sings with many famous jazz and blues vocalists.
But in 1925, the contract with Henderson ended, and the musician returned to Chicago. But even here he works tirelessly, achieving a lot. At this time, he played with E. Tate in the show band, here his new talent was revealed - acting abilities, he recorded his compositions together with various professional musicians.
In 1927, Armstrong decided to finally stop playing the cornet . Now his favorite instrument is the trumpet . He chose it because the sound of the trumpet combined better with other instruments, and the sounds were brighter and richer. At the same time, Louis begins to sing in scat style. In those days, this manner, when words were added to the sounding melody, which acted as additional accompaniment, was new.
The public is increasingly accepting the musician with enthusiasm, and his fans are becoming more and more numerous. Since 1929, Armstrong has lived in New York . It was a time when the sweet style reigned supreme, Armstrong enriched this music by adding his original style to it. Now he is becoming a favorite and a celebrity throughout America.
In the early 30s, Armstrong toured various cities of the country with popular big bands, records appeared, he was invited to Hollywood, where he starred in more than 50 films , and performed on the radio. He visited European countries and North Africa with concerts, and everywhere he was received with admiration.
In 1933, Armstrong got his own orchestra . An active and professional manager, Joe Glaser, . In 1936, an autobiography book written by Armstrong appeared on store shelves.
But the musician’s health was not so rosy. He had to undergo surgery due to damage to his upper lip, which suffered stress when playing. He then wanted to get rid of the original hoarseness by having surgery on his vocal cords.
In 1947, Glaser created the All Stars , inviting the most popular musicians of the time to join it. They changed periodically, but those who participated in the ensemble subsequently became famous and famous. Mostly they played popular songs in jazz arrangements or performed melodies in the Dixieland style.
In the 50s, Armstrong is still loved and popular. He constantly performs, visiting many countries around the world, and is invited to famous jazz festivals.
In 1959, the musician suffered a heart attack , but did not stop performing. More and more often he performs on stage as a vocalist.
In the late 60s his health deteriorates, but he still tries to work.
On July 6, 1971, due to heart failure, his fans received the sad news that Armstrong was no more...

King Oliver

Although he still had to work odd jobs selling newspapers and hauling coal in the city's famous red light district, Armstrong began to earn a reputation as a fine blues player. One of the greatest cornet players in the city, Joe "King" Oliver, began acting as a mentor to the young Armstrong, showing him the signs on the horn and sometimes using it as a sub.

By the end of his teens, Armstrong was growing rapidly. In 1918, he married Daisy Parker, a prostitute, and began a stormy union marked by many arguments and acts of violence.

During this time, Armstrong adopted a three-year-old boy named Clarence. The boy's mother, Armstrong's cousin, died in childbirth. Armstrong cared for Clarence, who became mentally ill due to a head injury he suffered at an early age.

Louis Armstrong. Detailed biography

Jazz is one of the most famous musical styles. It is difficult to imagine what it would be like without one of the most significant people in the field of music of the 20th century, who directly influenced its formation and development in popular culture.

Louis Armstrong was born and raised in the oppressive atmosphere of the Louisiana ghetto. Louis's father abandoned the family when the child was still an infant, so he grew up with his mother, who worked as a laundress, whose main income was prostitution. The atmosphere of his childhood and youth is truly terrifying: racial oppression, surrounding poverty, banditry and drug addiction. In fact, he lived at the very bottom of society.

Louis began earning money at an early age. In order for the family to somehow make ends meet, he started delivering newspapers and supplying expired food to restaurants. At the age of seven, Armstrong began working in the home of the Jewish Karnovsky family. They appreciated the boy's hard work and character and quickly became attached to him. Thanks to their care, he learned the Yiddish language and wore a chain with a Star of David pendant as a sign of gratitude. They also paid for the purchase of Armstrong’s first personal musical instrument, a cornet.

Louis was interested in music from an early age. He could easily be found near the dance halls and taverns of Storville. At the age of eleven, the boy left school and joined a local street band, in which he was able to train his hearing.

When Louis was 13 years old, on New Year's Eve, he stole his stepfather's revolver and began shooting in the air on the street, for which he was detained by the police and sent to a reform school, where he mastered playing musical instruments such as the altohorn and cornet.

Having freed himself, Louis decided to connect his life with music and began performing in local bars and various establishments in the city. As a result, he was noticed by the famous musician King Oliver, who improved his sound and performance. Soon Armstrong was able to join Kid Ory's musical ensemble. He also took part in performances of the Tuxedo Brass Band, and in New Orleans he played in Fats Marable's Jazz-E-Sazz Band, who taught Louis how to read music.

In March 1918, Louis Armstrong married Daisy Parker. However, their life together did not last long. His second wife was pianist Lil Hardin, who insisted on developing the artist’s solo career. The couple moved to New York. Here Louis was able to fully develop his unique style.

In the mid-twenties, the musician went to Chicago, where he recorded his best albums with the Hot Five studio lineup. Around the same time, the musician chose the trumpet as his main instrument, abandoning the cornet, and finally settled in New York.

In the thirties, Louis made a series of tours to Europe and North Africa, which brought him widespread fame abroad. At the end of the thirties, the musician underwent a series of operations related to the treatment of injuries to the lip and vocal cords.

Fate Marable

Meanwhile, Armstrong's reputation as a musician continued to grow: in 1918, he replaced King Oliver in Kid Ory's band, then the most popular group in New Orleans. He was soon able to stop working with manual labor and began to concentrate on his cornet, playing at parties, dances, funeral marches and at local "honky-tonks" - the name of small bars that usually host musical performances. ,

Beginning in 1919, Armstrong spent his summers playing on riverboats with a group led by Fate Marable. It was on the riverboat that Armstrong honed his music-reading skills and eventually met other jazz legends for the first time, including Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden.

Debut on the jazz stage

After returning to the city, the first thing he did was learn to read music, touring on ships in the summer - the musicians willingly agreed to help the novice trumpeter. Since 1918, he actively played in various musical groups in New Orleans and Chicago.

The successful career of the great Satchmo began in the King Oliver Orchestra

In 1922, the talented boy was invited to the most popular Chicago jazz band as a second cornetist. Participation in King Oliver's orchestra was a powerful impetus to success for Louis Armstrong.

In 1932, Louis was invited to perform at the Palladium Theater in London. There he had a chance to meet the editor of the English magazine Melody Maker, Mathieson Brooks. Unknowingly, the journalist distorted Armstrong's New Orleans nickname Satchelmouth and called him Sachmo. The jazzman was not upset at all; on the contrary, he liked the new jazz nickname more than the previous one.

Read about Louis Armstrong's faithful dogs - Favorite Pets of Jazz Artists

Big Band Jazz

Although Armstrong intended to stay in New Orleans, in the summer of 1922 he received a call from King Oliver to come to Chicago and join his Creole jazz band in the second cornet.

Armstrong was accepted, and he soon took Chicago by storm with his wonderfully fiery playing and dazzling two-cornet breaks, which he shared with Oliver. He made his first recordings with Oliver on April 5, 1923; That day he earned his first recorded solo on "Chimes Blues."

Armstrong soon began dating the band's pianist, Lillian Hardin. After they married in 1924, Hardin made it clear that she felt Oliver was holding Armstrong back. She encouraged her husband to break off relations with his mentor and join the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, the leading African-American dance group in New York at the time.

Armstrong joined Henderson in the fall of 1924 and immediately made his presence known with a series of solos that introduced the concept of swing music to the group. Armstrong was a major influence on Henderson and his arranger Don Redman, both of whom began incorporating Armstrong's swing vocabulary into their arrangements, turning Henderson's group into what is generally considered the first jazz big group.

However, Armstrong's southern background did not mesh well with the more urban, northern mentality of Henderson's other musicians, who sometimes gave Armstrong a hard time with his wardrobe and the way he spoke. Henderson also forbade Armstrong from singing, fearing that his rough vocalization would be too crude for the sophisticated audience at the Roseland Ballroom.

Unfortunately, Armstrong left Henderson in 1925 and returned to Chicago, where he began playing with his wife Lila in a band at the Dreamland Café.

Career advancements

In 1922, Armstrong received his first surprise in his life, which would change his entire future life. Having lost his former cornetist, Oliver decides to invite the talented guy Louis in his place, who immediately agrees to play in the Creole ensemble. This moment becomes the turning point of a lifetime. Together with the Creole Jazz Band, he begins to travel around the country and gives several concerts in Chicago, where he gains his first fans.

After some time, Louis Armstrong decides to move to New York and pursue a career as a solo musician. Having learned everything he needed, he leaves his hometown and goes to work in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra. It was there that he adopted the entire craft from the jazz master and was finally formed as a musician, receiving his own, unique, bright and lively style of playing the cornet, for which Louis Armstrong was loved by millions of fans around the world.

Since 1925, the musician has been happily recording track after track: “Heebie Jeebies”, “Go Down Moses”, “What a Wonderful World”, “Hello Dolly”, “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” and others. Moreover, most of them are recorded not as solo compositions, but as duets, trios and even group performances. In particular, Louis Armstrong invites such celebrities as Johnny Dods, Carroll Dickerson and Boyd Atkins to the recordings, who gladly respond to his invitations to play together.

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five

While in New York, Armstrong recorded dozens of recordings as a sideman, creating inspiring jazz with other greats such as Sidney Bechet, and supporting numerous blues singers, namely Bessie Smith.

Returning to Chicago, OKeh Records decided to allow Armstrong to make his first recordings with a group under his own name: Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. From 1925 to 1928, Armstrong made more than 60 recordings with the Hot Five and then the Hot Seven.

Today they are generally considered the most important and influential recordings in the history of jazz; on these recordings, Armstrong's virtuosic brilliance helped transform jazz from ensemble music to the art of the soloist. His stop solos on numbers like "Cornet Chop Suey" and "Potato Head Blues" changed the history of jazz, offering bold rhythmic choices, swinging phrases and incredibly high notes.

He also began singing on these recordings, popularizing silent "scat singing" with its enormous popularity. popular vocal in 1926 "Heebie Jeebies".

The Hot Five and Hot Seven were strictly recording groups, and during this period Armstrong performed with the Erskine Tait Orchestra at the Théâtre Vendôme, often playing music for silent films. While performing with Tate in 1926, Armstrong finally switched from cornet to trumpet.

THE BEGINNING OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG'S CAREER

After his release at age sixteen, Armstrong continued to make a living through music. Almost all black jazz players went this way. At first, he played in brass bands in bars and on riverboats sailing along the Mississippi, in gyms, at dances and holidays.

In 1917, Armstrong himself led one of the jazz bands. His fortunes changed when he met his first mentor, Joe Oliver, a leading jazzman in New Orleans. In 1922, he invited Armstrong to be a second cornetist in his Chicago orchestra. This is where Louis first started playing the trumpet.

Oliver showed touching fatherly care for the young musician. Until the end of his days, Louis Armstrong considered this, as he put it, the “great master” of early jazz to be the person to whom he owed all his professional achievements more than anyone else. He was also greatly influenced by the pianist from Oliver's ensemble, Lil Hardin, who, unlike most jazz musicians of that time, received a classical musical education. Subsequently (in 1925), Lil became Armstrong’s wife and became part of his famous “Hot Five”.

In the 20s, Armstrong tried to organize his own group, but he did not succeed right away. Before they could get together, the groups disbanded, although some of them became famous, such as the “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven”. Armstrong attracted everyone with his soulful and pure trumpet playing, his improvisations and husky voice. Soon he finally switches to solo performances with a large jazz orchestra.

It is believed that it was Armstrong who developed a special style of performance - scat singing: a kind of jazz singing, when the melody was improvised, a meaningless set of words was added to it and it served as a kind of additional instrument.

Armstrong's deep-throated voice as a singer evoked mixed reactions: it was compared to iron filings, vegetable oil on sandpaper, or a rumbling car gearbox full of peanut butter.

But Armstrong’s main thing was different - a brightly emotional manner of performance, accompanied by a snow-white smile.

In 1925, Armstrong returned to Chicago, where he recorded a series of extremely popular records, “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” (“Hot Five” and “Hot Seven”) . Armstrong records the first record where he uses scat. This style of performance was soon adopted by many jazz musicians, so that a kind of fashionable craze emerged.

Now it is difficult to establish when Louis first began to sing. Perhaps as a child, in church.

“When I was ten years old,” Armstrong recalls, “my mother took me to church, where I sang in the choir.”

For a number of years he sang with his quartet on the streets of New Orleans. But there is no other information that Louis sang anywhere.

Drummer "Kaiser" Marshall says that Armstrong began singing with the orchestra quite by accident. On Thursdays, Roseland hosted a kind of amateur show, which was a fairly common form of entertainment in those days. Because of this, the orchestra ended its performance early, shortening it by an entire section. “One day we got Armstrong to come on stage,” says Marshall, “and sing “Everybody Loves My Baby, But My Baby don’t Love Nobody But Me.” He sang and played along with himself on the trumpet...

Louis Armstrong became a jazz legend

The public was delighted and from then on every Thursday they demanded that Louis sing.” Maybe it was like this, maybe it was different. Henderson recalls:

“About three weeks after Armstrong joined our orchestra, he asked permission to sing a solo number. At first I didn’t really understand how you could sing with a voice like Louis’s, but in the end I agreed. He was great. All the orchestra members fell in love with his singing, and the audience went crazy. I think this was his first public performance as a singer. In any case, I am sure that he never sang with Oliver’s orchestra.”

“...In 1925, a shy, unconfident young man suddenly realizes that people like his singing,” writes D. Collier. - Needless to say, from that moment on he seizes every opportunity to sing from the stage. This was a turning point in his musical career. Less than five years had passed before the public, and Armstrong himself, began to perceive him not as a wonderful jazz improviser, but as a singer playing along with himself on the trumpet.”

Earl Hines

Armstrong continued to grow in Chicago throughout the decade, as he began playing at other venues, including the Sunset Cafe and the Savoy Ballroom. A young pianist from Pittsburgh, Earl Hines, absorbed Armstrong's ideas into his piano playing.

Together, Armstrong and Hines formed a powerful team and made some of the greatest recordings in jazz history in 1928, including their virtuoso duet "Weather Bird" and "West End Blues."

The latter performance is one of Armstrong's most famous works, beginning with a stunning cadenza that features equal portions of opera and blues; with its release, West End Blues proved to the world that the fun musical genre, dance jazz, was also capable of creating high art.

Musical genius

Louis Armstrong did not stop performing and touring until his death. The biography (brief in our presentation, but very rich in reality) says that the great musician died at the age of 69 from acute heart failure, although Armstrong’s heart had failed him before that. He suffered 2 heart attacks, after which he recovered for quite some time. In addition, he was operated on several times (there were problems with the upper lip, as well as with ligaments).

Many music critics believe that the biography of the performer (Louis Armstrong deserves such words) is the story of the development and flourishing of a real genius of that era. His style of playing wind instruments was in many ways ahead of his time. He actually worked in a unique technique and improvised a lot and fruitfully.

There are also those who believe that the artist wasted his time, devoting time not only to music, but also acting in films, working on books with his own biography, and also participating in various shows, thus often exposing himself as a clown. Well, perhaps this is partly true, but we should not forget what time it was, how non-white performers were treated then.

Since 1935, Joe Glaser became Armstrong's manager. Not only did he work with Louis until his death, they were fast friends. Much of the jazz legend's work was in the hands of Glaser, and some believe that such influence had a negative impact on musical creativity. But it is impossible to know any other development of history.

Not wrong

In the summer of 1929, Armstrong traveled to New York, where he took part in the Broadway production of Connie's Hot Sweets, starring Fats Waller and Andy Razaf. Armstrong was featured at night on Ain 't Misbehavin', breaking up crowds of (mostly white) audience members into the night.

That same year, he recorded with small groups in New Orleans, including the Hot Five, and began recording with larger ensembles. Instead of doing pure jazz numbers, OKeh began allowing Armstrong to record popular songs of the time, including "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "Stardust" and "Body and Soul."

Armstrong's bold vocal transformations on these songs completely changed the concept of popular singing in American popular music, and had a lasting effect on all the singers who came after him, including Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.

Jazz pioneer

During the early Roaring Twenties, Chicago became the home of jazz. Louis Daniel Armstrong returned here in the fall of 1925, organized a group and began recording the greatest compositions in the history of jazz with the Hot Five musicians. He developed a unique style and played amazing solos. During these years, Armstrong worked with large groups in Chicago clubs and theaters. The vocals that accompanied the recordings after 1925 complemented his playing with a velvety hoarseness. The peak of performing skills came in the early thirties of the last century. A refined, unique performance style combined with a mature approach led to a rethinking of early compositions and their re-recordings. He achieved international fame and first traveled to Europe as a soloist in 1932. After the end of World War II, starting with a trip to France in 1948, he began touring regularly around the world. Traveled throughout Europe, Africa, Japan, Australia and South America.

Louis continued to perform in large orchestras until 1947, and then returned to a small team of first-class musicians called the All Stars. Louis starred in films and wrote books. One of the most famous musicians in the history of jazz music died in New York of a heart attack on July 6, 1971.

Satchmo

By 1932, Armstrong, who was now known as Satchmo, began acting in films and made his first tour of England. While he was beloved by musicians, he was too wild for most critics, who gave him some of the most racist and harsh reviews of his career.

Satchmo didn't let the criticism stop him, however, and he returned to an even bigger star when he began a longer tour of Europe in 1933. In a strange turn of events, it was during this tour that Armstrong began appearing in films and made his first tour of England. While he was beloved by musicians, he was too wild for most critics, who gave him some of the most racist and harsh reviews of his career.

Armstrong decided to take some time off after the incident and spent much of 1934 vacationing in Europe and relaxing.

When Armstrong returned to Chicago in 1935, he had no band, no obligations and no recording contract. His lips still hurt, and there were still remnants of his crowd problems and with Lil, who, after the couple split, was suing Armstrong.

He turned to Joe Glaser for help; Glaser had his own connections to the Mafia, as he was close to Al Capone, but he had loved Armstrong since he met him at the Sunset Cafe (Glazer owned and operated the club).

Armstrong put his career in Glaser's hands and asked his problems to go away. Glaser did just that; within a few months Armstrong had a new big band and was recording for Decca Records.

Rise in popularity

In 1925, Louis returned to Chicago. There he also continued his vigorous creative activity, and in 1926, for the first time, he became the bandleader of his own ensemble, Louis Armstrong And His Stompers. At the same time, he switches from the cornet to the trumpet - in his opinion, a brighter-sounding instrument, and then begins to sing professionally. Louis Armstrong's singing arouses great interest and popularity among the public.

In 1927, the biography of Louis Armstrong again intersects with New York. He finally moved to the musical capital of America and began to work more and more on the then popular dance music of the suites. And here he is just as quickly gaining popularity, bringing his individuality to this direction.

Since 1930, the musician has toured America extensively and also made a number of tours to Europe. The biography of Louis Armstrong is a series of successful unions and solo work. An incredible amount of high-quality musical material, a huge number of devoted listeners. Armstrong became a true national hero in a short period of time.

African Americans "First"

During this period, Armstrong established several African groups. American "firsts". In 1936, he became the first African-American jazz musician to write an autobiography: Swing That Music.

That same year, he became the first African-American to be cast in a major Hollywood film when he starred in Pennies from Heaven, starring Bing Crosby. Additionally, he became the first African-American entertainer to host a nationally sponsored radio show in 1937 when he hosted Rudy Valle's Yeast Show at the Fleischmann for 12 weeks.

Armstrong went on to appear in major films starring Mae West, Martha Raye and Dick Powell. It was also a frequent radio presence, and frequently broke box office records during the height of the so-called "Swing Era".

Armstrong's fully healed lip made itself known on some of the best recordings of his career, including "Swing That Music," "Jubilee" and "Struttin' with Some Barbecue."

Health problems and death

Biography of Louis Armstrong in rare photographs

In 1936, Louis Armstrong's autobiography, Swing That Music, was published, in which the most famous jazz trumpeter spoke about his difficult life, the hardships he endured and his first success on the jazz stage.

At the same time, he underwent surgery on his upper lip - the musician’s professional activities led to deformation and tissue rupture. In addition, in an attempt to remove the hoarseness from his voice, Louis Armstrong underwent surgery on his vocal cords.

Louis Armstrong and Barbra Streisand

Even after suffering a heart attack in 1959, Louis Armstrong did not stop his concert activities, but he still began to perform less often. During this period, he took part in the musical “Hello, Dolly!” (Hello, Dolly) with Barbra Streisand. Their composition of the same name reached number one in the American charts.

Find out about the most popular songs from jazz films

He gave his last concert on February 10, 1971, where he sang with Bing Crosby.

The greatest jazzman, trumpeter Louis Armstrong, died on June 6, 1971 from heart failure. On this day, a wave of universal condolences swept across the world: many print media, including the Moscow Izvestia, published news about the passing of the jazz trumpeter.

Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby

Louis Armstrong's house

When Wilson grew tired of living out of a suitcase during endless strings of one-night stands, she convinced Armstrong to buy a house at 34-56 107th Street in Corona, Queens, New York. The Armstrongs moved into the house where they would live for the rest of their lives in 1943.

By the mid-40s, the Swing era was gradually winding down, and the big band era was almost over. Seeing the "writing on the wall", Armstrong scaled down to a six-piece combo, the All Stars; the personnel changed frequently, but it would be the band Armstrong would perform live with for the rest of his career.

Members of the group, at one time or another, included Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, Sid Catlett, Barney Bigard, Trummy Young, Edmond Hall, Billy Kyle and Tyree Glenn, among other jazz legends.

Armstrong continued recording for Decca in the late 1940s and early '50s, creating a string of popular hits including "Blueberry Hill," "The Lucky Old Sun," "La Vie En Rose," and "A Kiss." “Build a Dream” and “I Get Ideas.”

Armstrong signed with Columbia Records in the mid-'50s and soon released several of the best albums of his career for producer George Avakian, including Louis Armstrong's Place WC Handy and Satch Plays Fats. It was for Columbia that Armstrong scored one of the biggest hits of his career: his jazz transformation of Kurt Weill's "Mack the Knife."

Louis Armstrong: a success story

Louis Armstrong himself has repeatedly claimed that he was born on July 4, 1900 (US Independence Day), but in the 1980s it turned out that the great jazz musician was actually born a little later - on August 4, 1901.

Why didn't Louis know the true date of his birth? Because he was born and grew up in an extremely poor and disadvantaged area of New Orleans, in which the birth of a child is a trifle, which means remembering or writing down the date is a disastrous matter and no one needs it.

Armstrong's father left his mother when the future jazz genius was not even one year old. The troubles did not end there: very soon the mother left her children, leaving baby Louis and his sister Beatrice in the care of their grandmother. However, when Louis turned 5, his mother returned to the family, but due to lack of money she began to earn money through prostitution.

Louis himself, in order to somehow help the family, left school at the age of 11 and began selling newspapers and delivering coal. It was his last job that brought him together with the people thanks to whom Louis selflessly fell in love with music... This was a family of Jewish immigrants (according to one information - from Lithuania, according to another - from Russia). Karnofsky family. These people liked the little boy Louis so much that they treated him like their own!

Meeting the Karnofsky family became one of the key events in the life of the great musician, because it was they who gave little Louis his first musical instrument - a brand new, shiny cornet!

Moreover, the Karnofskys, with whom Louis was often near, lived in Storeville, an area famous for its free morals, and so Armstrong quickly became acquainted with music: he, standing near entertainment venues, began to sing and play the drums. Louis did all this completely unprofessionally, but from the heart!

When Louis was 13, he stole a policeman's gun and fired one shot. For this offense, the boy was sent to a correctional colony, which also played a huge role in Armstrong’s life. The fact is that there was an orchestra in this colony, and Louis, who loudly declared his immense love for music, immediately got into it. It was in this orchestra that Armstrong mastered the basics of musical theory, and also learned to play a variety of wind instruments more professionally, including the very cornet donated by the Karnofsky family.

Ambassador Satch

In the mid-50s, Armstrong's popularity abroad skyrocketed. This prompted some to change his longtime nickname Satchmo to "Ambassador Satch".

He performed throughout the world in the 1950s and 60s, including throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Legendary CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow followed Armstrong with a film crew on some of his worldwide excursions, turning the resulting footage into the theatrical documentary Satchmo the Great, released in 1957.

Although his popularity reached new heights in the 1950s, and despite the fact that he broke down many barriers for his race and was a hero in the African-American community for many years, Armstrong began to lose his reputation in two segments of his audience: modern jazz fans and young African Americans.

Bebop, a new form of jazz, blossomed in the 1940s. Introducing young geniuses such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the younger generation of musicians considered themselves artists rather than performers.

They considered Armstrong's stage persona and music to be old-fashioned and critical. him in the press. Armstrong fought back, but to many young jazz fans he was considered an outdated performer with his best days behind him.

The civil rights movement became more intense every year, with more protests, marches and speeches by African Americans wanting equal rights. To many young jazz listeners at the time, Armstrong's always-smiling demeanor looked like it was from a bygone era, and the trumpeter's refusal to comment on politics for years only contributed to the perception that he was out of touch.

Personal life

For the first time, Louis Armstrong married a Creole prostitute, Daisy Parker, at a very young age. However, the couple is not destined to live a long and happy life, if only because of the constant ridicule, bullying and dissatisfaction of Louis’s colleagues with his choice of life partner. They constantly remind him that a talented and gifted musician, who will soon become famous throughout the world, cannot be near such a person. This forces Armstrong to divorce Daisy in 1923.

A year later he meets pianist Lil Hardin. Despite the fact that their personalities were almost complete opposites, the couple began dating and married a few months later. By the way, it is Lil who becomes the very woman at whose insistence Louis begins a solo career and achieves worldwide popularity.

Little Rock

These views changed in 1957, when Armstrong saw on television the crisis of integration of Central School in Little Rock. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent in the National Guard to prevent nine Little Rock African-American students from entering the public school.

When Armstrong saw this and the white protesters hurling insulting words at the students, he blew his mind in the press, telling a reporter that President Dwight Eisenhower "didn't have the guts" to let Fob run the country and declared, "The way they're treating my people in the south, the government can go to hell."

Armstrong's words became front page news around the world. Although he finally spoke out after years of silence, he received criticism from both black and white public figures.

None of the jazz musicians who had previously criticized him took his side, but today it is seen as one of the bravest, most decisive moments of Armstrong's life.

Sharon Preston

Armstrong's four marriages never produced children, and as he and his wife Lucille Wilson actively tried for years to no avail, he was considered by many to be infertile, unable to bear children.

However, controversy regarding Armstrong's paternity began in 1954 when a girlfriend he was seeing on the side, Lucille "Sweets" Preston, claimed that she was pregnant with his child. Preston gave birth to a daughter, Sharon Preston, in 1955.

Soon after, Armstrong bragged about his child to his manager Joe Glaser in a letter that would later be published in Louis Armstrong's book, In His Life. Own Words (1999). Subsequently, until his death in 1971, Armstrong never publicly said whether he was in fact Sharon's father.

In recent years, Armstrong & her alleged daughter, who now goes by the name Sharon Preston Folta, have published various letters between her and her father. Letters dating back to 1968 prove that Armstrong truly always believed that Sharon was his daughter, and that he even paid for her education and house, among other things, throughout his life. Perhaps most importantly, the letters also detail Armstrong's paternal love for Sharon.

While only DNA testing can officially prove whether a blood relationship exists between Armstrong and Sharon, and one has never been conducted between believers, believers and skeptics can at least agree on one thing: Sharon's uncanny resemblance to the jazz legend.

Louis Armstrong: interesting facts from life

The jazzman has been married four times. His first marriage, at the age of sixteen, was to a Louisiana prostitute and lasted five years. This was followed by short marital relationships with Lil Hardin (pianist) and Alpha Smith. The last marriage (with nightclub vocalist Lucille) was the longest and lasted until the musician’s death.
With his first wife, Armstrong adopted a mentally retarded boy, a distant relative of Louis. According to some reports, the jazzman had a daughter from a dancer, to whom the performer agreed to pay a monthly allowance.
Every day the American trumpeter took marijuana, considering it better than a glass of any first-class whiskey.
Over the course of his life, Armstrong wrote two autobiographical books: in the mid-1930s and in the mid-1950s.
The vocalist loved delicious food and playing baseball.
A few years before his death, Louis slightly changed the specifics of his performance, paying attention to recordings of not only jazz songs, but also gospel-style compositions (reworked traditional compositions to spiritual Christian music).
Armstrong's first cornet was a gift from the Karnofsky family.

Late career

Armstrong continued a grueling touring schedule into the late '50s, and it caught up with him in 1959 when he suffered a heart attack while traveling in Spoleto, Italy. The musician didn't let the incident stop him, however, and after a few weeks of rest he was back on the road, performing 300 nights a year in the 1960s.

Armstrong was still popular around the world in 1963, but had not made a record in two years. In December of that year, he was called into the studio to record the title number of a Broadway show that had not yet opened: Hello, Dolly!

The record was released in 1964 and quickly rose to the top of the charts, hitting the No. 1 slot in May 1964 and knocking the Beatles off the top spot at the height of Beatlemania.

This newfound popularity introduced Armstrong to a new, younger audience, and he continued to make successful recordings and concert performances for the remainder of the decade, even breaking the Iron Curtain by touring communist countries such as East Berlin and Czechoslovakia in 1965.

Louis Armstrong - Jazz Legend

Sachmo's popularity continues to grow.
Tireless, versatile creative activity lifts Louis to seemingly unattainable heights. Armstrong collaborates with such jazz masters as Sidney Bechet, Oscar Peterson, Cy Oliver, Duke Ellington. Not a single international jazz festival is complete without a great musician - Nice, Newport, Monterey. The trumpeter comes to Latin America, Asia, Africa. Collaborating with symphony orchestras, the musician gives philharmonic jazz concerts at the Metropolitan Opera and Town Hall. Louis Armstrong - Let My People Go Satchmo's vigorous creative activity again affects the health of the brilliant trumpeter - in the late fifties he suffered a severe heart attack. However, this does not stop Armstrong, and despite the fact that his health no longer gives him the opportunity to perform as much as he previously performed, Louis does not leave the stage. Since 1960, Louis has again taken up his career as a vocalist, recording covers of his own compositions and new songs, collaborating with Barbra Streisand, acting in films and writing soundtracks for theatrical and cinematic productions.

Sachmo's song "Hello, Dolly!" takes the top of the American charts, and “What a Wonderful World” - the last hit of the great musician - becomes the top of the UK chart.

"What a wonderful world"

In 1967, Armstrong recorded a new ballad, “What a Wonderful World.” Unlike most of his recordings of the era, the song contains no trumpet and places Armstrong's gravelly voice in the midst of strings and angelic voices.

Armstrong expressed his heart about the number, thinking about his home in Queens as he did, but "What a Wonderful World" received a slight boost in the United States. The tune did, however, become a No. 1 hit around the world, including in England and South Africa, and eventually became one of Armstrong's best-loved songs after it was used in the 1986 Robin Williams film Good Morning Vietnam "

Well-deserved laurels

In 1947, Louis Armstrong began a new project. The bandleader's biography promised success in his every endeavor. He organizes the All Stars team. At first, the name was completely true, and only the stars of that time played in the group, but over time the situation began to change, and new musicians replaced the old ones. For many, “All Stars” became the starting point of a successful career.

Together with his team, Armstrong traveled all over the world, the most remote places, even Africa and India, but never visited the USSR, despite the fact that the United States State Department repeatedly tried to sponsor this trip. But Armstrong’s merits were already enough to tacitly award him the title of “Jazz Ambassador.”

Last years

By 1968, Armstrong's grueling lifestyle had finally caught up with him. Heart and kidney problems forced him to stop performing in 1969. That same year, his longtime manager Joe Glaser died. Armstrong spent much of this year at home, but managed to continue practicing his trumpet daily.

By the summer of 1970, Armstrong was again allowed to perform in public and play the trumpet. After a successful appearance in Las Vegas, Armstrong began performing around the world, including in London and Washington, DC and New York, he performed for two weeks at New York's Waldorf Astoria. However, a heart attack two days after the Waldorf concert delayed him by two months.

Armstrong returned home in May 1971, and although he soon resumed playing and promised to perform publicly again, he died in his sleep on July 6, 1971, at his home in Queens, New York.

Death

Despite his doctor's warnings, Armstrong decided to perform in March 1971 at the concert hall of the fashionable Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. At the end of the show, the musician was hospitalized with a heart attack. In May, the artist left the hospital with the intention of resuming concerts, but on July 6, 1971, 69-year-old Louis died of heart failure.

Louis Armstrong's grave

The musician is buried in Flushing Cemetery in New York. The artist's funeral was attended by many famous personalities - Ella Fitzgerald (with whom he recorded the imperishable hit "Summertime"), Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Ed Sullivan, Alan King and others.

Legacy of Sacht

After his death, Armstrong's stature only continued to grow. In the 1980s and 90s, young African-American jazz musicians such as Wynton Marsalis, John Faddis and Nicholas Payton began to talk about Armstrong's importance, both as a musician and a person.

A series of new biographies on Armstrong have made his role as a civil rights pioneer and, subsequently, an advocate for drawing on his entire career, not just his revolutionary recordings of the 1920s, abundantly clear.

The Armstrong House in Corona, Queens was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977; today the house houses the Louis Armstrong House Museum, which welcomes thousands of visitors from around the world each year.

One of the most important figures in 20th-century music, Armstrong's innovations as a trumpeter and vocalist are widely celebrated today and will remain for decades to come.