Won't-cha come along wit' me
To the Mis-sis-sip-pi?
We'll take the boat-to the Ian' of dreams,
Steam down the river, down to New Orleans.
Joe Sent for Me. Armstrong's two years on river boats spread his fame up & down the Mississippi. When he came back to New Orleans, he was met at the landing by cheering crowds. Among them, a young white trombone-player from Texas named
Jack Teagarden waited at the gangway to say hello, asked to shake hands with Louis. Teagarden, soon to 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, a modest man, makes no bones about what he owes to Joe Oliver in the Chicago days: "We never had to look at each other when we played, both just thinkin' the same thing. And he's the one that stopped me playin' all those variations--what they call bebop today. 'You get yourself a lead [melody] and you stick to it,' Papa Joe told me. And I always do." It was the kind of jazz that didn't take written arrangements, if a man had "a lead" and could "cut loose from the heart."
"No Musician Today:" So far as the U.S. public was concerned in the '20s, there were a good many other ways of playing jazz. Paul Whiteman, with his 30-piece band and his smooth arrange ments of Tin Pan Alley hit tunes and minor classics (The Song of India), was "King of jazz," and his music and records were far better known than the small-band New Orleans variety. But after Louis arrived in Manhattan in 1924, and persuaded Fletcher Henderson to let him "open up" on his horn at Broadway's Roseland Ballroom one night, jazz musicians of all existing varieties flocked to listen.
Then came tours that took Louis to the West Coast and points between. He switched 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" of jazz, sat and listened worshipfully. All of them now make their bow to Louis. Says Drummer Krupa: "No band musician today on any instrument, jazz, sweet, or bebop, can get through 32 bars without musically admitting his debt to Armstrong. Louis did it all, and he did it first."
