Think You Know Louis Armstrong?

Louis Armstrong is a jazz icon. He had a long career in which he mastered changing styles of music as a trumpet player, band leader, and vocalist. He appeared in movies opposite the biggest stars of Hollywood, and he also performed from his balcony in Queens for neighborhood kids. Imagine that!

Armstrong was born in New Orleans at the turn of the last century. His father worked in a factory and left the family when Louis was very young. His mother was very poor and turned to prostitution in order to feed her family. Louis often stayed with his maternal grandmother while his mother was working. On New Year's Eve in 1912, he made the mistake of firing a gun into the air. This blunder got him sent to the Coloured Waif's Home for Boys. This is where he learned to play the cornet and he performed in the band. He dreamed of a career in music. When he was released from the home in 1941 he played in clubs around New Orleans and on riverboats on the Mississippi.

Soon, Armstrong joined his friend and mentor, King Oliver, in Chicago. Armstrong and Oliver dazzled their listeners with their solos and the King Oliver Band began recording. He married the band's pianist, Lilian Hardin, in 1924. The Armstrongs soon left Chicago for New York City where Louis joined Fletcher Henderson's popular band, for a while.

The period between the early 1920s and 1930s in the Harlem section New York City was known as the Harlem Renaissance. Innovators in music, art, dance, and art flocked to Harlem where they encouraged each other and found support for their creations. Armstrong flourished during this period, and switched his main instrument from the mellower-sounding cornet to the brighter sound of the trumpet. Pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines came to town, and soon the two were collaborating. Here's "Weather Bird"...

After the Great Depression all but ended the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, Armstrong returned to Chicago. His lip was sore from constant trumpet playing, and his marriage had dissolved. He found a new manager, Joe Glaser, who helped turn his career around and got him a new recording contract. He divorced Lil Hardin and married a woman named Alpha Smith. This marriage only lasted a few years, but then Armstrong found Lucille Wilson, a Cotton Club dancer. She turned out to be the love of his life. They bought a modest home in the Corona section of Queens where they would spend the rest of their lives. I got to visit this home years ago, just before it became a museum, and I remember the solid gold bathroom fixtures, and lots and lots of wallpaper. Standing in Louis Armstrong's office was a special kind of thrilling, I will tell you! Check out the Louis Armstrong House Museum website here.

Meanwhile, in the 1940s, Armstrong began to lead his own swinging jazz band. Here are Louis Armstrong, trombonist George Washington, and Velma Middleton performing "Swingin' on Nothing"...

In the 1950s, he continued to record, always evolving his musical style. Notable from this time was his jazz version of "Mack the Knife"...

Armstrong toured during the 1950s and 1960s, both in the U.S. and overseas. He was so popular in other countries that he was known as "Ambassador Satch." He also appeared in many movies including this, my favorite, from 1964:

He toured and he toured, probably too much, and had a couple of heart attacks that slowed him down. He played his trumpet every day, and performed occasionally. (I've left a lot out, believe it or not!) Louis Armstrong died in his sleep at home on July 6, 1971. Lucille died in 1977, leaving the Armstrong home to the City of New York. It was designated a National Historic Landmark and opened to the public in 2003.

Who was this Louis Moreau Gottschalk?

Those readers who know me personally know that I have lately been teaching music courses at a lovely retirement village. If you know that, you also know that I have found the experience fulfilling and enjoyable beyond my expectations. The students/participants are bright and knowledgeable, well-read and well-traveled, and sharing my passion of music with them is simply a joy.

We are currently midway through a six-week course on American Music, beginning with Colonial America and ending in the 1920s with precursors of jazz and nascent American art music. In preparing each two-hour lecture, I have come across surprises and treasures I didn't know existed, and sometimes I even surprise those savvy participants with some aspect of American music with which they had not been familiar.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was a rock star in the mid-1860s.

Louis Moreau Gottchalk was a delightful surprise for all of us. I had heard of him, and I remember certain pianists in graduate school being so enamored with his music that they became Gottschalk specialists. I had never read about him, and not encountered his piano music because it was way past what I could expect to master for my own repertoire. This man was ahead of his time as they say, using the syncopated rhythms of Creole New Orleans in his piano compositions, and putting together a unique cosmopolitan sensibility from his travels in Europe and South America, as well as his native United States.

Gottschalk was born in New Orleans to a Haitian mother and German father. Music is a fundamental part of that city now, and was then, too. Gottschalk soaked it up and showed his aptitude for music early in his childhood. His parents signed him up for piano lessons at age five with the organist at St. Louis Cathedral, François Letellier, and by age seven he was substituting at Mass on the organ.

The organ pipes in St Louis Cathedral

As a survivor of eight years of childhood organ lessons, I can vouch for the difficulty of this instrument. Every finger and foot is required to act independently, while also adjusting switches and bars to tweak the organ's sounds. Both hands and the left foot are usually engaged in playing melodies and chords independent of each other. I wasn't able to come near mastering this in eight years, but little Louis Moreau could perform well enough after two years of lessons to play in church in front of people. I spent some time in New Orleans a couple of years ago, and St. Louis Cathedral was one of my favorite places there.

St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, New Orleans

When he was thirteen, his parents sent him to Paris to study music. He gave a recital at the Salle Pleyel (one of Chopin's hangouts) just before his 16th birthday which was a huge hit. He began composing for the piano and incorporating influences from the Creole music he knew from New Orleans. When you listen to Bamboula below, please remember that ragtime jazz as we know them did not exist yet. Some of the roots of jazz were around (the Creole influence, for instance), but they had not evolved into any kind of pure concert music. Parisians were fascinated by the sounds Gottschalk got out of the piano and his music became wildly popular. He gave recitals all over Europe, and North and South America, and soaking up musical influences at each location.

Scholars generally divide Gottschalk's music into six compositional periods, and these are based on where he was living at the time:

1844-1851: Paris (Bamboula is from this period)

1851-1852: Switzerland and Spain

1853-1856: United States (check out Le banjo from this period)

1857-1861: the Antilles (considered by some to be his most prolific period; listen to Souvenir de Porto Rico)

1862-1865: United States

1865-1869: South America

He was not strictly a piano composer. Gottschalk composed operas which are mostly lost to us today, and a collection of orchestral music. Towards the end of his life in South America, he enjoyed organizing huge concerts with hundreds of musicians. This exciting orchestral piece is Gottschalk's Grande Tarantelle.

Gottschalk suffered from malaria when he lived in Rio de Janeiro and eventually moved to Tijuca, a suburb, where he died on December 18, 1869 at 40 years old. My premiere source* tells me that it is believed he died not from the malaria, but from an overdose of the quinine used to treat it. His remains were moved from Brazil to Brooklyn, New York, where he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.

If you've never heard the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk before that this post will spark your curiosity. If you would like to read more, get your hands on Gottschalk's own memoir, Notes of a Pianist. I haven't read it YET, but it comes highly recommended!

*Irving Lowens and S. Frederick Starr. "Gottschalk, Louis Moreau." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/11530>.