George and Satch

I read the article about Avakian and his efforts to recover and reissue those old recordings of Armstrong's. Really interesting info.

Got me all hepped up for listening to some of those efforts by Louis, so went to the Red Hot Jazz site, http://www.redhotjazz.com/index.htm , and played about a dozen of those old Okehs... about half 5s and half 7s. I may go back again. :)

In 1945 two Highland Park High School friends and I drove to Chicago to a small bar..the Rag Doll... to hear Louis Armstrong play. We asked if we could have a picture taken with Mr. Armstrong. He agreed and I still have that picture today. He was great to us.

Louis's b'day discrepancy was posited in the late 1980s by the now deceased New Orleans jazz historian Tad Jones, and published in Giddins' "Satchmo." The evidence (a baptismal record) is not 100% proof of Louis having been born in 1901, but it's compelling.

George Avakian has indeed been a tireless champion of Armstrong and older forms of jazz in general. In 2003, he agreed to do a "peer review" on my book on Hot Lips Page. I hardly consider myself a peer of Avakian(!), but I was thrilled that he was interested. The book [Luck's In My Corner: The Life and Music of Hot Lips Page (Routledge Press, 2008)] is doing well, no doubt in part thanks to George's willingness to get behind a first time author.

I heard the following Louis Armstrong anecdote while working as an assistant archivist and docent at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, in 2007:

"Louis had many powerful and celebrated friends, and sometime in the early 1960s he threw a party that included Bobby and Ethel Kennedy among the revelers. When the distinguished guests disembarked from their limo and mounted the steps to the modest two-family house at 34-56 107th street, the front door opened and they were greeted with--a veritable nimbus of marijuana smoke. Given Bobby's role as "drug czar" during his brother's adminsiatration, this must have presented a conflict of interest for him--although who could turn down an invite from 'Pops'?"

"Armstrong's final chorus is one of the wonders not just of jazz improvisation, but of all twentieth century music. "

Yeah - write on, man!