State University of Moldova

Faculty of International Relations, Political and Administrative

Sciences

Report
“Louis
Armstrong”

Created by: Manoil Viorica

Checked by: Cervatiuc Ludmila

 Chisinau 2010

Contents:

•Personal
information
• Early Life
• Life’s Work
• Personality
• Awards
• Works
• Later Years
Personal Information
Full name: Daniel Louis Armstrong;
Nickname: "Satchmo";
Born: July 4, 1900, in New Orleans, Louisiana;
Died: July 6, 1971, on Long Island, New York;
Genres: Jazz;
Styles: Vocal Jazz, Traditional Pop, New Orleans Jazz, Classic Jazz,
Swing;
Instruments: Vocals, Leader, Trumpet;
Married: Daisy Parker (divorced, 1917);
Married: Lil Hardin (a jazz pianist), February 5, 1924 (divorced,
1932); Married: Lucille Wilson (a singer), 1942.

Louis Armstrong was a famous jazz trumpet player and singer.

He is regarded as one of the most important and influential
musicians in the history of jazz music.

Early Life
Louis Daniel Armstrong was born in New Orleans on August
4, 1901. He was one of two children born to Willie Armstrong, a
turpentine worker, and Mary Ann Armstrong, whose grandparents
had been slaves. As a youngster, he sang on the streets with
friends. His parents separated when he was five. He lived with his
sister, mother, and grandmother in a rundown area of New
Orleans known as "the Battlefield" because of the gambling,
drunkenness, fighting, and shooting that frequently occurred
there.

When Armstrong was 13 years old, he fired a pistol into the air to
celebrate New Year's Eve and was punished by authorities by
being sent to the Negro Waif's Home. This incident proved
somewhat providential: the home had a bandmaster who took an
interest in the youth and taught him to play the bugle. By the
time of his release from the facility, Armstrong had graduated to
the cornet and knew how to read music. Working odd jobs, he
scrounged up the money to continue lessons with one of his
musical idols, Joe "King" Oliver. From 1917 to 1922, Armstrong
played cornet for local New Orleans Dixieland jazz bands. He also
tried his hand at writing songs, but was only partially rewarded--
he saw his composition "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister
Kate" published, but the company reportedly cheated him out of
both payment and byline. Then Oliver, who led a successful band
in Chicago, sent for Armstrong. As second cornetist for Oliver, the
young jazzman made his first recordings.

Life's Work
When Armstrong returned to Chicago in the fall of 1925, he
organized a band and began to record one of the greatest series
in the history of jazz. These Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings
show his skill and experimentation with the trumpet. In 1928 he
started recording with drummer Zutty Singleton and pianist Earl
Hines, the latter a musician whose skill matched Armstrong's.
Many of the resulting records are masterpieces of detailed
construction and adventurous rhythms. During these years
Armstrong was working with big bands in Chicago clubs and
theaters. His vocals, featured on most records after 1925, are an
extension of his trumpet playing in their rhythmic liveliness and
are delivered in a unique throaty style. He was also the inventor
of scat singing (the random use of nonsense syllables), which
originated after he dropped his sheet music while recording a
song and could not remember the lyrics.

By 1929 Armstrong was in New York City leading a nightclub

band. Appearing in the theatrical revue Hot Chocolates, he sang
"Fats" Waller's (1904–1943) "Ain't Misbehavin'," Armstrong's first
popular song hit. From this period Armstrong performed mainly
popular song material, which presented a new challenge. Some
notable performances resulted. His trumpet playing reached a
peak around 1933. His style then became simpler, replacing the
experimentation of his earlier years with a more mature approach
that used every note to its greatest advantage. He rerecorded
some of his earlier songs with great results. In 1924, Armstrong
enjoyed a brief stint with bandleader and arranger Fletcher
Henderson in New York City. By the time jazz pianist Lil Hardin,
who would become the second of his three wives, persuaded
Armstrong to work independently around 1925, he had switched
from the cornet to the trumpet. During the next few years he
made recordings fronting his own musicians; depending on the
number assembled, they were known as the Hot Five or the Hot
Seven. Around the same time, Armstrong is credited with the
invention of the jazz technique of scat singing--legend has it that
Armstrong dropped his sheet music during a recording session
and had to substitute vocal improvisations until someone picked
up the sheets for him. Also during this period, his
experimentations led him to break free of the more rigid Dixieland
style of jazz to pave the way for a more modern jazz genre.

But in 1930, Armstrong began taking yet a different direction with

his career, performing with larger bands and recording more pop-
sounding songs. Jazz purists fault him for this move, but others
point out that he helped inspire the later swing sound.
Nevertheless, Armstrong was still identified with jazz by the
public, and on his extensive European tours was considered an
"ambassador" of the genre. When he gave a concert in Ghana, he
was considered a hero by its natives; he also performed a few
times before the British royal family. It was in England that he
won the nickname "Satchmo," a distortion of "satchelmouth,"
which described the extent to which his cheeks puffed out when
he played the trumpet.

Armstrong also helped spread jazz's popularity throughout the

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s by appearing in musical roles in
several films, from Pennies from Heaven in 1936 to Hello, Dolly in
1969. He was probably included in the latter because his
recording of the title song in 1964 sold over two million copies
and momentarily displaced the then-phenomenal Beatles from
the pop charts. Armstrong also made successful recordings of
popular songs such as "Mack the Knife" and "Blueberry Hill" and,
as late as 1968, scored a chart hit with the single "What a
Wonderful World."
Personality
Louis Armstrong is frequently regarded by critics as the
greatest jazz performer ever. With both his trumpet and his rich,
gravelly voice, he made famous such jazz and pop classics as
"West End Blues," "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," "Hello,
Dolly," and "What a Wonderful World." Armstrong's influence on
the jazz artists who followed him was immense and far-reaching;
for instance, according to George T. Simon in his book “The Best
of the Music Makers”, fellow trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie
affirmed that "if it weren't for Armstrong there would be no Dizzy
Gillespie." Reviewer Whitney Balliett declared in the New Yorker
that Armstrong "created the sort of super, almost celestial art
that few men master; transcending both its means and its
materials, it attained a disembodied beauty." Apparently, fans all
over the world agreed with this assessment, for during his lifetime
Armstrong made extremely successful tours to several countries,
including some in Africa and behind the Iron Curtain.
Armstrong was a major financial supporter of Martin Luther King
Jr. and other civil rights activists. Armstrong mostly preferred to
work quietly behind the scenes, not mixing his politics with his
work as an entertainer. The few exceptions made it more
effective when he did speak out. He was an extremely generous
man, who was said to have given away as much money as he
kept for himself. Armstrong was also greatly concerned with his
health and bodily functions. He made frequent use of laxatives as
a means of controlling his weight, a practice he advocated both to
personal acquaintances and in the diet plans he published under
the title Lose Weight the Satchmo Way.
Armstrong was an avid audiophile. He had a large collection of
recordings, including reel-to-reel tapes which he took on the road
with him in a trunk during his later career. He enjoyed listening to
his own recordings, and comparing his performances musically. In
the den of his home, he had the latest audio equipment and
would sometimes rehearse and record along with his older
recordings or the radio.

Awards
 "West End Blues" was one of the first five records elected to
the Recording Academy's Hall of Fame; won several periodical
jazz polls, including those conducted by Esquire and Down Beat;
honored by the American Guild of Variety Artists.

Works
Selective Discography
* Hello, Dolly, MCA.
* At the Crescendo, MCA.
* Best of Louis Armstrong, Audiofidelity.
* Definitive Album, Audiofidelity.
* Louis Armstrong with the Dukes of Dixieland, Audiofidelity.
* Disney Songs the Satchmo Way, Buena.
* I Will Wait for You, Brunswick.
* Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, Archive of Folk & Jazz.
* Mame, Pickwick.
* Satchmo: A Musical Autobiography (four-album set), Decca,
1957. * The Best of Louis Armstrong, MCA, 1965.
* What a Wonderful World, ABC, 1968, reissued, 1988.
* Louis Armstrong with His Friends, Amsterdam.
* July 4, 1900/July 6, 1971, RCA.
* The Genius of Louis Armstrong, Columbia.
* Louis Armstrong in the Thirties, RCA.
* Louis Armstrong in the Forties, RCA.
* Louis Armstrong, Bella Musica, 1990.

Later Years
 Armstrong continued to front big bands, often of lesser
quality, until 1947, when the big-band era ended. He returned to
leading a small group that, though it included first-class musicians
at first, became a mere background for his talents over the years.
During the 1930s Armstrong had achieved international fame,
first touring Europe as a soloist and singer in 1932. After World
War II (1939–45) and his 1948 trip to France, he became a
constant world traveller. He journeyed through Europe, Africa,
Japan, Australia, and South America. He also appeared in
numerous films, the best of which was a documentary titled
Satchmo the Great (1957).

In 1959, Armstrong was briefly hospitalized due to a heart attack.

By now, his health was starting to deteriorate, and his continual
problems with his weakened lips forced him to concentrate more
on singing than blowing his horn. But despite these setbacks, his
love of entertaining kept Armstrong on the road, in the studio,
and behind the camera.

For the next few years, Armstrong toured Eastern Europe,

Canada, and Las Vegas, performed annually at the Newport Jazz
Festival, and gave a concert for President John F. Kennedy. During
this period, he recorded with Duke Ellington, and his 1964 hit
"Hello Dolly" reached the top of the charts in the United States
and England, effectively replacing the Beatles in the number one
spot. In the United Kingdom, his recording of "What a Wonderful
World" also rose to the top of the charts.

In 1969, Armstrong was hospitalized for three months due to

heart problems. Armstrong died just after a heart attack on July 6,
1971, a month before his 70th birthday, and 11 months after
playing a famous show at the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room. He
was residing in Corona, Queens, New York City, at the time of his
death. He was interred in Flushing Cemetery, Flushing, in Queens,
New York City.

Armstrong's fame and popularity, however, have continued long

after his death. In 1975, a program dedicated to the jazz great's
music by the New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra toured the Soviet
Union as part of official cultural exchange between that country
and the United States. A bust of Armstrong has been placed on
the site of the Nice Jazz Festival in France. And one of his hit
records even became a hit again during the late 1980s--"What a
Wonderful World" was included on the soundtrack of the Robin
Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam, received a great deal of
airplay, and introduced Armstrong's music to a new generation of
fans.