Author : Thomas Brothers
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 39,16 MB
Release : 2007-03-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 039333001X
Drawing on first-person accounts, this book tells the rags-to-riches tale of Louis Armstrong's early life and the social and musical forces in New Orleans that shaped him, their unique relationship, and their impact on American culture. Illustrations.
Author : Louis Armstrong
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 39,85 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780195140460
Louis Armstrong has been the subject of countless biographies and music histories. Yet scant attention has been paid to the remarkable array of writings he left behind. Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words introduces readers to a little-known facet of this master trumpeter, bandleader, and entertainer. Based on extensive research through the Armstrong archives, this important volume includes some of his earliest letters, personal correspondence, autobiographical writings, magazine articles, and essays.
Author : Gary Giddins
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 21,66 MB
Release : 2009-03-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 0786731451
Gary Giddins has been called "the best jazz writer in America today" (Esquire). Louis Armstrong has been called the most influential jazz musician of the century. Together this auspicious pairing has resulted in Satchmo, one of the most vivid and fascinating portraits ever drawn of perhaps the greatest figure in the history of American music. Available now at a new price, this text-only edition is the authoritative introduction to Armstrong's life and art for the curious newcomer, and offers fresh insight even for the serious student of Pops.
Author : Ricky Riccardi
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 17,79 MB
Release : 2020-08-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 0190914130
Nearly 50 years after his death, Louis Armstrong remains one of the 20th century's most iconic figures. Popular fans still appreciate his later hits such as "Hello, Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World," while in the jazz community, he remains venerated for his groundbreaking innovations in the 1920s. The achievements of Armstrong's middle years, however, possess some of the trumpeter's most scintillating and career-defining stories. But the story of this crucial time has never been told in depth until now. Between 1929 and 1947, Armstrong transformed himself from a little-known trumpeter in Chicago to an internationally renowned pop star, setting in motion the innovations of the Swing Era and Bebop. He had a similar effect on the art of American pop singing, waxing some of his most identifiable hits such as "Jeepers Creepers" and "When You're Smiling." However as author Ricky Riccardi shows, this transformative era wasn't without its problems, from racist performance reviews and being held up at gunpoint by gangsters to struggling with an overworked embouchure and getting arrested for marijuana possession. Utilizing a prodigious amount of new research, Riccardi traces Armstrong's mid-career fall from grace and dramatic resurgence. Featuring never-before-published photographs and stories culled from Armstrong's personal archives, Heart Full of Rhythm tells the story of how the man called "Pops" became the first "King of Pop."
Author : Terry Teachout
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 20,32 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780151010899
Certain to be the definitive word on Louis Armstrong, "Pops" paints a gripping portrait of the man, his world, and his music. Drawing on a cache of new sources, the author has crafted a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure.
Author : Thomas David Brothers
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 38,98 MB
Release : 2014-02-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0393065820
The definitive account of Louis Armstrong—his life and legacy—during the most creative period of his career. Nearly 100 years after bursting onto Chicago’s music scene under the tutelage of Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. A trumpet virtuoso, seductive crooner, and consummate entertainer, Armstrong laid the foundation for the future of jazz with his stylistic innovations, but his story would be incomplete without examining how he struggled in a society seething with brutally racist ideologies, laws, and practices. Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields his own tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone as Armstrong shucks and jives across the page. Through Brothers's expert ears and eyes we meet an Armstrong whose quickness and sureness, so evident in his performances, served him well in his encounters with racism while his music soared across the airwaves into homes all over America. Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism blends cultural history, musical scholarship, and personal accounts from Armstrong's contemporaries to reveal his enduring contributions to jazz and popular music at a time when he and his bandmates couldn’t count on food or even a friendly face on their travels across the country. Thomas Brothers combines an intimate knowledge of Armstrong's life with the boldness to examine his place in such a racially charged landscape. In vivid prose and with vibrant photographs, Brothers illuminates the life and work of the man many consider to be the greatest American musician of the twentieth century.
Author : Louis Armstrong
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 46,52 MB
Release : 1986
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0306802767
"In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who'd stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lots of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn." So says Louis Armstrong, a tough kid who just happened to be a musical genius, about one of the places where he performed and grew up. This raucous, rich tale of his early days in New Orleans concludes with his departure to Chicago at twenty-one to play with his boyhood idol King Oliver, and tells the story of a life that began, mythically, on July 4, 1900, in the city that sowed the seeds of jazz.
Author : Vic Hobson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 14,91 MB
Release : 2018-10-09
Category : Music
ISBN : 1496819810
Throughout his life, Louis Armstrong tried to explain how singing with a barbershop quartet on the streets of New Orleans was foundational to his musicianship. Until now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said, “I figure singing and playing is the same,” or, “Singing was more into my blood than the trumpet.” Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony shows that Armstrong understood exactly the relationship between what he sang and what he played, and that he meant these comments to be taken literally: he was singing through his horn. To describe the relationship between what Armstrong sang and played, author Vic Hobson discusses elements of music theory with a style accessible even to readers with little or no musical background. Jazz is a music that is often performed by people with limited formal musical education. Armstrong did not analyze what he played in theoretical terms. Instead, he thought about it in terms of the voices in a barbershop quartet. Understanding how Armstrong, and other pioneer jazz musicians of his generation, learned to play jazz and how he used his background of singing in a quartet to develop the jazz solo has fundamental implications for the teaching of jazz history and performance today. This assertive book provides an approachable foundation for current musicians to unlock the magic and understand jazz the Louis Armstrong way.
Author : Charles B. Hersch
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 19,70 MB
Release : 2008-09-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 0226328694
Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune
Author : Louis Armstrong
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 37,63 MB
Release : 1993-08-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780306805448
The first autobiography of a jazz musician, Louis Armstrong's Swing That Music is a milestone in jazz literature. Armstrong wrote most of the biographical material, which is of a different nature and scope than that of his other, later autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (also published by Da Capo/Perseus Books Group). Satchmo covers in intimate detail Armstrong's life until his 1922 move to Chicago; but Swing That Music also covers his days on Chicago's South Side with ”King” Oliver, his courtship and marriage to Lil Hardin, his 1929 move to New York, the formation of his own band, his European tours, and his international success. One of the most earnest justifications ever written for the new style of music then called ”swing” but more broadly referred to as ”Jazz,” Swing That Music is a biography, a history, and an entertainment that really ”swings.”
