Louis Armstrong – Satchmo Grooves torrent download

If album titles establish a web of autobiographical significances on a macrolevel, song titles and spoken comments on individual performances add a series of microlevel references. This is significant because it remains unclear how much input Armstrong had on the selection of album titles in the s. This constituted a more clearly self-controlled practice of connecting his name with his musical voice.

It opened up a connection between musical performance and autobiographical narration by establishing an implicit pact between the musician and his listeners in the very same way in which autobiographer and reader implicitly agree on a generic pact that guides the reader's expectations of the text's referential nature.

Therefore, the name and face on the covers of his musical recordings and the name on the covers of his two autobiographies visually connect the musical and textual contents presented in each of these media. Moreover, most magazine articles and interviews place photographs of the musician prominently alongside the text. These photographs are visual reminders of the autobiographical pact, connecting the autobiographical speaker and his music with images of this speaker and thus referencing the person who produces, or at least informs the production of, text, music, and image.

While performative experimentation is possible and necessary for a performer who is trying to appeal to diverse audiences and is therefore subject to various institutional and discursive pressures, these experimentations are always re integrated through the pact that assumes the identity of performer and the object of performance.

The frontispiece of Swing That Music is a good example in this regard. It reprints the photograph by Anton Bruehl that had accompanied an article on Armstrong in Vanity Fair about a year before the publication of the autobiography. Finally, the text proper places itself explicitly in the context of Armstrong's music.

No sound recordings exist of Armstrong's radio appearances in , but there is recorded evidence of his performances at the Fleischmann's Yeast Show from April to May , which took place only months after the publication of Swing That Music. The many autobiographical narratives he authorized throughout his life heighten this effect since nearly all of them emphasize his personal investment with the New Orleans places and events named in the songs.

This is something I'll never forget: the music they played at the funerals. While bound by the autobiographical pact to Armstrong's life story and thus to a specific historical moment, this recording is also a site of experimentation in the sense that it enables Armstrong and his colleagues to signal a self-reflexive understanding of their role as popular entertainers who provide their audiences with a sonic illustration of one of the most famous New Orleans socio-musical practices.

They do so by overly dramatizing the performance, thereby foregrounding the temporal, spatial, and social distance between the New Orleans folk ritual of the early twentieth century and their current status as highly paid professional musicians who revive this ritual for an audience personally unfamiliar with the culture in which it originated.

The sonic narrative constructed on this recording thus adds to, but also complicates, Armstrong's numerous written depictions of New Orleans jazz funerals by simultaneously reciting and multiply marking heterogeneous identities: folk musician versus professional musician versus popular entertainer.

Apart from writing and music, film was another powerful medium into which Armstrong extended his autobiographics. Significantly, in most of the twenty-plus movies in which he starred, he played himself, not a fictional character.

In Glory Alley dir. Vincente Minnelli, , he appears in a short comedy scene as the trumpeter to the devil. He played a concert after the premiere to promote his role in the film, recorded the soundtrack with Billie Holiday, posed with her on publicity shots, and was featured prominently on movie posters. More revealing in terms of Armstrong's autobiographics, however, is the fact that the film appeared in lieu of a multiepisode biopic that Orson Welles had planned to produce with Armstrong playing the central role.

Welles had begun to work on the project in One is the medium of the photo-collage, with which he became involved in the s and that he kept up as a hobby for the rest of his life. He made reference to this hobby in a letter to Marili Mardon. Well, you know my hobbie one of them anyway is using a lot of scotch tape…. My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and making a little story of my own. He creatively reassembled and pasted them into his many scrapbooks, onto the covers of his reel-to-reel tape-box collection, and onto the walls and even the ceiling of his den at his home in Corona, New York.

Norman Z. Melville Shavelson, , and Hello Dolly dir. Gene Kelly, ; a newspaper cartoon of himself and manager Glaser; and many photographs of himself and his fourth wife, Lucille. It is not too farfetched to find structural similarities among Armstrong's anecdotal approach to written and oral autobiography e.

Besides taping his favorite records including his own and his live performances, he taped hundreds of hours of private conversations at his home in Corona, backstage, and in hotel rooms he took his recording equipment on tour.

While not all of these recordings can be conceived as autobiographical in a conventional sense, they nonetheless illustrate a drive to conserve his life story in yet another medium. The immensity and diversity of Armstrong's autobiographical output raise a central question: how can we read, hear, and perceive these wide-ranging activities without either strictly segregating them into autobiographical writings and nonwritten communication or merely speculating that writing and expressions in other media are somehow connected?

This practice structures Armstrong's music singing and trumpet playing , his spoken narratives interviews, tape recordings, vocal insertions and jive patter on recordings , and his visual performances on stage, in films, on photographs, and in his photo-collages. These complex autobiographical phenomena—an endless string of narratives instead of a fixed body of texts, autobiographical performances across media instead of autobiography as a literary genre—are best approached through an intermedial model of music-image-text interfaces.

The first assumption is that Armstrong follows a transmedial impulse in the sense that he is communicating similar ideas and sentiments in and through different media. He performs his life story in every medium at his disposal, and while the shape, form, and details of this story will vary depending on the context of performance and on the medium through which each particular presentation emerges, it is nevertheless the same basic story conveyed over and over again and orchestrated as part his autobiographics.

This book accounts for these two related phenomena: it comes to terms with Armstrong as a transmedial artist, and it maps the intermedial effects of Armstrong's autobiographical performances.

As a transmedial and intermedial study of these performances, this book differs from the biographical, historical, and musicological focus of previous scholarship. It pursues four aims. Yet acknowledging and accounting for the historically and culturally specific moments in which Armstrong wrote and spoke about his life and music is especially significant in a field of cultural production in which musicians have rarely had full and open access to the means of self-representation.

On the one hand, it encourages readings of musicotextual relations between jazz and autobiography that are sensitive to the communicative exchange that takes place between expressions in these media while, at the same time, dismantling the overly narrow formalist and structuralist requirement that autobiographical discourse must mimic jazz music in order to qualify as a form of intermedial literature. On the other hand, this shift makes clear that one would be ill-advised to marginalize, or even ignore, the manifold expressive forms chosen by musicians and focus solely on their music, thereby underestimating the significance of their appearances in film, on television, and in photographs.

Indeed, the cross-fertilizations that result from the interdependencies among these media code jazz as an intrinsically intermedial phenomenon. Armstrong utilized the autobiographical mode as his most powerful and central form of expression in all media of communication.

In that regard, autobiography is neither an addendum to his music nor simply a collection of jazz anecdotes. Instead, it provides the structure through which all of his communication emerges, and it largely determines the popular and critical reception of his Satchmo persona. While it makes sense, from a literary standpoint, to think of Armstrong's autobiographies as a corpus of related writings, it makes even more sense, from an intermedial perspective, to emphasize the cross- references among expressions in various media and the cultural work they perform within the referential frame that is constituted by the musician's autobiographics.

The arrival of jazz and its growing popularity presented black musicians with a basic conundrum. In order to gain an audience eager to attend their shows and buy their records, they offered themselves and their music to listeners who had routinely used black music as a canvas for crossracial projections and interracial fantasies.

In this period of heightened cultural flux, new projections were added to more established racial fantasies. These new projections limited the creative possibilities of the musicians but simultaneously provided them with new cultural capital, which players like Armstrong used strategically in their struggle for social agency, commercial success, and creative freedom.

The idea is to examine the ways in which changing stage representations and racial discourses structured Armstrong's autobiographics, its reception, and its cultural repercussions and to do so by tracing an evolving intermedial cultural poetics of blackface minstrelsy that is not beholden to the popular entertainer versus master musician dichotomy or to the narrative of Armstrong's jazz as great American art by an unlikely black genius.

Based on the assumption that the aesthetics of jazz and autobiography require a specific understanding of intermedia relations, it makes a distinction between music-text interfaces that result from shared aesthetic, narrative, and performative principles and can be allocated on the level of autobiographical text and musical form chapters 1, 2, and 3 and a larger frame of reference that ultimately transcends the bounds of individual texts and musical pieces and includes a more expansive kind of cultural intermediality chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 identify instances of cultural intermediality in terms of a discourse of modern blackface minstrelsy within which Armstrong was frequently positioned and that he himself evoked. Chapter 4 launches an inquiry into the ways in which the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century extended their intermedial influence even after they had largely disappeared from American life.

Chapter 5 views Armstrong as a performer whose intermedial interventions in the jazz discourse amplified the double resonances of the postcolonial laughter with which he confronted his audiences and readers. It further assesses the intriguing confluences between the minstrel gaze and the patterns of the African American migration narrative in Armstrong's writings and music and reconstructs the discourses and debates that surrounded his highly controversial blackface performance as King of the Zulus in Chapter 6 examines Armstrong's cultural politics, the unconventional sense of political engagement that earned him political prominence as Ambassador Satch but also caused him to fall out of favor with many African American listeners, who denigrated him as an Uncle Tom and accused him of playing the clown for white audiences by the s.

Listening closely to Armstrong's nuanced commentary about his tours to Africa and paying close attention to his written, spoken, musical, and visual reflections on his role as a black entertainer during the civil rights movement, this chapter argues that the musician's complicated, and sometimes contradictory, engagement with the political changes that shaped his life is best understood in terms of a deeply rooted habitus that was determined by the vernacular culture of New Orleans, as well as by the legacy of blackface minstrelsy.

A Note on Citations Louis Armstrong's handwritten and typed manuscripts are filled with orthographic and typographic idiosyncrasies apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, underscores, unorthodox capitalization, unusual spelling, and so forth. These idiosyncrasies are represented without editorial interventions because they convey meaning and determine the visual appearance of the texts.

The frequent ellipses that shape Armstrong's writings are reproduced without brackets; whenever I cite only parts of a sentence or passage, I use ellipses in brackets to indicate the omission.

And indeed, Armstrong was very much aware of the discursive power wielded by music journalists and historians and sought to accommodate their interests in addition to furthering his own. They form their own opinions, they got so many words for things and make everything soooo big—and it turns out a—what you call it—a fictitious story. I read much of this crap and then I was told that I should write some truth, and explanations of many jazz subjects that were not clearly explained.

If jazz autobiographers intervene in the shifting discourses of jazz, offer alternate takes on jazz history, and revise drafts written by others, the question is how they realize these objectives. As participant observers whose understanding of the past is necessarily shaped by the pitfalls of memory as well as by complex personal significances and strategic concerns, they nevertheless speak with special authority as cultural insiders and musical creators.

This authority rests on specific linguistic and narratological means, which is why this chapter sets out to conduct a series of literary close readings of Armstrong's autobiographical recollections. The goal is to reconstruct the historical contexts in which Armstrong produced his depictions of early New Orleans jazz and to investigate the ways in which his language and narrative perspective determined his versions of the story.

As Joshua Berrett argues, certain harmonic properties of the song especially the major seventh chord that underlies the opening melody are atypical of Armstrong's musical vocabulary but very common in the classical compositions studied by his wife and comusician, Lil Hardin.

Read as an autobiographical statement made for a specific purpose and directed at a specific readership, Armstrong's words attain a historical significance of which purely musicological perspectives may remain unaware.

In the early s, jazz was becoming recognized as an art form and as a musical genre whose history was worth preserving, and Armstrong was setting out to become an all-American jazz icon. In , he had already started working on his second autobiography, to be published three years later as Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. Hardin may have been the actual composer, but perhaps Armstrong thought that he had made it his own by adding his personal style to it.

It is very possible that Hardin composed the chord progressions and melody of the tune but that the band collaborated on the actual arrangement of the piece. All in all, the anecdote says much about Armstrong's creative process connecting musical innovation with personal recollection and vice versa and about the power of autobiographical interventions in the historiography of jazz.

Musical recordings and personal testimony, as this example attests, must be read in conjunction with and not against each other, if we are to get a sense of the historical complexities and personal significances of jazz. In narratological terms, Armstrong's depictions capture music making and its social integration on the level of content story , as well as on the level of narrative transmission discourse : vernacular music is reflected by a vernacular approach to autobiographical telling, and instead of formal musical analysis, the reader encounters portraits of particularly memorable players, performances, and practices.

The self presented in Armstrong's life narratives comes into existence through musicking's powerful impact on the autobiographical subject, and the autobiographer makes sense of his self through his social role as a musician. And what are the narrative techniques through which these recollections are voiced? What is the cultural position of the black musician in New Orleans in the s and s?

What are the musical materials on which musicians draw and out of which they create new styles? And what, according to those who heard it, did the music sound like? In terms of setting, what are the places of musical performance, and how do these places influence the performance?

What are the institutions and rituals through which musical performances are regulated? What effects does the music have on its audiences? What are the personal and cultural meanings for the music's practitioners?

In terms of narrative transmission, when does Armstrong tell which specific stories? To whom does he address them? How does he verbalize his recollections of past events? And what kind of narrative voice and autobiographical speaker are constructed? In order to answer these questions, it makes sense to start with Swing That Music, Armstrong's first autobiography, because its narrative construction of events is most obviously shaped by the ghostwriter's hand, which controls the narrative discourse and is responsible for a notion of New Orleans music very much opposed to the musicking Armstrong remembered in later accounts.

Swing That Music takes an analytical approach to its subject. The account insinuates a sense of passivity that is striking. Swing That Music places New Orleans musicians at the beginning of jazz while erasing the specific cultural value of their musical innovations. Not knowing much classical music, and not many of them having proper education in reading music of any kind, they just went ahead and made up their own music.

Before long, and without really knowing it themselves, they had created a brand new music, they created swing. They made a music for themselves which truly expressed what they felt. It is certainly true that many working-class African American musicians of Armstrong's generation began their careers as so-called ear musicians who lacked knowledge of European music theory.

What this passage neglects, however, are two important facts. First, many musicians branched out as soon as they could and gathered as much musical knowledge as possible.

Armstrong, for instance, accepted employment on the Streckfus entertainment ships —21 , vessels that traveled up and down the Mississippi to supply entertainment and dance music for racially segregated and mostly white guests.

He did so in order to gain new insights into music, plus money and notoriety. It meant a great advancement in my musical career because his musicians had to read music perfectly. Music unhampered by the straitjacket of rules and conventions is reified as being more spontaneous, more emotional, and more authentic than allegedly civilized music. However, as Armstrong's later autobiographical depictions reiterate and as his recordings from the early s with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band illustrate the first of which was made in early Apr.

The stark discrepancy between Swing That Music's view of jazz as a music that came naturally to black New Orleanians and Armstrong's revision of this view makes one wonder whether this first narrative of Armstrong's life should even be considered as part of his autobiographics. It should be, and for good reasons. Only if we recognize Swing That Music as the template for Armstrong's later narratives can we read these narratives as evidence of Armstrong's active and conscious engagement with previous representations of his life story.

What is more, the topos of jazz as natural music never fully disappeared from his autobiographics. It continued to shape the popular understanding of jazz long after Swing That Music had faded from public consciousness, as a interview with U.

But it was the sound at all times. Natural music, shore [sic]. It's the same thing. You can't write it—you just feel it. But the musician's account is actually very specific about the fact that the music is not instinctive at all. That Armstrong affirms the narrative of natural music in his Jazz Casual interview with Ralph Gleason in signals that the piece in U.

The ideological underpinnings of Swing That Music thus provide the historical and discursive contexts for later interviews. In , they forced the narrator to perform a number of rhetorical somersaults. The discrepancy between the self-consciously authoritative and knowledgeable voice—allegedly Armstrong's—and his fellow untutored New Orleans musicians is the result of a convoluted logic that seeks to celebrate the musical sophistication of swing music and its popular appeal to white listeners in the s with Armstrong as a black poster child.

Owing to the band's prominent status among early jazz historians, Swing That Music contains lengthy passages that celebrate the ODJB as jazz pioneers. These passages take away from Armstrong's role in the creation of jazz and reveal the degree to which the prerecorded history of jazz could be reshaped to legitimize a later style of music, in this case, American swing.

The latter part of each binary is idealized. Instead, they celebrate the communal atmosphere and excitement of New Orleans and offer extensive commentary about the alternative musical education that existed beyond the hallowed halls of white conservatories and music schools.

And he would enjoy them so well—he would applaud for me, so earnestly until I would feel just like I had just finished a cornet solo in the French Opera House—a place where Negroes were not allowed. As far as to buy a little Trim [sex]—that was absolutely out of the Question.

Most of the help was Negroes. They were paid good Salaries and had a long time Job. The pay was swell, no matter what your vocation was. Musicians—Singers and all kinds of Entertainers were always welcomed and enjoyed. Just stay in your place where you belonged. No Mixing at the Guest Tables at no time. Everybody understood Everything and there weren't ever any mix ups, etc.

Most of them were also good Sight Readers. They had Small Bands. Places we Dark Skinned Cats wouldn't Dare to peep in. So ratty music is bluesy, folksy music that moves you and exhilarates you, makes you dance.

Creoles tended to be thoroughly trained and educated in European classical music, whereas New Orleans blacks derived much of their musical knowledge from the idioms of the blues and plantation music.

The Creoles favored skills such as precise intonation and the ability to read and notate music. Everything made music back then: banana men, rag-pickers, them pretty painted streetwalkers all singing out their wares. Aside from amateur musicians like Larenzo and Santiago, Armstrong heard many professional players on the streets of his hometown.

He grew up in and around Jane Alley, which was located in the center of the black redlight district and was surrounded by honky-tonks and cabarets. And right in the middle of that on Perdido Street was the Funky Butt hall—old, beat up, big cracks in the wall. Before the dance the band would play out front about a half hour.

And us little kids would all do little dances. Then we'd go look through the big cracks in the wall of the Funky Butt. It wasn't no classyfied place, just a big old room with a bandstand. And to a tune like The Bucket's Got a Hole in It, some of them chicks would get way down, shake everything, slapping themselves on the cheek of their behind.

At the end of the night, they'd do the quadrille, beautiful to see where everybody lined up, crossed over—if no fights hadn't started before that. Cats'd have to take their razors in with them, because they might have to scratch somebody before they left there. If any of them cats want to show respect for their chick—which they seldom did—they'd crook their left elbow out when they danced and lay their hat on it—a John B.

Stetson they'd probably saved for six months to buy. The setting, mood, and word choice perfectly illustrate his command of oral storytelling, and they re-create a vivid image of the activities at the Funky Butt. The peeping of the children and the illicit sexuality of the dancing add to the overall erotic appeal of the tale, as does the sexual innuendo, which unfolds through a series of intricate puns. Moreover, rather than analyzing the music that provides the sonic background for this anecdote, Armstrong describes the physical and social setting, as well as the human interactions taking place during the musical performance.

The music animates the dancers and enables nonverbal interaction between the sexes. The conflation of musical and bodily gestures was part of the African cultural legacy that Armstrong was internalizing. The documentary impulse that drives such vernacular recollections of the music's social functions and cultural contexts is consistent in his work. In order to illuminate these functions and contexts, Armstrong often mentioned the social clubs and organizations that were hugely influential in the lives of black New Orleanians.

Clubs like the Broadway Swells, the Bulls, and the Turtles would put on a parade every year, and as was typical of a musically inclined black New Orleanian, Armstrong became a member of one of these organizations, the Tammany Social Club. These processions were a source of relief and tied the community together, but they also offered work for brass bands and gave aspiring youngsters a chance to learn from musical elders. Any Nigger. They wouldn't give up until they would find one.

From then on, Lord have mercy on the poor Darkie. Covers - Performances of a song with the same name by different artists. The recording on the other side of this disc: Satchel Mouth Swing. Uploaded by jakej on June 16, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Lazy River — Trouble In Mind — Tiger Rag — Moments To Remember — Once In A While — Just A Gigolo — Cotton Tail — The Peanut Vendor — Sincerely — You Rascal You — Someday — Jerry — Now You Has Jazz — New Orleans Function — Simply… Satchmo!

Where the Blues were born in New Orleans — Pennies from Heaven: The skeleton in the cupboard — Hurdy Gurdy Man — Fifty-Fifty-Blues — Blues for yesterday — Nobody knows the trouble I have seen — Jonah and the whale — Go down, Moses — Down by the riverside — Sometimes I feel like a motherless child — Rock my soul — This train — He's so relaxed, so inventive and very fleet-fingered, getting around his horn in total command.

It's a shame that this song left the group's repertoire when Hines left the band. That version is fine but not quite a classic as Armstrong's band at the time sounds pretty woeful and Louis sticks to playing a series of stunning glisses, but not much else.

The Pasadena version cuts it to ribbons, in my opinion. First off, there's the trumpet playing that just knocks me to my knees. At these slow tempos, Louis tended to play more notes and though I'm not the kind of person who feels that "more notes equals good jazz," there's something to marvel at in Louis's dexterity here. He's just on fire and the ideas simply rush out of his horn, much like the similar "That's For Me" recorded for Decca in April But then there's that vocal, which might be in my top 5 or 10 favorite Louis vocals of all time.

One day I'll do a complete post on "You Can Depend on Me" Trummy Young had a swinging instrumental feature on it later in the 50s so I won't say more except just listen: The third song in this stunning sequence is a breakneck version of "That's a Plenty" that is as exciting as it gets. For those who have never heard it before, buckle your seatbelts. However, I've heard many versions from this edition of the band and can tell you that this is a pretty set performance: most of the solos and especially the ensembles had been worked out after playing the tune almost nightly for years.

This is the kind of thing that critics who followed the All Stars around started complaining about but I don't care. It's just a perfect performance and if you had never heard it before, you'd be knocked out. Dig it: At this point, it was time for Louis to take another breather. Teagarden stepped up to play a beautiful "Body and Soul," which was usually a feature for Bigard and one of his better ones. I don't know why it changed this evening but I'm not complaining and Teagarden played the hell out of it.

Then Velma came back on for "Big Daddy Blues," singing, dancing and yes, even doing her famous split. I did an early post on the history of Velma's blues features but that was in the days before I knew how to include audio. One day I'll do it again from scratch, with audio. Velma stayed for one more duet and it became one of her best-loved features with Louis: "Baby, It's Cold Outside.

To make up for it, here's the classic Pasadena version. I've always thought the audience was a little subdued but don't mind them Enjoy it and damn, it is cold out there these days, isn't it? Gene Norman's "Just Jazz" and "Dixieland Jubilee" bashes usually made it a point for one act to perform a number with the band that was to follow. I can't imagine anyone following Louis but in this case, the always fun Firehouse Five Plus One joined in for a too-short version of "Muskrat Ramble.

Still, a fun ending to a wonderful evening of music. This post has gone on long enough and if you're still with me, you're a trouper I guess this is a good time to say good-bye to any new readers!

One of the big complaints about the All Stars is that they played the same songs every night. This simply wasn't true. I'm not going to argue that didn't play some of the same songs nightly--Louis had his hits and he knew audiences wanted to hear them--but you can't find two All Stars shows with exact same set orders.