 The year was 1958. I remember the gig like it was yesterday. The old Greyhound bus, with the tattered banner - Louis Armstrong and his All Stars – blowing in the wind, on the side of the vehicle, pulled up outside the town’s municipal auditorium for another dixieland jazz clambake. “Time to go blow, man,” Armstrong mustered in that raspy-sounding voice of his, “time to go blow the blues.”
One by one, the elite musicians in Louis Armstrong’s All Stars got off the tour bus and shuffled off to the auditorium in the drizzling rain. First Velma Middleton, the band’s singer, then clarinetist Edmund Hall, then drummer Barrett Deems, then bass player Squire Gersh, then trombone player Trummy Young, then keyboard artist
Billy Kyle and finally, the U.S. Ambassador of Jazz, himself, Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong stepped off the bus and into the cold darkness of the night.
I was the last one off the bus. I wanted to make sure I had my tape recorder, my camera and that extra change of underwear I had stashed in a small gym bag along with a copy of Playboy magazine, a small flashlight, a bar of Lifebouy soap, a bottle of Aspirin and a small battery-operated radio. It was my first tour date with a celebrity. Not only that, it was my first professional interview. I was as nervous as a cat.
 I’m still trying to remember how I managed to get the invitation of a lifetime to take a few days leave from my Air Force duties and go on tour with the famed jazz musician. Actually, I think it was Satchmo, himself, who did the honors.“My manager sez you wanna do an interview,” he told me. “Why don’t you come along with us, man and ride the bus on our tour?” Then he winked at me and continued, “You ain’t one of them racist cats are you man?” he asked. “We’s black, but we’s cool. Can you dig it man?” I thanked him for asking me to come along, stuck out my hand and gave him a hipTexas soul shake.
Satchmo just laughed and flashed a big grin. This was back in the days when black people and white people seldom spoke to one another in public, unless maybe it was to utter four letter words and tell one another to leave their daughter or misses alone or run the risk of being strung up by their neck at the hanging tree.
This was a terrible, troubled time when black people and white people didn’t drink from the same water fountains; didn’t sit together at tables in coffee shops; didn’t occupy the same hotels; didn’t sit in the same church pews, much less sit side by side on the same bus.
 I looked over at Satchmo, not knowing exactly what to say. His smile seemed to say it for me. “Hey, man,” he said, “there ain’t no need to worry none about what all them white cats might say. We gonna have us a ball, talkin’ about jazz. And when you is talking about jazz, man, there ain’t no need to fuss and fret. It’s like the Good Lord done give you a horn and sez ‘Here, brother, blow on this for a while and you’ll be fine and dandy.’ Know what I mean, man?
“The Good Lord had ol’ Gabriel blow on his trumpet way up yonder,” Satch observed, motioning with his arm uplifted toward the sky. “I can’t blow like that cat, man, but I does the best I can. Some cats think ol’ Satch is a clown, but I don’t never mind. I just blow on the horn. And whatever comes out comes out. Mostly it’s just Bourbon Street blues, man. White folks, they call it jazz.
“Jazz is the universal language,” he noted. “It don’t know nothin’ about how rich a man is or how poor he is, or how many wives he’s got or how many chillin’ he has to feed, or how many times he gets down on his knees and prays. Or whether he’s white, brown, black, yellow or green. Jazz is just music, man, that’s all. Ain’t got nothin’ to do with politics and power, unless maybe it’s soul power. Can you dig it, man?”
 Before I could answer him, Satchmo reached into the storage area under the bus, where the suitcases are stashed, and pulled out a battered ol’ trumpet case. He held it there in his arms for a minute or so, like a mother grasping a new-born baby, then he handed the horn case to me and said, “Here, man, you wanna carry the horn?” Together we walked in the rain to the gig. I carried the horn and Satch carried the grin.
After the gig was over and we were on the Greyhound tour bus and on the road again,Louis told me he was thinking about the possibility of going to Russia to “preach the gospel of American jazz.” The hot trumpet player looked at me with a gleam in his eye. “Yes suh, I do believe, man, I could warm up them cats,” he said. “They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with a little bit of the happy music.”
It sounded rather far fetched at the time, but Satchmo said that playing dixieland music for the Russians was more than a pipe dream – the Russians had actually expressed an interest in it. I could tell he thought maybe I didn’t believe him. “We got the idea on the fire,” he noted with a devious chuckle, “and before we finish up here on the continent, we may have this Russian sleigh ride all fixed up. Yes suh.”
Told that the four foreign ministers in Geneva were discussing broadening cultural contacts between eastern and western nations, Louis said, “Well, man, I don’t know just how tightly we fit in under culture, but I figure our little ol’ two-beat music might make them Russian cats thaw out a little.
Ya know what I mean, man?”
When I asked him if he thought the Russians knew what jazz is, Armstrong replied: “Why, man, I ain’t even sure myself.” Louis grinned from ear to ear, flashing those famous teeth, and then stared silently for a minute out the window of the tour bus. Suddenly, he turned his head and asked, “Hey, man, what are all them foreign minister cats trying to do over there in Geneva? When me and the band played a one-nighter over there, I betcha we drew more people to Victoria Hall than them foreign minister cats attracted in 10 days.”
 When told that the foreign ministers guys wanted to unify Germany, build up European security, improve east-west contacts and reach an agreement on disarmament, if possible, ol’ Satch grinned again and exclaimed, “Unify Germany? Hell man, we’ve already unified it. We come through Germany playing this ol’ happy music, and if them Germans wasn’t unified, then this ain’t ol’ Satchmo a-talkin’ to you.”
Satchmo amused himself and everybody else on the bus by singin’ an old time gospel music favorite, or a New Orleans style blues tune. From time to time, when he thought you weren’t lookin’, he’d pull a small mirror out of his shirt pocket, look in it and smile.
“Ain’t I pretty, man?” he asked me, laughing as only Armstrong could. Throughout the tour, Armstrong was constantly studying his embouchure and his lips for signs of cracks. He took out a bottle of witch-hazel and the sweet spirits of nitre, (which he spelled out: N-I-T-R-E), which he put on his lips. “Just checkin’ out my chops, man,” he told me. “Checkin’ out my chops. You look at ‘em, man, and tell me whatcha see?”
When Satchmo grinned, what I saw was mostly teeth. But, it was rather obvious that the famed jazz trumpeter had a permanent indentation on his lips, made from years of pressing the trumpet mouthpiece of his horn to his lips and blowing the blues.
Give or take a few minutes, when trombone player Trummy Young wandered down the aisle and offered to engage Louis in a game of chess, and drummer Barrett Deems bugged him for a spare cigarette, Louis talked up a blue streak. He was better than anybody I’d ever heard before on the radio. Tellin’ fascinating stories about marchin’ in funeral parades down the streets of New Orleans; going to old cemeteries and blowing the blues or offering his two cents worth about music in general. (“There ain’t but two kinds of music, man, good and bad”).
Louis didn’t like to brag about having connections, he just liked for everybody to know he had a bunch of friends, some black, some white and some half breeds in between. He talked about the billfold given to him by Bing Crosby; about the Star of David, given to him by a friend, which he always wore around his neck and about the nature of the song “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” named for the famous New Orleans brothel run by the one and only Lulu White.
When the bus pulled into a Texaco gas station so the band’s singer, Velma Middleton, could pay a visit to the “little girl’s room,” Louis looked at me, slyly, and shook his head. “That woman ain’t gonna fit in the door of no little girl’s room,” he laughed. “That big mama is gonna have to go sit for a spell in the “big girl’s room.”
Clarinetist Edmund Hall took advantage of the “pit stop” to get a hot cup of coffee. Bassist Squire Gersh snored right through the whole shindig, sending echoes from the back of the bus to the front as loud as the fervent licks on his ax. That was back in the days when bass players played the upright instrument, before the trend of musicians to strap on basses and all those other electric do-dads.
We were about to pull out of the gas station and hit the road again when I looked around and realized Satchmo wasn’t in his regular seat. I got off the bus and walked into the station looking for him. There he was, big as sin. He was standing over in the corner jive-talkin’ to a coupla little kids, giving them a Tootsie Roll and laughing up a storm.
“Hey, Satch,” I yelled, “Time to go. The bus is pulling out.” Satchmo turned around slowly and rolled his eyes from one side to the other. “That big ol’ bus ain’t going nowhere, man,” he responded, “till ol’ Pops, here, tells it to. Besides,” he added, reaching into his pocket, “I done got the key right here. Go back in there and tell them cats I’ll be there in a minute.” Then he turned back to the little kids standing there looking up at him in awe. “Come on now, man,” he told them, clapping his hands and humming a tune, “Do that little dance again for me. Yeah, that’s right, man. Go, cats, go!”
Traveling on the road with Satchmo was a unique experience, to say the least. And every gig was different. All the juke joints looked alike, and so did most of the fans, but that’s where the similarity stopped. The same songs were printed on the program, the same introductions were made and the applause was always the same, but the music was always different.
Somebody asked Louis one time if he knew what he was gonna play when he went out there on the stage before a packed house. “Naw, man, not really,” he confessed. “I just pick up the horn and blow. The Good Lord do the rest.”
 No matter what songs Satchmo played or how long he played or who was the featured solo performer, you could always count on one thing being the same. Loud, thunderous applause after each song, with people whistling and stamping their feet so hard on the wooden floors, you wondered if they would give way under the groovy boom, boom, booms.
Between shows, Satchmo was a real hoot. He’d come off stage at intermission, keyed up and on his toes, with his tuxedo soaked in sweat. He’d put on his giant black horn-rimmed spectacles, take a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and wipe his head, pull off his jacket, tie and shirt, wrap his shoulders in a giant towel and hunch down comfortably in an old easy chair.
Edmund Hall often came into the stuffy little dressing room with a glass of cold lemonade and handed it to Satch. He’d take a sip and smile. “Good stuff, man. Good stuff. There ain’t nothin’ better to cool you down than a big glass of homemade lemonade.”
Backstage at every concert, Armstrong would point to the little box-like radio sitting on the table by his makeup mirror. “Turn on the music box, man,” he’d say. “I wantcha to hear some groovy licks. You ain’t gonna never hear nothin’ like it again, man.” I’d turn on the radio, right on cue, each night expecting to hear the cool sounds of jazz penetrating the small little cubicle. Instead, I was always shocked to hear the sweet sounds of classical symphonic violins.
 Ol’ Satch would often get up from his easy chair and shuffle over in front of the radio. He’d sit the glass of lemonade down and raise both arms, like a symphonic conductor does on the podium. He’d wave first one arm, then the other, then slowly glide both his arms from high above his head to down below his knees, like a butterfly in flight. Then, he’d stand there with his back to me and raise both arms above his head. Then, he’d bow slowly from the waist and turn around with a big grin on his face.
“If I’d had me a baton like them symphony cats use,” he said, “I could have done a whole lot better job.” I always laughed while Armstrong changed into another shirt for the second part of each night’s show. It was the same ritual every night. “Betcha didn’t think ol’ Satch know’d anything about that classical stuff, huh, man?” he asked me. Then, he added as an afterthought, “It don’t matter none what kind of music it is, man, as long as all them cats blow it loud and sweet and don’t miss no beat.”
One night, Satchmo was about ready to go back out on stage again when he noticed a little grey-haired man standing by the door. He had a piece of paper in his hand. Armstrong went over to him and signed his autograph, then shook the fellow’s hand. “One thing about my kind of music,” he told the fan, “you old guys don’t have to worry none about hearing it real good. I always blow them blues loud and clear. Been doin’ that as long as I can remember.”
As her friendly nightly ritual, and, no doubt, to insure her paycheck, Velma Middleton always  handed Louis a clean white handkerchief for his pocket. He’d rub some of that witch-hazel stuff on his lips and shuffle back out on the stage for another set.
1958. Man, that was a long time ago. Sometimes, I can close my eyes and see the whole zany scene in my mind’s eye. I can hear Satchmo blowin’ the blues. I don’t even have to put a disc in my CD player. Sometimes, I sing along, especially when I know Trummy Young has scooted off stage for a bathroom break.
Yes suh, as ol’ satch would say, I carried the horn, and he carried the grin. Ah, but what a groovy grin.
DON ALY’S HOLLYWOOD
“Whenever women in Hollywood find out their men are gay, they don’t disown them, they give them an apron and have them cook dinner.”
|
