IN EARLY 1960, exhausted by the constant grind of touring, Peanuts Hucko left the band to pursue work as a studio musician. A rejuvenated Barney Bigard rejoined the All Stars; he no longer seemed tired and bored. Trummy Young, for one, was now impressed with his playing: “Barney Bigard sounds a whole lot better than when he was with the band before. He’ll surprise you.” Young also supposed the reason: “He’s not drinking.”1 As Bigard tells it: “When I played my first job with Louis after being out of the band for so long I asked him, ‘What are you going to open with, Pops?’ ‘ “Back Home Again in Indiana,” ’ he said. Five years later it was still ‘Indiana’ … Trummy and Louis were as good as ever and it felt like old times to be back.”2
Armstrong celebrated his sixtieth birthday while on tour in the summer of 1960, briefly accompanied by jazz writer Bill Coss and photographer Herb Snitzer, who were traveling with the band for a piece for Metronome. In the article Armstrong reminisced about one of his heroes: “You’d go back to his dressing room and Bill [“Bojangles”] Robinson would be crouched around the table, tears running down his face, in real agony, and the man would rap on the door and say, ‘One minute,’ and Bill would stand and wipe his face, and put his shoulders back, and grin, and dance on that stage. THAT’s show business!” Here was Armstrong’s philosophy of entertaining, and it accounts for why he continued to push himself so hard even as his health gradually declined throughout the 1960s.3
Behind the scenes, Armstrong continued having problems with Frenchy Tallerie. Armstrong had fired Tallerie after Tallerie frantically and presumptuously tried to cover up Armstrong’s comments on the Little Rock crisis, but had allowed him back, most likely as a favor to Joe Glaser. Apparently, a few All Stars engagements were canceled and all the musicians in the group were reimbursed except for Armstrong. In a scathing letter sent to Joe Glaser on May 17, 1960, he didn’t hold back. “Dear Mr. Glaser,” he wrote. “Please don’t ignore this letter like you didn’t (ANSWER) concerning Frenchy giving every(one) their faire back and keeping mine and hasn’t given (it) to me as yet. I just don’t like to be ignored. I think that I am entitled a little bit somewhat as sort of being treated like a man instead [of] just a Goddam Child all the time. That we can forget. So please (don’t) let me down (on) this issue.”4 How Tallerie still had a job at this point boggles the mind, but the letter is further proof that Armstrong was not afraid to stand up to Glaser when he felt he was being taken advantage of. Dan Morgenstern related that some time in the early 1960s, “I also overheard Louis on the phone with Joe, giving as good as he apparently was getting in the foulmouth department. No ‘Mister Glaser’ in evidence there, but it ended calmly. Armstrong was never afraid of Glaser’s tough-guy demeanor.”5
So it happened that Armstrong recorded two albums in 1960, neither with the All Stars. The first was another pairing with the Dukes of Dixieland, which took place at New York’s Webster Hall. Many Armstrong insiders attended the sessions, including his publicist Ernie Anderson, his good friend Jack Bradley, guitarist Marty Grosz, Gene Krupa, and two very different trumpeters, Max Kaminsky and Dizzy Gillespie. Armstrong was his irrepressible self; on “South” he improvised an ode to red beans: “You eat a big plate and Swiss Kriss in the morning!” The repertoire this time around was comprised of songs not regularly performed by the All Stars, and Armstrong responded with scorching horn work on “Limehouse Blues,” “Wolverine Blues,” and an exceptional vocal and instrumental version of “Avalon.” When he plays lead over Frank Assunto’s second trumpet—as with his appearance with Gillespie—Armstrong sounds as if he were playing a heretofore unimagined instrument. Assunto was agog: “The old man is too much.”6 On two of the slower pieces, “New Orleans” and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Armstrong was preternaturally effective. In 2007, the band’s helicon player, Rich Matteson, recalled Armstrong’s playing the latter tune: “In that moment, he turned that place into a personal chapel. He looked up and he started talking to God … Nobody in the room but Louie and his God. It was absolutely frightening. And we got done with the first take, I’m standing there crying. I turned and looked, the drummer’s crying, the clarinet player’s crying, the trombones are crying, Lucille’s crying, his own wife.”
Armstrong called for a break when he noticed that even the engineer could not look him in the eye, having gotten too emotional. During the break, Matteson asked Armstrong how he could play like that in a studio without a live audience. “Well, I always play for somebody I love,” Armstrong responded. “That’s all. You play for somebody you love all the time. I always play for Him because He gives me talent. I play for Lucille because she’s my wife and I love her and if I make a mistake, she understands. They all want to listen, that’s cool. And if they don’t want to listen, it’s still cool, because I was going to play for Him and her anyway.”7
Armstrong’s next recording partner would be an old friend he had been teaming up with for nearly twenty-five years: Bing Crosby. Though they had recorded singles and film soundtracks, this was to be their first full-length album together. But Armstrong was burdened by too overtly a Dixieland setting on this album, performing such songs as “Let’s Sing Like a Dixieland Band,” “Muskrat Ramble” and “At the Jazz Band Ball,” the latter two chiefly jazz instrumentals now given corny lyrics for the occasion. Several numbers are marred by an intrusive choir, trashing the integrity of pieces like “Little Ol’ Tune.” All the same, there are some pleasant surprises, such as Armstrong’s take on Horace Silver’s “The Preacher,” while “Rocky Mountain Moon,” arguably the best track on the record, is stunningly beautiful from start to finish.
Billy May was hired for the date’s arrangements, and Johnny Mercer for new lyrics. “That was a labor of love for John, because John loved Louis, and I know he’s a good friend of Bing’s,” May remembered. He continued: “Louis was fun to work with. He enjoyed life, and he enjoyed recording. He enjoyed singing. He enjoyed playing. And he enjoyed talking to the musicians. And it was old home week … Almost all the musicians that I had in the band had worked with and were former—had something to do with him before. And Bing of course enjoyed being around musicians. It was really a fun gig.”8
Armstrong continued touring into September before his first overseas trip since his near-death experience in Spoleto. On October 1, Pepsi-Cola International opened five bottling plants in West Africa to produce eight million cases of soda a year. A Pepsi spokesman said, “To help move these cases along to the nationals of Ghana and Nigeria, Pepsi-Cola is sending a jazz group headed by Louis Armstrong to entertain West Africans …”9 One-half of the profits of Armstrong’s stint in Southern Rhodesia in November were to go to Nyatsime College near Salisbury.10
Before heading for Africa, Armstrong spoke about the trip: “This is an important event, sure, but don’t get me wrong—all dates are important. Whenever I play it’s important to me; you still got to hit them notes.”11 The first stop was Accra, Ghana, where all fifty thousand seats in the city’s sports stadium were sold in advance. Once there, Armstrong changed his tune; the African tour was no longer just another date, however important, but “the most important event in my life.”12 At the airport, he was met by three thousand Ghanians. Banners welcomed him throughout the city while musicians played and sang everywhere Armstrong looked. A Pepsi press release noted, “At times even Satchmo, who has been mobbed by admiring fans in every country he has visited, became anxious about his immediate future. One moment of truth came when a few over-jubilant Ghanians suddenly hoisted him to their shoulders and tossed him around like a medicine ball.”13
The night of the first show, it rained so hard, the stage Armstrong was supposed to play on collapsed. It was propped up with cement blocks and wooden boxes and the show went on, but here was an ominous sign of things to come. “The magic of Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong’s trumpet went a little sour in Lagos, Nigeria, last night,” said a report after an October date. “It seems the Africans don’t dig jazz while the American horn-blower doesn’t dig calypso … Before the U.S. goodwill ambassador and his all-star combo had blown three numbers, the locals were swinging for the exits. Their beat was for home. The harder Satchmo blew the more fans he blew out the door. When he was finished only a handful of the 15,000 spectators remained.”14
Offstage, Armstrong met with Sir Ahmadu Bello, the premier of Northern Nigeria, a visit he remembered ten years later on The Mike Douglas Show. “The king, he couldn’t take us over there, you know, so I stayed with all his men,” Armstrong recounted. “He took Lucille and Velma Middleton, my vocalist, to meet all his harem. Boy, he must have had about a hundred wives. Yes sir, they must keep a muzzle on him or something with all those wives!” Pepsi’s support of the tour would soon come to an end, proclaiming it “an enormous success.”
The State Department, via the U.S. Information Agency, stepped into the breach and sponsored the next leg of the tour. Armstrong received a tumultuous reception from the Congolese, who called him “Okuka Lokole”—jungle wizard, the man who can charm beasts. He was entering the Belgian Congo at a volatile time: the country was in the midst of a civil war between followers of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu, the latter’s forces led by future dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. But in honor of Armstrong’s visit, both sides stopped fighting and welcomed him grandly, bearing him on a red throne, which was reported in many newspapers and even in a movie newsreel. “The Congolese briefly forgot their differences to give Satchmo a triumphant welcome to Leopoldville,” is how the Associated Press reported it in a story headlined, “ ‘Wizard’ Satchmo Unites the Congo!” “They cheered and jived in the street as Satchmo drove past behind a truckload of native dancers … The army of Col. Joseph Mobutu and the police force loyal to ex-Premier Patrice Lumumba joined forces to provide a heavily armed cordon ’round Satchmo and his party from the moment they stepped off the Congo River ferry from Brazzaville. Satchmo shook his head sadly at the sight of all the rifles. But he cheered up when Congolese girls in colorful costumes turned up to pose for pictures with him and his wife, Lucille.”15 “We came off that ferry and then we got in the automobile and no more shooting,” Armstrong recounted in 1970. “And then they paraded all through the city. And the day of the concert they put me in this chair—and you know, you’ve got to be somebody to ride in that chair. That’s better than ol’ rocking chair!” Asked if he was scared, Armstrong responded, “With my people? That’s all they know. ‘Ol’ Satch-e-mo,’ all through the jungles.”16 When he got to the stage, Armstrong announced, “Merci beaucoup, beaucoup,” to thunderous ovation.
At the evening’s concert in front of 175,000 people at a Leopoldville soccer stadium, members of warring parties sat together, danced, and cheered the music. No sooner did Armstrong and the All Stars leave the Congo than fighting resumed. Such was the power of “Ambassador Satch.” Back in the United States, Armstrong’s trip to Africa was receiving praise as well. One editorial that appeared in many newspapers in mid-November stated: “Having been around the world numerous times, and as a representative of the State Department, this man with his trumpet is able to overcome barriers between peoples in a way beyond the capacity of polished diplomats.”17
Armstrong must have been proud of the work he was doing now at age sixty. He was blowing the trumpet in particularly fine form. “If I’m in the gutter, I still got enough strength to blow in the ceiling,” he said at this time. “I mean, you got to live with that horn. That’s why I married four times. The chicks didn’t live with the horn. They got too carried away, all but the last, and forget everything about the horn. I don’t. I don’t want a million dollars. See what I mean? No medals. I mean, I don’t feel no different about the horn now than I did when I was playin’ in the Tuxedo Band. That’s my livin’ and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make ’em right.”18 Feeling his oats, he couldn’t resist a dig at the younger jazz trumpet players, something he hadn’t done publicly in quite some time: “How many modern trumpet players could play my solos? You’d have to carry ’em out on stretchers.”19
And even though at sixty he was an elder statesman, Armstrong was not about to stop playing any time soon. “I look at it this way, too,” he said. “I get outa that bed every day, see? I make a good salary and my horn still sounds good. And I feel good. So I don’t think nobody in the world [is] any richer than I am. Musicians don’t retire. They stop when there’s no more work. We never thought about that in New Orleans. Like we say there, ‘That our hustle,’ you know, a day’s work. But anybody sit down with their money and look at the four walls, they don’t live long; they die. There’s nothin’ I can say other than I’ve set myself up to be a happy man. And—I made it.”20
Armstrong took a break from the African tour in early December to head to Paris, where he performed two new Duke Ellington numbers, “Battle Royal” and “Wild Man,” in the film Paris Blues. In Paris, excepting two concerts on Christmas Eve and two on New Year’s Eve, the All Stars waited for filming to conclude. Asked what they were up to, Billy Kyle responded with a smile: “Getting over that African tour.”21 “The rest of us, Trummy, myself, Barney, Mort Herbert, Billy Kyle, you know, we just played tourists,” Danny Barcelona remembered. “Went all over Paris for five weeks. Not bad, huh? You got paid for it, you got a hotel paid for … while Louie was working! ”22
Once the break was over, Armstrong and the All Stars returned for more dates in Africa. Tragedy would strike Velma Middleton, Armstrong’s comic foil and female vocalist for nearly twenty years: she collapsed of a stroke while climbing steep stairs. Her health had been slipping and the intense African heat had not been salubrious. As her stroke occurred at the tail end of the tour, the band could not wait for her to get better. She was put in a Sierra Leone hospital, and Jet magazine reported she was partially paralyzed.23
A traumatized Armstrong wrote to Joe Glaser in the wake of Middleton’s stroke. “She’s got a stroke that’s a Bitch,” he wrote.
Mr. Glaser, I ain’t never in my whole life, seen anyone with a Stroke like Velma’s. She has a stroke (all the way) down her whole right side. Even her (Eye) is paralyzed. Hump. Ain’t that ‘somphin’? What she needs now is to be taken from that small Hospital from Freetown, Africa and brought to America, USA, put into Hospital right away, where they may save her life. Because she is in a Bad Condition. Pray to the Lord that she won’t have another Stroke before she get a chance to see (at least see) the good ‘ol’ American soils again. ‘Gosh.’ We’re still ‘Carrying on with our concerts, just like nothing happened. But it’s hard to do.24
She never did recover, and died alone there on February 10, 1961, the site of her burial in question, and Louis and the band away on tour. “They didn’t have the facilities to treat someone like that,” wrote Bigard. “I’ll never forgive Joe Glaser and Louis for that, because they said it would take too many people to lift her on the plane to France. I said to myself, ‘This woman gave her all, and they just leave her here, like that, in some little African town.’ ”25
Armstrong and Lucille would have taken Bigard to task about Glaser’s handling of the situation. In a private tape made with friends shortly after Middleton’s passing, Louis and Lucille talked about the episode. All along the Armstrongs had wanted Middleton buried in America for her family’s sake, and she eventually was. “But for Joe Glaser, she wouldn’t be there,” Lucille said caustically. “Joe Glaser pulled all—that’s why it took ten days to get her here—all kinds of strings to get her over here. She would have been buried in Africa.” For his part, Louis insisted: “If it don’t be for Joe, her mother would never had had that body.” Their only regret was that it took so long to transport Middleton’s body to the United States. Because of the severity of her stroke, only half of her body could be embalmed; in the long waiting period, the body had deteriorated and was ravaged by maggots. “Couldn’t open the casket,” Armstrong lamented. “And if you had seen her, she wouldn’t look like herself after being four days buried there.” With solemnity, Armstrong made a bizarre comparison. “People don’t stay the same after they die,” he said. “Just like a pile of shit, you put it in the street, in the morning, when the sun hit it, anything li’ble to be coming out of there. That’s what I’m talking about.”26
Middleton had served Armstrong loyally for nineteen years and, in their timeless duets, had given pleasure to audiences around the world. In the final documentation of Middleton’s contribution, an African concert recording from November 1960, she sang as she did night in and out, but in retrospect she is poignant. On “St. Louis Blues,” she sang her own lyrics about Armstrong blowing “nice and high,” ending with “I’m gonna love that man till the day that I die.” On their final show stopper, “That’s My Desire,” Middelton’s last lines are “Though you’ve found someone new, / I’ll always love you, / That’s my desire.” Critics might have scoffed at her dancing and splits, but she was part of the family, the band, and things would never be the same without her. Armstrong knew Middleton was irreplaceable. “It ain’t necessary to have another female singer,” he told Jet magazine, “because there ain’t no more Velmas.”27 Dan Morgenstern wrote, “This was a trouper’s passing, and Velma was a trouper to the bone.”28
After the heart scare in 1959 and Middleton’s passing in 1961, Armstrong perhaps was finally forced to confront the punishing work schedule he continued to embrace. In the same letter to Glaser in which he lamented Middleton’s stroke, he also introduced a novel idea, though he did so in a way to show he was serious. “You’re my man,” he began. “But, just one thing. You’re skeptical of my abilities and myself ‘knows’ you are frightened of my assuredness.” Having established this, Armstrong sprung his idea on Glaser: an extended run on Broadway. “Yeah man Dig this Shit,” he wrote. “The title of our band concert only our Show A Night With ‘Satchmo’ And His All Stars. Do you hear me Mr. Glaser? It is about time Dammit. If I can please people, all over the world, why can’t you rent a theatre with just a stage. Any kind of stage. With the right lights and right mikes. ‘Shit.’ We’re in business.”29 Perhaps realizing he was being too forceful, Armstrong backed away a bit and heaped on some flattery. “I am just pulling your leg buddy. You keep me with the best and for that I love your dirty Drawers for it.” But in his postscript, Armstrong couldn’t resist one more plug for his idea: “P.S. Always remember the same people whom we play for all over the world comes to New York some time or other. And just them alone will buy tickets (You Dig?). Will be great. Wow.”
Glaser obviously disregarded the idea, because Armstrong continued a string of one-nighters as soon as he returned home from overseas; the money was just too lucrative to turn down. It was around this time that columnist Jack O’Brian spent an afternoon at Glaser’s Associated Booking office with both Louis and Lucille Armstrong. “We conversed an hour and suddenly Louis rasped: ‘Show Jack the books,’ ” O’Brian later wrote. “Joe reacted as if mad. ‘Why should I show him the books?’ he demanded in mock anger. ‘Because I want him to see them,’ Louis said, simply. Joe went to a huge walk-in wall vault, reached high for a large leather case, upended it on his desk, and said, ‘Start counting. There’s $15,000 to $20,000 in every book—all insured by the government.’ They were bankbooks. Joe ticked them off: more than a million dollars, maybe much more; we couldn’t keep up with Joe’s count.”30 Armstrong proudly asked Glaser to show O’Brian the books because he knew he was responsible for much of that money. He also knew that when the money was rolling in, he and Lucille could only benefit, as evidenced by a letter Glaser wrote to Armstrong in the summer of 1961 before sending Armstrong on another tour: “It will be a pleasure for me to give you some extra going away bucks.”31 For the time being, there was nowhere else for Armstrong to go than back on the road. But just the fact that Armstrong himself was envisioning staying put and doing his show on Broadway—a short distance from his home in Corona, Queens—demonstrates that perhaps the grind on the road was beginning to wear on his mind as well as his body.
Back in the United States, Armstrong’s next step made consummate sense. Having played with Duke Ellington on the Timex show in 1959 and having performed his music in Paris Blues, Armstrong teamed up with Ellington for a studio album. Bob Thiele, a producer at Roulette Records, had finally succeeded in getting the two jazz giants to record a program of Ellington tunes, Duke himself on piano. Over two days in April 1961, Armstrong, Ellington, and the All Stars met in RCA’s New York City studios for seventeen songs. With time in short supply, arrangements were scant, nor was Ellington able to prepare anything new, as he had in previous meetings with Ella Fitzgerald and Coleman Hawkins. Still, the music that resulted was nearly flawless. It is joyous to hear Armstrong put his inimitable stamp on such standards as “Drop Me Off in Harlem,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and on ballads such as “Solitude,” “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” and “Mood Indigo.” He was battling a slight cold, and his voice sounds deeper than usual, his singing nonchalant and forceful even as his trumpet playing was that of a man half his age. The session’s biggest surprises were two anomalies: a track Ellington made up on the spot, “The Beautiful American,” an uptempo blues in a minor key, and “Azalea,” written with Armstrong in mind years earlier—an intricate melody deftly handled by Armstrong’s horn, the beauty of whose wily lyrics lies in such Ellington rhymes as “azalea” with “failure” (pronounced “fail-ya”) and “assail ya.” Armstrong charmingly breezed through the twists and turns of the song, Ellington brilliantly comping behind him. So it was that the two managed to create a classic.
The Armstrong-Ellington collaboration was a happy experience for all involved. “To see Louis at work under these circumstances was, for us, a rare privilege,” said critic Stanley Dance, who was present at the sessions. “He never spared himself and he was so quick to grasp the whole conception of an interpretation … At the piano Duke was full of ideas and a great source of inspiration.”32 Barney Bigard, who had worked with Ellington for fourteen years, recalled, “Duke and I reminisced a while before we started, but the main thing was that Louis got along so great with Duke. I mean two prominent leaders on one date could have been rough, but we had no problems … The session came out real well.”33 For Bigard, though, this would be his final stand with the All Stars. One of its charter members, he would continue touring until July of 1961, when he again decided to leave, this time for good.
Bigard was replaced by another New Orleans clarinetist, Joe Darensbourg. Born in 1906, Darensbourg remembered hearing Armstrong play as a young man in the Crescent City. “That’s one of the things that really made me want to be a musician, hearing a sound like that,” he would later write. “What a man!”34 In the 1920s, Darensbourg played with trumpeter Oscar “Papa” Celestin and pianist Jelly Roll Morton, among others; but he really didn’t begin making his mark until the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1940s. Based on the West Coast, Darensbourg played for years with trombonist Kid Ory. In the mid-fifties he joined the band of Armstrong-inspired trumpeter Teddy Buckner before good fortune struck in 1957 when his Capitol recording of “Yellow Dog Blues” became a bona fide hit record. The novelty of the recording was that it featured Darensbourg playing in an old-fashioned, slap-tongue style that somehow appealed to the public.
The clarinetist joined Armstrong during a rare night off in Buffalo and made his debut on July 17, in Bala, Ontario. “One of the first things Louis said to me was, ‘Well, Joe, now you with the All Stars, so you a star. Let’s see you shine.’ ”35 It didn’t take long before Darensbourg began featuring himself on “Yellow Dog Blues.” “When you got ready to play, Louis would say, ‘This is your solo, play whatever you want, long as you want, short as you want, just do it.’ Those were his very words. He never told anybody how to play. He wasn’t one of them bandleaders that would tell you this or that … We always had a lot of fun and, certainly, I never worked for a better guy or a better bandleader.”36
Darensbourg signed a one-year contract but wound up staying three years. In that time, he got along beautifully with Armstrong, but he also saw the sterner side of the trumpeter at times. “I was about a minute late getting on the stand, for some reason—I had to go to the men’s room,” Darensbourg told drummer and writer Barry Martyn. “And when I got up there, he says, ‘Look, that’s one thing I won’t tolerate. You men be on this stand. Listen, homeboy, we hit. We hit.’ And another time, Billy Kyle was taking a solo, and me and Trummy started talking. Boy, Louis got mad … He said, ‘When a man is taking a solo, anything you do to distract him … That’s his spot, and you don’t do nothin’ to distract him, because you wouldn’t want him to do it on your solo.’ He says, ‘I don’t do it.’ And then he says, ‘You guys just be quiet, that’s all.’ ”37
Darensbourg also witnessed an altercation between Armstrong and one of the band’s other new faces, bassist Irv Manning. Mort Herbert had left the group in early June to practice law full-time, which he continued to do until his untimely death at the age of fifty-seven in 1983. Manning had performed with many jazz greats, including Eddie Condon and Benny Goodman, before joining the All Stars. After Darensbourg joined a month later, Armstrong called a rare rehearsal in Boston to go over features and background parts. Manning wanted to do a comedic skit on “The Rain in Spain” for his feature, “but nobody liked it and finally Louis got fed up and he says, ‘I don’t know, Irv, I don’t think it will fit.’ Irv says, ‘The only reason I was doing it was to get you a laugh.’ When he said that, Louis got mad as hell. He said, ‘I been playing music before you was born. I don’t need you to get a laugh for me.’ ” Manning called Armstrong a “sonofabitch” and Armstrong told him to quit on the spot; Manning quickly apologized.38 He was safe for the time being, but the incident would prove a harbinger of what was to come.
Darensbourg was full of anecdotes that shed light on Armstrong’s offstage persona. “He spent a lot of money on people, orphanages, things that you never seen in the papers,” Darensbourg wrote. “Like when we went down to Tennessee, where they had the only all-colored medical school. Louis and Joe [Glaser] had donated thousands of dollars to help them build a new wing for heart research and we went down to play for them. I felt it was a beautiful thing to play for something like this and I enjoyed meeting some very prominent doctors. Louis never turned anybody down. I seen him give away cash money to all sorts of people that was having a hard time.”39 Darensbourg was careful to explain that Armstrong’s charity was consistent with his unique working relationship with Joe Glaser. “A lot of people used to say Louis was gonna wind up broke because of his generosity,” he said. “Louis told me himself that him and Joe didn’t have any kind of written contract. People would say that nobody knew how Joe was splitting the money, but Louis wasn’t as dumb as they thought. Once every six months him and Joe would have a meeting so he knew what was happening, or Lucille did. Anyway, when he died he’d wound up a millionaire and Lucille had all the money she needed.”40
Darensbourg also noted the pleasure Armstrong took in simple things. “Louis was crazy about [Cracker Jack] popcorn, so every time I’d pass a place I’d pick up about half a dozen boxes for him … As soon as he opened that box he’d look for the prize. One time it was a little trumpet, made a whistling sound when he blew it, so he says, ‘I hope it’s a Selmer.’ He played it all the time on the bus. He was just like a little kid that had found a diamond ring.”41
Darensbourg spent much free time with an ebullient Armstrong, usually sampling Darensbourg’s Creole cooking, but he also witnessed the trumpeter more subdued when he was alone. “For all his popularity, Louis could be sitting in his dressing room and he looked like the saddest guy in the world. That always amazed me. He’d be sitting with his horn in his hand, just looking at it, turning it over, looking at the bell, picking it up and blowing a little, that’s all.”42
Velma Middleton had been well-nigh impossible to replace, and for several months Armstrong had not bothered even to try.43 Now, in addition to Darensbourg and Manning, Armstrong added a new vocalist, Jewel Brown, a twenty-three-year-old Houston native, to the band, but how she became one of the All Stars was instructive. After working with Earl Grant in Los Angeles, she had settled into the Chalet Club in Dallas, working for the infamous Jack Ruby. There Tony Papa, a representative of Joe Glaser’s ABC booking agency, had heard her. After Middleton’s death, Glaser had his people across the country search for a singer, even though, as Brown remembers, “they weren’t very sure that Louie would even want another singer because of the tie between he and Velma, and he was quite hurt at losing her.”
On Papa’s recommendation, Glaser flew down to Texas and caught one of Brown’s shows without letting her know he was in the audience. “I did not know that he had done that until later on,” she recalls. Impressed, Glaser flew immediately back to New York, where he began brainstorming a way to get her into the band. When the All Stars were next in Texas, Glaser had Brown audition by working with the band for two weeks. Brown remembers that altogether some five hundred singers all over the country were after the job, but after hearing many of them and letting some sit in, the band was given final say. “I believe they asked the boys in the band what did they think about me,” Brown says. “And they said, ‘Well, that little girl down there in Texas got it going on!’ ” Brown officially joined the band in June of 1961.44
Of meeting Armstrong, Brown recalls, “He seemed delighted in me. I mean, I didn’t know what to think or say. I’ve never been afraid of anybody. I just went in, all whole hog, you know.” When asked what Armstrong was like offstage, Brown replied, “The same as he was onstage. He was just the same, personable kind of guy. He was the same personable fellow offstage as what people saw onstage, and I guess that was his success. He was always personable, like he was sitting in somebody’s lap, singing to them, performing. And Pops was just friendly to all people, whether he understood their language or whatever. It seemed like they understood his gestures whether they understood English or not. And I believe that was his success.”
The new faces in the band did not stem the negative criticism showered on the All Stars, especially after an October 12 performance at Massey Hall in Toronto. “Mr. Armstrong still calls his band the All-Stars, but any resemblance between professional jazz musicians and the collection of mediocrity Mr. Armstrong dragged behind him all night, last night, is strictly wishful thinking,” Patrick Scott wrote in a devastating review in the Globe and Mail. According to Brown, Armstrong was never bothered by what critics wrote about him. “Critics are not the people that buy the tickets,” she says. “So what they say is really insignificant. As a matter of fact, [Armstrong] gave me a lesson on that. He told me, he said, ‘If you ever see a [review] that is not what you would desire, don’t let it bother you.’ He said, ‘That’s one person’s opinion. He didn’t buy a ticket.’ He said, ‘You just always get out there and do the best you can do.’ And that’s what I always did.”45
Still, it is hard to imagine that Armstrong was not offended by Scott’s reference to his band as “Louis Armstrong and his All-Nonentities.” Scott trashed every one of the All Stars that night, continuing a trend that had started after the early version of the band that included Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, and Sid Catlett broke up. But most of succeeding musicians in the group—Trummy Young, Edmond Hall, Billy Kyle, Joe Darensbourg, Peanuts Hucko, and Mort Herbert—while not possessed of the same star power, were team players with impressive résumés and were well respected by their peers.
As Armstrong rightly wondered in 1956: “There’s a lot people … say that I play with musicians sometimes that’s not up to my standard. Well, how do they know what my standard is? I mean, we was just taught there weren’t but two kinds of music. Jack Teagarden always said that, ‘There’s only two kinds of music, good and bad.’ And that’s why you hear those hands when we finish playing our tunes, ’cause we try to play them right. But I don’t listen to fanatics that try to tell me how to blow my horn. And I guess that’s why I’ve been playing forty-something years, you know?”46
Joe Glaser was usually responsible for finding new All Stars, but as Dan Morgenstern told me, “People who say that … it was Joe Glaser’s call who came into the band and all that, that’s pretty much bullshit, because Louie naturally had final approval of anybody who came in.”47 In the case of a musician like drummer Kenny John—the opposite of a team player, and with a drinking problem—once Armstrong had had it with him, he was out. Russ Phillips did his best trying to fill Teagarden’s shoes, but Armstrong wanted someone different and asked Trummy Young to join the band as his replacement. While Glaser may have found the musicians, if Armstrong had a problem with them, they were gone.
In addition to musicianship, character was key for Armstrong, as is evidenced by the long tenures of Danny Barcelona and Mort Herbert. Cozy Cole remembered that it was important that nobody in the All Stars ever started arguments. “That’s the way Louie would hire you,” he said. “Of course your character first and he’d have to like your playing, but Louie with that personality that he had, he didn’t want anybody to be in there that’s going to be a drag. He wants everybody in there to get along.”48 Barcelona provided tremendous swing to the band, but he wasn’t a great soloist like Sid Catlett, sometimes rushing the tempo during his breaks. When the trumpeter Wes Hensel asked Armstrong why he used Barcelona, Armstrong responded matter-of-factly, “Oh, he’s a nice fella.”49 As Armstrong’s friend Jack Bradley said, Barcelona “just did his job. He wasn’t the world’s greatest drummer but he always showed up on time and did what he was supposed to. And I think Louie would prefer someone like that than some so-called star that didn’t show up all the time and you couldn’t depend on.”50
In September, the All Stars settled in New York to make one of the most challenging records of Armstrong’s career. Pianist-composer Dave Brubeck and his wife, Iola, had collaborated on a musical project titled The Real Ambassadors, which was informed by social protest suggesting that jazz musicians would make better politicians than those then in charge. It touched on many issues of the day, especially race, and the Brubecks had conceived of the project with Armstrong in mind after his incendiary Little Rock comments. “I think that’s what we really tried to overcome when we wrote The Real Ambassadors,” Iola Brubeck remembered, “because before we got into this project we didn’t really know Louis that well, but we sensed in him a depth and an unstated feeling we thought we could tap into without being patronizing, and I think that’s why he took to it.”51
While they intended eventually to stage a play, the Brubecks wanted to record the score first. Singer Carmen McRae and the vocalese group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross agreed to participate, but Armstrong proved difficult to get hold of, as Dave Brubeck related. “Louis’s road manager wouldn’t give me access when I wanted to discuss the project with him in Chicago, so I found out the number of Louis’s hotel room, sat in the lobby until room service came and hollered, ‘Hi, Louis’ when the door opened … Louis invited me in, ordered me a steak and thought the idea was interesting. I gave him copies of the tunes to listen to on the road; and at the session, he was the first one in the studio and last guy to leave.”52
Brubeck’s demo tapes of the material are at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. Listening to them today, one hears a very polite Brubeck explaining the nature of the project and what Armstrong means to it. It is possible, that Brubeck gave Armstrong the demo tapes of the songs in the summer of 1961 before an All Stars’ four-day tour of Germany, for Brubeck is heard saying, “I’ve just talked to Joe Glaser and he’s told me how difficult it will be for you to record any of these things before going to Europe. But I’m hoping you can figure out the backgrounds with my group playing and me singing the songs like you asked me to do.”
To his meeting in Chicago, Brubeck had brought along the lyrics to a song called “Lonesome.” Without knowing the melody, Armstrong gave an impassioned reading that greatly affected Brubeck. “Now I told my wife about the way you read the song ‘Lonesome’ in Chicago,” Brubeck says in the tape. “You didn’t sing it, you just read it, and it was such a moving job that I thought maybe you would be able to read this on tape and send that back to us because this wouldn’t involve you singing or trying to match your voice with the backgrounds that I’ve sent you by my combo.” Brubeck went on to tell Armstrong about Iola’s regard for him: “She’s always considered you the greatest ambassador we’ve ever had.” Iola herself then tells the trumpeter: “I saw you tonight on [the television program] You Asked for It and I was very, very impressed with your performance on the show. It thrilled me particularly because I heard you deliver some lines in a way that I knew it was possible for you to do some of the scenes in the show I had written for you. Now, I had the feeling all along that you could do them, but I had never heard you do anything like that before, and when I saw you tonight and saw the sincerity with which [you spoke] some various lines, it impressed me terrifically.” The rest of the tape features Brubeck and his trio playing the show’s originals with Brubeck singing the melodies (“I’m ashamed of the horrible way in which I sing,” he tells Armstrong at one point).53
Armstrong practiced the Brubecks’ material whenever he had the rare luxury of free time. “Louis told everybody that we had written him an opera,” Brubeck remembered. The only problem was finding someone who wanted to record it. “All of the producers I took it to, thought it was great, but they’d give me all these excuses … You weren’t supposed to have a message. I forget the word they used, but it meant you weren’t entertaining. We couldn’t lecture the American public on the subject of race.”54
Eventually, Brubeck’s own label, Columbia, agreed to take on the project, which was completed over the course of three sessions in September 1961. The first song recorded was “They Say I Look Like God,” a mournful piece that pitted Armstrong’s blues-infused singing against Gregorian-chant-like lines delivered by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. The Brubecks intended the song as satire, with Armstrong wondering if God could be black. “If both are made in the image of thee,” he sings, “Could thou perchance a zebra be?” Expecting Armstrong to deliver the line with his usual jocularity, they were shocked and moved by Armstrong’s chilling seriousness. Armstrong had tears in his eyes when he got to the song’s final line, “When God tells man he’s really free”; he repeated “really free” with haunting sincerity. “Goose pimple, I got goose pimple on this one,” Louis said after recording it.55 For me, this is arguably the most emotionally wrenching recording of Armstrong’s career—a performance that dispels any notion of Armstrong as merely a clown in his later years.
Not every song on The Real Ambassadors is quite so serious; some, such as the romping “King for a Day,” are full of good humor. The first session ended with the title tune, “The Real Ambassadors,” on which Armstrong sang autobiographical lyrics:
The next day, Armstrong was joined by Carmen McRae for heavenly vocalizing by both singers. “I Didn’t Know Until You Told Me” is mainly McRae, but Armstrong harmonizes with her sublimely at the end. Next up was a vocal version of Brubeck’s well-known instrumental “The Duke,” retitled “You Swing Baby.” The performance was left off the original album, but it contains some stunning trumpet, with Armstrong interpreting the tricky melody made famous by Miles Davis after his own fashion. “One Moment Worth Years” features an absolutely gorgeous melody, Armstrong and McRae demonstrating deep chemistry, in one of the most charming performances of Armstrong’s later years.
The highlight of the day, however, was “Summer Song,” a heartbreaking ballad that would become the album’s most lasting track. “On his poignant performance of ‘Summer Song,’ you can hear the elder Armstrong accepting the inevitability of death and looking ahead towards his final peace, even as he casts a parting glance at all of his remarkable achievements,” writes Chip Stern in the liner notes to the CD reissue.56 Dan Morgenstern was present at the recording session and vividly remembered that “Summer Song” was accomplished in one take, before which Brubeck at the piano had played the song for Armstrong as he mastered the lyrics. In the documentary The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, Morgenstern said, “Brubeck was totally overwhelmed. As a matter of fact, tears came to his eyes when he heard Louis do this thing, and the record of it is marvelous.” Jack Bradley, who was also present, described the session as a “a love fest, especially between Dave Brubeck and Louie. Dave would run up and hug and kiss Louie after every take. It was a wonderful session, and it went well, considering they didn’t have time to rehearse.”57
The lack of rehearsal led to Armstrong having trouble with some of the Brubecks’ tricky lyrics. One song, “Since Love Had Its Way,” required fifteen takes to get the lyrics right. After take one of “King for a Day,” Armstrong remarked, “That was a real tongue twister.” Brubeck asked, “Pops, what do you want to do next?” A game Armstrong replied, “I don’t care, you call ’em.” Brubeck said, “I was thinking of your lip.” Armstrong answered, “It ain’t the lip, it’s the lyrics. You don’t have to worry ’bout my chops.” After another tricky lyric on “Nomad,” Bradley remarked to Armstrong, “You’ll get your tongue worn out with those lyrics.” Armstrong replied, “More than that, I’ll get my brains worn out.”
But in the end, the hard work was worth it. At the time of the sessions, Brubeck exclaimed, “This is a miracle that it came off. I didn’t think it would come off, without even any rehearsal.” On the final night of the sessions, Bradley watched as every musician left until the only ones left in the empty studio were a satisfied Brubeck and Armstrong. “Boy, oh boy, what a night we’ve had,” Brubeck said. “We’ve done everything on schedule. God, boy, we had such a ball.”58
While in Germany the following year, Armstrong was interviewed on television by Joachim-Ernst Behrendt. “The latest thing I’ve done is with Brubeck,” he told Behrendt. “It turned out nice. Yeah, I told a guy, ‘I just made a record with Brubeck.’ ‘Brubeck!?’ I said, ‘Yeah! I’ll play with anybody, man, you kidding?’ That’s my hustle. Good, too!” (Nor was Armstrong kidding about playing with anybody. Only two weeks after the Brubeck session, he had reunited with trombonist Kid Ory at Disneyland.)
Having recorded the tracks for The Real Ambassadors, the Brubecks set about staging the play, but could not get it off the ground. But by the time Armstrong was interviewed by Behrendt, things seemed more promising. “We’re going to do a concert with everybody that was in this session, right from the stage,” Armstrong said. “It even might be on TV … And we’re going to have the ranks and everything, same as opera, you know what I mean. It’s going to be all right. We’re doing it at the Monterey Jazz Festival.”59
On September 23, 1962, at the Monterey Jazz Festival, The Real Ambassadors had its first and only performance, complete with costumes and scenery. The performance opened with a speech read by a narrator that showed no doubt that this work was written with Armstrong in mind:
Our story concerns a jazz musician not unlike the musicians you have seen on this stage the past three days. The personal history of our hero reads like the story of jazz—up from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain to Chicago and beyond—from New York to San Francisco, London to Tokyo and points in between. The music which poured from his horn became his identity—his passport to the world—the key to locked doors. Through his horn he had spoken to millions of the world’s people. Through it he had opened doors to presidents and kings. He had lifted up his horn, as our hero would say, and just played to folks on an even soul-to-soul basis. He had no political message, no slogan, no plan to sell or save the world. Yet he, and other traveling musicians like him, had inadvertently served a national purpose, which officials recognized and eventually sanctioned with a program called cultural exchange.60
Brubeck remembered a funny story about the Monterey performance. “At dress rehearsal, I said to Louis, ‘You’re the real ambassador, will you wear this top hat and carry the attaché case? The audience will immediately identify you as the real ambassador,’ and he said, ‘Dave, I’m not wearin’ a top hat and I’m not carrying that case.’ It came time to open and it was time for the concert to begin, Louis to make his entrance, and he came in, there’s the top hat, the attaché case and he struts right by me and he says, ‘Pops, am I hammin’ it up enough to suit you now?’ ” There was no hamming when Armstrong reprised “They Say I Look Like God.” Before an audience, Brubeck still expected the lyrics to get a laugh, but once again Armstrong remained completely serious. “There wasn’t a smile in the audience, Louis had tears,” Brubeck remembers. “He took those lines that we thought would get laughs right to his heart and everybody in that audience felt what he felt.”61
The Real Ambassadors was a triumph for Armstrong, but because of Joe Glaser no film of the live performance survives. “Well, the reviews were fantastic,” Brubeck said. “[Ralph] Gleason and [Leonard] Feather—to give you an example of two people who weren’t too kind to me—they flipped over it. They had tears in their eyes after the concert, and said they felt it was the greatest thing ever done at Monterey. But Glaser wouldn’t allow me to have the TV crew turn the cameras on—and they were standing right there.”62 Glaser’s insistence on not filming The Real Ambassadors has deprived jazz fans of the chance of witnessing one of the most important evenings in the careers of both Armstrong and Brubeck, but the studio recordings are still in print and grow in stature with each passing year. Armstrong remained proud of the project, telling Feather, “It was five years ahead of its time and the big shots that buy shows for Broadway were afraid of it … I had to learn all that music, and I’d never done nothing at this kind before. Brubeck is great!”63 And Brubeck wrote: “When The Real Ambassadors was performed … the most critical jazz audience in the world rose as one body to give Louis Armstrong and the cast a standing ovation. It was an electrifying moment.”64
Between the studio recording of The Real Ambassadors in September 1961 and the Monterey performance in September 1962, Armstrong continued business as usual, touring both at home and abroad. Yet as much as he had traveled the globe, Armstrong regretted not being able to play at two destinations. “Two places,” he told Leonard Feather. “Russia and New Orleans. I haven’t been home to New Orleans since 1956, and I’ve turned down any number of offers, because I won’t go until I can take all my men.”65 “Sad, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve been all over the world with my band. In Wiesbaden, Germany, Lucille and I slept in the same bed the Kaiser and Hitler slept in. I’ve played for the kings of England, Sweden, Belgium, Holland; I’ve been invited to banquets with the president or prime minister of the countries I’ve visited. Yet I can’t take my own band to my own town.”66 Armstrong also publicly hinted at a never previously discussed longing: time off. “I’ll tell you, though, if I took any time off now, I’d want to take a whole year. I’d like to go to all the places I’ve worked and just listen. Let me hear the cats and catch the bands—let me be a civilian for a change! And there’s so many things I want to do with my tape library. I’ve got all kinds of history in there, and things we did after the sessions, and it all needs to be edited. I’d like to get me a secretary and put all that stuff in order. I don’t mean I’d retire. During the year off I’d warm up every day for fifteen minutes to keep my chops up to par.”
Before the interview came to a close, Armstrong told Feather, “You know, I’m serious about taking a year off. Of course, we have to plan it way ahead. We’re in San Francisco in January, then Sun Valley, then another tour of England and the Continent …”67 Except for his private idea about performing on Broadway in 1961, never before had Armstrong talked this way publicly, badly wanting a vacation but not having it within him to stop performing. Armstrong knew he was aging, something that was occasionally beginning to show in his live performances. A Coda magazine review of an Armstrong show in 1962 related what must have been a rough night for the trumpeter at the Brant Inn on July 18th.” The review read, “The evening was not one of the happiest ones for Louis looked very tired and drawn even before the dance started. Then midway through the evening he slipped and fell awkwardly. Although he finished the show without fuss he asked to see a doctor afterwards and complained that it hurt when he blew. X-rays revealed nothing. However much we love to see and hear Louis year after year, the grueling pace and miserable travelling conditions would tax the strength of a man half Louis’s age.”68
Joe Darensbourg recalled that Armstrong nearly got his wish at one point during his three years with the band. Armstrong, feeling a bit tired, was told by his personal doctor, Alexander Schiff, to take a break. “They told us that Louis was taking off for an eight-week Caribbean cruise with Lucille and that we was having a paid vacation,” Darensbourg said. “They paid us for the eight weeks, post-dated all the checks. Man, I started singing, I was so happy. Nobody in the band could believe it. A vacation with pay! I came on home and relaxed for about three weeks, just thinking about five more solid weeks, enjoying my swimming pool.”
As it turned out, things were too good to be true for Darensbourg and the rest of the band. “I didn’t take any jobs, just took my horn out and blew for fun, when here comes a call from the office saying to get ready to come back to New York ’cause Louis was itching to go back to work … He wasn’t having any fun on that cruise. We kept the money, although it wouldn’t have mattered about the money. Louis just loved playing that horn, he never really wanted to lay off. The guys once told me that Louis had the feeling that, if he ever had a long lay off, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to come back.”69 Jewel Brown says, “He worked so hard that we would beg for days off. And he loved working, he loved working.” Brown first visited Europe on two tours of the continent in 1962. She was thrilled by the experience: “Every single solitary place, everywhere, there was never not a packed house. Never, ever. It was amazing. Either they did good advertisements or there’s a lot of people during that time that plain old loved Louis Armstrong. And he gave them a show.”70
One member of the band who didn’t make the European trips was bassist Irv Manning. In Feather’s piece, Manning was full of compliments about his time with the All Stars: “My mouth still drops open at the fantastic conception that Louis has. And it’s a wonderful group to work in—all the guys are just like a family.”71 But Manning had a short temper that would often get the best of him, and he was thrown out of the band after an altercation with everyone’s nemesis, Frenchy Tallerie. “This Frenchy was a miserable guy, evil, and nobody in the band liked him,” Darensbourg wrote. “Why Joe kept him as the road manager I don’t know.” Apparently, Tallerie borrowed a dollar from Manning and refused to pay him back. “Eventually one thing led to another, Irv got mad and he pushed Frenchy on to a stanchion or something,” according to Darensbourg. “The floor had just been mopped and Frenchy slipped. Somebody told Louis that they had got into a fight and Frenchy was down on the floor.”72 Jewel Brown remembered Armstrong yelling, “ ‘[Manning’s] fired! Get rid of him!’ … And Pops didn’t want to know why or anything, that was it. That was it.” When she was asked whether Frenchy could be overbearing, Brown replied: “Yes, he was, yes he was, and nine times out of ten, Frenchy deserved it. But you’re supposed to have discipline as adults, and that was not the [answer], punching him out like that.”73
Manning was replaced by Billy Cronk, a veteran of such groups as Bob Crosby’s Bobcats and the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, who went to Europe with the All Stars. There was something curious about Armstrong’s European appearances in 1962, which are documented on film and audio tape: the set lists are repetitive. While no two set lists are identical, the pool of songs had dwindled. Almost every concert on this European tour relied on performances of Armstrong’s most popular tunes, among them “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” “Mack the Knife,” and “Blueberry Hill”; New Orleans favorites like “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “Tin Roof Blues,” and “Tiger Rag”; and the High Society numbers “Now You Has Jazz” and “High Society Calypso.” Armstrong was clearly intent on chiefly performing songs that accounted for his contemporaneous celebrity. His gambit was greeted by the rapturous delight of packed crowds everywhere, but back at the office Joe Glaser was worried about the criticisms of Armstrong always playing the same songs. “Joe Glaser wanted [the tunes] changed, but all of them was afraid to tell Louis,” Darensbourg wrote. “I’d go up to the office and Joe would say, ‘Why don’t you guys play some different tunes? Do you want to talk to Louis about it?’ ” But Darensbourg wouldn’t do it, and neither would anyone else, including Frenchy. What Louis did on stage was a subject that everyone knew was off limits. Armstrong’s previous manager, Johnny Collins, once made the mistake of trying to get Armstrong to change his program back in the early 1930s. Armstrong remembered his reaction in 1953: “I said, ‘Listen, cocksucker! You might be my manager and you might be the biggest shit and book me in the biggest places in the world but when I get out on that fucking stage with that horn and get in trouble, you can’t save me. So we’ll play THIS, THAT and …’ ”74 Surely, Glaser must have had similar experiences with Armstrong, so he wasn’t about to broach the subject again. But as Darensbourg admitted, “People used to criticize Louis for sticking to these songs, but he knew if we didn’t play them the audience would holler and demand them.”75 Recordings from the 1962 European tour do capture Armstrong occasionally playing unexpected tunes like “I Get Ideas” and “Jazz Me Blues,” but with less frequency. For the most part, he still played magnificently, but on other occasions he struggled a bit with his velocity. At one Paris concert, he even had difficulty with his “Indiana” solo. His sound was still huge, and he still had years of great trumpet playing left in him, but the first small signs of a decline were evident.
After returning from Europe in May, the All Stars had downtime of only one day before departing for South America. And so it went on for the rest of the year, the touring sometimes bordering on absurdity. As Darensbourg recalled: “Had some pretty crazy distances to travel … I know one time we flew from New York to Copenhagen for a few days just to play at the Tivoli Gardens for their anniversary, but the biggest jump we ever made was from Tokyo, Japan, to Houston, Texas, for some big oil tycoon’s daughter’s party at the Shamrock Hotel in Murchison.”76 Danny Barcelona vividly remembered a typical day of traveling with the All Stars. “So we got up early and, okay, Frenchy, the road manager, and Doc Schiff, everybody, baggage count at six, leave at seven … and then Louie gets down at eight! So we get on that bus and then stop on the way for lunch and then you’re in that city, and sometimes you don’t have the time to check in [at] the hotel, it was straight to the concert hall or whatever … Really, that’s part of it. And I mean it’s a whole bunch of them all at once, not just one or two at a time, you know. Yeah, we could do about thirty one-nighters straight in a row, or forty … One time we were finishing in Toronto, left at one o’clock in the midnight, you know, after midnight and got in the bus and went straight to the Waldorf-Astoria. We didn’t even have breakfast! I mean, we had breakfast when we stopped, but went straight to the gig! And now that’s rough. I mean, you know, geez, no shower, no nothing … I guess you get used to it, you know.”77 To Brown, the All Stars were “family” and Armstrong never once acted as if he were better than any of them. “Pops was right there with us,” she recalled. “He was never without us and we was never without him. He was constantly right there. We did everything together.”
By this point in his career, Armstrong had a pretty set routine, something witnessed countless times in the 1960s by his friend Jack Bradley. “He had a philosophy I believe probably from the old days of show biz … that the show is the ultimate thing and everything he did during the day was for the show and whatever appointments or whether he ate or whether he practiced, it was all geared to that,” Bradley said. “If showtime was at 8:00 say, he’d always be one of the first ones there … He’d be there at least an hour ahead of time and he had his whole ritual he’d go through with in his dressing room. On the counter, he’d line up his medicines and salves and creams and his handkerchiefs and his piles of samples of Swiss Kriss to give out and his 8×10 photos and everything had its place. And he’d do the same thing no matter where he went. He’d know when to go on and he’d very often be the first one in the wings before the rest of the band. And that’s what he’s here for and that’s what he wanted, to be straight.”78
Armstrong’s postshow routine was also set in stone. “So once the show was over, he’d very often announce, ‘Folks, thank you everybody and good night and Pops will be in the dressing room if you want any autographs,’ ” Bradley continued. “And then he’d sit at his—always, somehow, a little table would appear, not like a card table size, usually smaller. He’d always make sure there’d be one. He’d sit behind it. He’d line the people up. He’d have pictures, a sample pack of Swiss Kriss and with everyone, he wouldn’t just go, ‘Here.’ He’d go, ‘Hi,’ he’d greet them with a big smile and sincerity and say, ‘What’s your name?’ The people would be nervous as hell most times and he’d try to get them to relax. ‘What’s your name?’ Sometimes if he didn’t know how to spell it, he’d ask them and they’d tell him. Not that they expected their name on the picture, but he felt that was more personal and he strongly felt that without these people, he couldn’t exist, he wouldn’t exist and he owes them this and he didn’t mind doing it at all. And very often, it went for so long, the rest of his band would be back in the hotel in bed and Louie would still be doing that. So it shows you what kind of person he was. And he didn’t do it as a chore. He did it as part of his being. These were his fans. They were important to him.”79
Armstrong, ever on tour, was making so much money for Glaser and himself that the trumpeter felt no need to make new records. The year 1963 in Armstrong’s life was more or less lost in a haze of travel, so much so that few broadcasts and articles about him survive.
The band was still selling out every performance, but by year’s end it was clear that as busy as he had been, Armstrong had lived through the quietest period of his life. He had not recorded an album solely with the All Stars since 1959’s Satchmo Plays King Oliver. His albums in the 1960s so far were collaborations with Bing Crosby, the Dukes of Dixieland, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington. He had stopped recording the pop songs Decca had forced on him in the 1950s. He had not been in a film since Paris Blues in 1961. And he had not set foot in a recording studio for more than two years, since September 1961. Nonetheless, when he did again, Armstrong would find himself atop the music world at the unlikely age of sixty-three.