AFTER YEARS OF speculation and rumors, Louis Armstrong stood poised to pierce the Iron Curtain in early 1965. Though the All Stars never visited the Soviet Union, as had been assumed they would, they toured Prague, East Berlin, Bucharest, Belgrade, and Sofia from mid-March to the beginning of April, with a new trombonist, Tyree Glenn, who had joined the band in late February.
Russell “Big Chief” Moore had served the All Stars well for more than a year, but as Dan Morgenstern puts it, “Big Chief didn’t last long because Big Chief was Big Chief. Big Chief was huge. Big Chief was what we nowadays call obese. And he simply decided that being on the road at that pace wasn’t going to be good for him. He was absolutely right.”1 Moore remembered the last relentless trip from Japan to San Francisco to Iceland to the Virgin Islands as the one that did him in. He gave notice, and Glenn met up with the band in Memphis. “I told Tyree Glenn that I can’t take it,” Moore remembered, “I want to be home with my wife and my family. He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take over, Chief.’ ”2 Moore reconnected with his former employer Lester Lanin, with whom he remained well into the 1970s. Moore died in 1983 at the age of seventy; according to Morgenstern, “He was a good, good trombone player. Boy, I liked Big Chief.”3
In Tyree Glenn, the All Stars had a musician with impeccable credentials; he had had long stints with the orchestras of Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. Glenn could also double on vibraphone, and after a while he began taking vibes features with the All Stars. Glenn’s tenure got off to a rocky start, however, during his first rehearsal with the band. When Billy Kyle tried to teach him the same backgrounds that Moore had played, Glenn became peeved and said, “I’m not Chief, I’m Tyree Glenn. I’ll play my own background.”4 Armstrong, as always, must have seen something in the newcomer that others didn’t, because soon he made him his comic foil. While performing in Honolulu, Armstrong called up old friend Trummy Young and had him teach Glenn some of their old routines. Within a year or so, Glenn proved to be an adept partner, turning in fun versions of “Rockin’ Chair” and joining Armstrong in his revival of the routine with Velma Middleton on “That’s My Desire.” On trombone, Glenn wasn’t as brash as Young, but he had a fluent way of swinging and was a master of the plunger mute. Hardly the greatest trombonist in the history of the All Stars, Glenn was nonetheless crucial to the group in Armstrong’s twilight years.
The All Stars arrived in Prague on March 12 and were greeted by Prime Minister Alexander Dubcek. “That’s how big Louis was then,” Arvell Shaw recalled. According to Shaw, “The first night was reserved for the VIP’s, the diplomatic corps and everything. They had all the VIP’s, the diplomats from China, from Africa, from all over Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia. Everyone was there. They had three rows in front for the American Embassy staff and the American Ambassador.” But those three rows were empty; when Armstrong asked why nobody from the American embassy was there, the tour’s promoter replied that he didn’t know.
The All Stars received a massive ovation at the conclusion of their program. The next day, their success was celebrated in newspapers around the world. “The next night,” Shaw continued, “we walked out on the stage to play, the theatre was packed, and right in front the place was filled by the Americans with flags waving, calling ‘That’s our boy, Louis.’ Louis said, ‘Those jive turkeys, they thought I was going to bomb out, and they wouldn’t come to support me.’ But we laughed it out—it was a diplomatic thing.”5
Some of Armstrong’s Prague performances at Lucerna Hall were recorded, and they more than show that Armstrong was ready for the challenge of this trip. He dusted off demanding pieces such as “Royal Garden Blues” and “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” compensating for his diminishing speed with brute strength. In Prague an old song found its way back into Armstrong’s live repertoire: “Black and Blue.” Three versions survive from March 1965; all are moving experiences, but none more so than the one captured on video (March 22) in East Germany, the next stop on the tour.
The All Stars arrived at Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport on March 19 to greetings from a jazz band, Jazz Optimisten Berlin, in the form of a rendition of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” He had never performed in East Berlin before and not a single Armstrong recording was available for purchase in East Germany. None of this mattered: he was an icon, an institution, arguably the most recognizable entertainer on the planet. However, the East Berlin press was eager to see Armstrong for entirely nonmusical reasons: they wanted him to comment on the Berlin Wall and, more important, they hoped for him to comment on some explosive remarks he had made before leaving for Prague. In February, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had unsuccessfully tried to institute a voter-registration program in Selma, Alabama. Under the aegis of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, numerous marches were held in Selma, with more than 250 demonstrators arrested. On March 7, six hundred people left Selma to march fifty-four miles to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Early on, police had attacked the demonstrators, brutally beating many; at least sixteen had to be hospitalized. The horrifying images were broadcast on television for the world to see.
Louis Armstrong watched in a hotel in Denmark. When asked for his reaction, Armstrong said he “got sick.” As to why he’d never taken part in such a march, Armstrong allowed: “Maybe I’m not in the front line, but I support them with my donations. But maybe that’s not enough now. My life is music. They would beat me on the mouth if I marched and without my mouth I would not be able to blow my horn.” A newspaper reporter asked Armstrong whether, given his stature and celebrity, he could imagine being so attacked. “They would even beat Jesus if he was black and marched,” Armstrong cooly responded.6 He wondered: “How is it possible that human beings can still treat each other that way? Hitler is dead a long time—or is he?”7
Armstrong’s words made headlines around the world, as had his remarks regarding the Little Rock incident of 1957. But this time there was a difference: possibly as a result of prodding by Joe Glaser, Armstrong began to recant. On March 19, when he arrived in East Berlin, there was a press conference with local reporters eager for Armstrong to criticize the United States, which at the time did not recognize East Berlin. Armstrong was the first American entertainer to play there, and before he even blew a note, he was mired in controversy. “I’ve got no grievances,” he said when asked about how he had been treated in the American South. “I love everyone. All through the South, some of my greatest friends are white people.” Even more, Armstrong went out of his way to say: “I have been treated fine in the South. In the South, we stay in the best hotels and get courteous treatment. We play to mixed audiences there and some of my best audiences are in the South … both whites and blacks are my fans and I am not going to abuse either one.”8 Armstrong refused to comment publicly on the Berlin Wall. “I ain’t worried about the Wall, I’m worried about the audience I’m going to play to tomorrow night,” he told the press. “I don’t know nothing about no Wall. See, when you get in the concert hall, forget about everything and concentrate on Satchmo.” When the line of questioning didn’t cease, Armstrong turned frank: “I can’t [say] what I want to say, but if you accept it, I’ll say it: forget about all that other bullshit.”9 With those words, a deadly serious Armstrong stopped talking, lit a cigarette, and pointed at himself. Such testiness would have made headlines in the United States, but it didn’t make an impression in East Berlin. The Communist reporters were “visibly disappointed,” according to one account, but Armstrong was savvy enough not to add fuel to the fire of his Denmark quotes. As a black man from the United States performing in a Communist country, Armstrong was in a conundrum. When all was said and done, he just wanted to play his music; he felt better communicating with his horn than with mere words.
On the evening of March 22, 1965, Armstrong and the All Stars performed at the Friedrichstadt Palast, a program that was broadcast on both German television and radio. After opening with standards “Sleepy Time” and “Indiana,” Armstrong called for something special. “Thank you very much, folks. Here’s one of our recordings, a beautiful number called ‘Black and Blue.’ Yessir.” A murmur went through the audience; the choice of “Black and Blue” was a loud clarion call.
Originally from the 1929 Broadway show Hot Chocolates, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” was a dark-skinned woman’s lament about losing out to lighter-skinned women when trying to get a man. In July 1929, Armstrong, a cast member, had daringly recorded it for Okeh, stripping it of its womanly associations while turning it into essentially a powerful protest song. After Armstrong formed the All Stars in 1947, “Black and Blue” had become a mainstay. By the mid-fifties, Armstrong had recorded a definitive version for Columbia and had performed it in Ghana, moving Kwame Nkrumah to tears. But, inexplicably, Armstrong had stopped performing the tune, perhaps because he found it too confrontational, too controversial in the wake of Little Rock. From May 1956 until March 1965, only two versions of “Black and Blue” survive from countless broadcasts and concerts recorded, and in both instances Armstrong announced the song as a request. But the events in Selma had so infuriated him, and his East Berlin press conference could have been construed as so compromising, that on March 22, Armstrong chose to break his silence on certain matters with his music.
No sooner did he call the number than pianist Kyle began playing a solemn introduction. When the rhythm section kicked in, it was clear that they were playing “Black and Blue” at a tempo slower than that of any previous version. Back in the 1950s, “Black and Blue” had a hint of a bounce to it, and when Armstrong sang it, he couldn’t quite repress a smile. In East Berlin, the bounce was gone. Armstrong stoically played a full chorus of melody, pacing himself dramatically with sympathetic support from Glenn’s trombone and Shu’s clarinet. Armstrong stuck closely to the melody, holding the last note of each phrase and shaking it slightly for emphasis.
At the end of the chorus, Armstrong slowly made his way to the microphone. He stared at the floor and unburdened himself of a nearly inaudible sigh. As he reached the microphone, he gave his face a quick wipe with his handkerchief and proceeded to sing Razaf’s lyrics.
He sang the first eight bars hinting a smile, unable to mask his delight in the beautiful number, but there was none of the mugging and eyerolling routinely lambasted by younger black musicians in America. During the second eight bars, Armstrong’s smile began to fade, as he manipulated his handkerchief as a prop to dramatize the hurt contained in the lyrics. By the time he got to the bridge, his smile had disappeared. He now assumed the air of a preacher, pointing a finger skyward as if to say, “Listen up to my sermon.” In perhaps the most disturbing stanza of the piece, Razaf’s original lyrics ran, “I’m white inside / But that don’t help my case,” and that’s how Armstrong had sung it from 1929 through 1956. But by the time of his “by request” versions in 1959, Armstrong had made an important change to the lyrics, a change he retained in East Berlin. “I’m right,” he now sang, a telling alteration indeed. As Armstrong made his way across the bridge, he instinctively tried to smile but, engaged as he was in serious business, fought it off and finished out the bridge with a dramatic scat break delivered with a pained frown. He sang the last stanza as if to clarify what he had been unable to express to reporters only a few days earlier: “My only sin,” he intoned, “is in my skin.”
His smile reappeared at the end of the vocal; he was awash in the audience’s adulation. He took two steps backward and put the horn back to his lips. He wasn’t done preaching yet. He blew a reflective quote of a song he loved, “I Cover the Waterfront,” before quickly ascending into the upper register in a scorching manner. Refusing to peak too fast, he withdrew to his lower register for some somber, blues-infused phrases, his eyes closed, his horn pointing to the floor. He pulled the horn from his lips for a second, put it back, flickered his valves for good measure, leaned back and resumed playing. As the band began throbbing beneath him, Armstrong’s playing grew more intense. He closed out the bridge with a shattering tremolo, tension building as the rhythm section turned up the heat with a series of triplet accents.
The tension exploded when he began his final eight bars with a three-note phrase leading to a screaming high concert B—not the highest note he had ever hit, but arguably the angriest, the most passionate single note he would ever play. Back in America, avant-garde jazz was in its “New Thing” phase, younger musicians frequently unleashing their anger at racism by way of music full of instrumental screams and shrieks. The high B Armstrong played on “Black and Blue” rivaled their ferocity. As he hit the note, he was leaning back, his trumpet pointed to the heavens, his eyes rolling back into his head, his eyebrows furrowed—here was dangerous intensity personified. Arvell Shaw let out an emotional yell, urging Armstrong on as cameras caught drummer Danny Barcelona, laying down an unyielding backbeat, slack-jawed, agog at his boss’s impassioned outpouring.
Armstrong still wasn’t done. He continued to play in almost operatic fashion, nailing another high B along the way. He concluded with a signature chromatically ascending phrase, ending on a sky-high C, shaking it for all it was worth. The audience was beside itself, ecstatically shouting its approval. Armstrong beamed and started shouting back, mostly gibberish, at once as appreciation of their response and acknowledgment that he had just created something special. When he took what he thought would be his final bow that night, he was besieged by continuous applause for more than two minutes. He encored with “Hello, Dolly!” but still the East Berlin fans wouldn’t let him leave. He came out for bow after bow, finally appearing in his bathrobe. Louis Armstrong had breached the Iron Curtain, and “Black and Blue” was as powerful a musical statement about race as he would ever make.
Mindful of appealing to his East German audience, Armstrong eventually found time to visit the Berlin Wall. “This is where the truly musical mixed with that which was outside of the realm of music,” wrote Karlheinz Drechsel, a German jazz musician and journalist who had spent almost the entire tour with the All Stars.
There—in the shadow of the “Wall”—one could see not only Louis Armstrong the world famous jazz musician but an ambassador, a symbol of humanitarianism, of people living together in a life of liberty. Armstrong had perhaps never been so conscious of this as he was during that tour. His deep distress when he saw the inhumane reality of the “Wall” for the first time with his own eyes at the Brandenburg Gate made a very great impression on me, and his thoughtful words during the drive in the tour bus, “That’s even more terrible than Jim Crow! What cruel hardship and pain for millions of people! I will do my best to give my very best to make them happy. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”10
On the bus ride from Magdeburg to the Erfurt freeway, Drechsel witnessed a remarkable scene. “During a brief rest in a poor village pub whose ‘menu’ comprised nothing but sausage with or without bread the musicians suddenly found themselves surrounded by lively school kids,” he wrote. “The news ‘Louis Armstrong is sitting in the Konsum’ had spread like wildfire, followed by a turbulent autograph hunt using scraps of paper, beer mats, playing cards, copy books and the like. Louis Armstrong was literally surrounded, but his joy was obvious and, with careful lettering and the typical Satchmo smile, he let every kid have his ‘Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong.’ It was a wonderful, heart-warming scene.”
But Frenchy Tallerie busted up the scene, shouting, “Cut the crap immediately!” and telling the band members to “move your asses to the bus.” “Dead silence ensued,” Drechsel continued, “and then Louis Armstrong, with an aggressive outburst that was not his style anyway and especially unusual against a white man, said to the road manager, ‘We’re not in the States here. And even there you won’t be able to boss us around much longer! Get out: slavery is over once and for all. Listen here, the joy and happiness of these kids here are a thousand times more important to me than your orders. We won’t leave here before I’ve signed the last autograph!’ And that’s what happened.”11 Coincidentally or not, this would turn out to be Tallerie’s last tour with Armstrong, ending a rocky relationship that went back to 1942.
Armstrong wasn’t going to allow Tallerie’s antics to mar such a historic occasion. “Six years before his death, Louis Armstrong had once again reached a really impressive artistic zenith,” Drechsel wrote of the historic tour. “And the jazz audience in East Germany (where until then there had not been one officially issued Armstrong record) celebrated the ‘King of Jazz’ with an enthusiasm that had never been known before. No concert ended without standing ovations that went on for several minutes.”12
Armstrong was only back in the United States for a matter of days when he became the recipient of a major award. On April 13, Armstrong won a Grammy award for “Best Vocal Performance, Male” for the song “Hello, Dolly!” beating out Andy Williams, Dean Martin, João Gilberto, and Tony Bennett for the honor. Armstrong might not have known it at the time, but Joe Glaser campaigned pretty hard for this to happen. In late December 1964, Glaser received a phone call from George T. Simon, the esteemed jazz writer and president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, asking if Armstrong would be available to give out an award during the ceremony. Glaser didn’t think Armstrong should solely be handing out awards, he insisted that he should be on the receiving end of one. Apparently, Glaser used some pretty strong language, because minutes after the fractious phone call ended, Glaser composed a letter to Simon, apologizing for his emotional outburst, but continuing to hammer his point home.
I repeat and add to what I said, that it is a shameful situation when you see obscure artists, and Johnny-Come-Latelies [sic] who have gotten lucky with one record and who have not served the Public or the Industry as long as a man called Louis Armstrong, receive an award and Louis Armstrong’s latest record “Dolly” sold over two million, and one Million so far of the albums, should be asked to present an award to these questionable “hits.”
Glaser was particularly miffed that N.A.R.A.S. presented Bobby Darin with an award for his record of “Mack the Knife” during an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, but never bestowed such an honor on Armstrong. Glaser could not control his feelings, which eventually spilled out in a remarkable run-on sentence:
I appreciate the fact your organization has great merit, and I have the greatest respect and admiration for the people you mention who have made awards and presentations, but the important thing is who receives an award, not who gives it out, therefore when you asked that Louis Armstrong, who has one of the greatest hits on earth, to give an award, I had no alternative but to express myself as I did, even admitting it may be a secret who is going to get an award and who is not—from all indications it doesn’t appear as if a man of Louis Armstrong’s caliber, ability, and prestige is going to get anything, only lend his great showmanship to giving, and I for one would not want Louis Armstrong’s feelings to be hurt even though he is a Champion and one of the “greats” of the world.13
Glaser’s passionate appeal may or may not have had any effect on the voters, but the end result was another major award for Armstrong. Though it must have been nice to conquer the Iron Curtain and receive a Grammy all within a matter of weeks, this period served as something of a farewell to Armstrong at the peak of his powers. As it turned out, Armstrong’s fierce trumpeting during the tour had not been without pain. Within a week of his return to the United States, Armstrong underwent dental surgery, which required a long recuperative hiatus. With a mouth full of intricate bridgework, Armstrong’s trumpet playing would never again be the same.
While Armstrong recovered, the All Stars managed a rare vacation, six weeks off, from April 12 to May 24. It was then that Arvell Shaw left the band yet again to freelance, and was replaced by the very talented George James Catlett, better known as Buddy. Catlett was a product of the Seattle jazz scene, having jammed while still a teenager with Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, among others. Before joining Armstrong, Catlett amassed experience playing with the small groups of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Coleman Hawkins and with the Count Basie and Quincy Jones big bands. For Catlett, becoming an All Star was a dream come true, for he had always admired Armstrong profoundly. “I had seen him perform when he’d come to Seattle and I had his records,” Catlett said. “My first musical experience was my father had bought me a Czechoslovakian cornet and I had learned to play Louie’s ‘Back o’ Town Blues’ without knowing my scales or anything. So I could kind of feel where Louie was coming from.” Catlett never grew tired of listening to what Armstrong could do night after night with many of the tunes he himself had practiced. “Watching him style himself was something, like he would play ‘Hello, Dolly!’ or something like that until it was coming out of your ears and he would still come up with, every once in a while, a new note or an approach to his phrasing on tunes like that,” he said. “It was really something to experience listening to that.”14
Having recovered from his dental work, Armstrong led the All Stars back on the road for another grueling tour of Europe: London, Paris, Copenhagen, and Budapest, where they played to an outdoor crowd exceeding one hundred thousand. Upon their return to the States in mid-June, there was yet another change in personnel: Eddie Shu was replaced by Buster Bailey. Born in 1902, Bailey was a technically advanced clarinet player who had studied with Franz Schoepp of the Chicago Symphony, who would later be Benny Goodman’s teacher as well. Bailey had first met Armstrong when they played in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1923 and 1924 and then with Fletcher Henderson in 1924 and 1925. Bailey’s consummate virtuosity provoked some to complain that he didn’t swing. But after the bored Barney Bigard, the bland Joe Darensbourg, and the sometimes blasé Peanuts Hucko, Bailey was a godsend, one of the best clarinetists Armstrong ever played with; he turned “Memphis Blues,” W. C. Handy’s ode to Bailey’s hometown, into a memorable feature.
Bailey’s first night with the band was July 4, which Armstrong celebrated as his birthday every year. To honor the day in 1965, Armstrong performed three shows for twenty thousand fans at Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. The crowd was chiefly young people there to hear the man who had turned “Hello, Dolly!” into a hit. Armstrong didn’t mind; he was inspired by their enthusiasm: “Man, them kids are something else. Who say they don’t know good music from bad?”15
While the All Stars were on the road, the July 15 issue of DownBeat hit newsstands, featuring a “Salute to Satch” cover story together with tributes to the trumpeter, and a long interview with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Dan Morgenstern. “It’s wonderful—but nobody lasts forever,” Armstrong said of his fame before summing up his career. “After 52 years of playing, I had a wonderful experience for a man who came up from New Orleans selling newspapers and who just wanted to blow the horn … The people put me in my seat, and I’ll never let them down. And there’s no problem: they love music, and I love music too.” Regarding his critics, Armstrong was sanguine: “If you perform, you’re going to have your up and downs, but what is said about you, good or bad, is forgotten tomorrow. The public is ready for tomorrow’s news. That’s how fast our America is … it’s wonderful to be around and to see so many things happening with the youngsters. And you’re right in there with them. Today. That’s happiness—that’s nice. I don’t regret anything. I still enjoy life and music.”16
Critic Patrick Scott begged to differ. Reviewing a lackluster Toronto concert of July, Scott was struck by Armstrong’s seeming exhaustion; four days later, he dwelled on it some more in an article titled “An Ominous Streak Shows Up in Satchmo.” “I think it is a genuinely humble awareness of this universal affection that keeps this man going—and that eventually will kill him,” Scott wrote. “Even iron men grow rusty, and the first ominous streaks are beginning to show on Armstrong. The characteristic ebullience and effervescence were not in conspicuously large supply at O’Keefe Centre. He smiled his trademark smile (and rolled his eyes and shook his jowls and brandished his handkerchiefs) when the occasion demanded, but he spent much more of his time—right there on the stage, in front of all those people!—slump-shouldered against the piano, staring somberly at his shoes, or off into space. For the first time in all the times and places I have seen him he seemed to be uninterested, almost to the point of obvious boredom, in what was going on around him.” Scott concluded: “I would like him to stop being a musical zombie, and start to enjoy life—and his own work—again, and to hell with goodwill ambassadorships and ‘Mack The Knife’ and Tyree Glenn.”17
In Toronto, Scott had wanted to spend a day with Armstrong. Both Joe Glaser and Armstrong himself had agreed, but plans were scuttled when the above review appeared. Scott was cut off by Armstrong’s new road manager, Ira Mangel, who replaced Frenchy Tallerie after the Iron Curtain tour, for his unflattering piece. But Armstrong followed through, telling an irate Mangel to allow Scott and him privacy. Scott was then allowed to spend an entire evening in Armstrong’s company, from his late-afternoon wake-up through his entire preshow ritual of Swiss Kriss, vitamins, dinner, and warming up. Scott was with him throughout the show and watched him sit at a small table and sign autographs long after the final notes sounded. Scott’s resulting piece, “The Offstage Satchmo,” was a fascinating glimpse of Louis’s daily routine and featured numerous quotes from the trumpeter himself.
However, Scott left some things out of the profile, as he related elsewhere in the very same issue. “He also talked so freely and frankly that some things he told me will remain unpublished until he dies,” Scott wrote. “Others—such as the fact that he knows he is in a rut and intends to get out of it as soon as he can—gave me a rather eerie sensation, since I knew (but he didn’t) that I had just written a piece, already going to press, in which I had said that Armstrong was in a rut, and that he seemed determined to die in it. What he told me confirmed the first point—he even used the phrase ‘prisoner of this grind I’m in’—and proved me completely wrong on the second—which was the happiest discovery that I was wrong, I had ever made.”18
In fact, in the profile Scott quoted Armstrong as saying, “Gotta keep myself in shape for that grind. And not just for the grind, either. I wanna be in shape when I put down that horn. I’m 65 years old now, Daddy, and I sure as hell don’t figure to be playing that horn when I’m 70. That’s when I wanna be relaxin’ and enjoyin’ life, and I plan to be in shape to do that, too.”19 Not long after, Louis told Associated Press writer James Bacon, “Man, there just ain’t no days off. Just looking at that itinerary makes me tired.” Armstrong was about to embark on forty-two straight one-nighters in September without any sustained time off until January 1966. “I got 12 weeks off next January and I may just dig this retirement jazz for size.”20 There was now a buzz building, with numerous blurbs appearing in print throughout the country hinting that Armstrong was considering retiring. Scott even tracked down Armstrong’s second wife, Lillian Hardin, a driving force behind Armstrong’s career in the 1920s, who said, “But I’ll tell you one thing—and I hope it doesn’t sound like sour grapes, because it isn’t. If Louis and I had stayed together he’d’ve retired long ago. The first time he hit a bad note, that would have been it. Sure, he’s the greatest jazz musician that ever lived—but he’s the stubbornest, too. He should have quit long ago, and he’d be a happier man today.”21
Armstrong realized he had to intercede on all of this retirement talk. While in Eugene, Oregon, for a gig, he tried to clarify matters. “I told a reporter I thought it’s time to start taking things a little easier. You know, goof for three or four months, then lay off for three or four, but man, I’m not retiring.” In the wake of this statement, Scott went to press in October with what Armstrong and he had discussed in private: “His two greatest fears, Armstrong told me last July, were: a) that when it came right down to it he would be ‘scared stiff’ to tell his manager, Joe Glaser, that he wanted out; and b) that Glaser would die before he did—and ‘then what a hell of a mess I’d be in,’ ” Scott recounted. He added, “He knows he is not playing as well as he used to (which is why he is not playing as much), and he knows he is not going to improve with age. But this is not his chief concern.” Scott used Armstrong’s own words to describe his “chief concern.” “I don’t feel I have to prove anything now,” Armstrong said:
And I’ve been so tired for so long that I couldn’t if I had to. All I want to do is get the hell out of this grind while I still have my health, so Lucille and I can enjoy what’s left of our lives as civilians. I don’t want to be Satchmo any more. I can’t go where I want to go or do what I want to do. I don’t resent the acclaim—it’s been wonderful all these years—but we just haven’t had a life of our own. So mark my words: about a year and a half from now, old Satchmo is gonna disappear—me and Lucille will go underground for about six months—and when we come up again it’s gonna be as Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, civilians, period.22
Armstrong also told Scott his postretirement plans: “I’d like to give trumpet lessons to little kids,” he said. “I think maybe I could still show ’em a thing or two. But once I lay down that horn I’ll never pick it up in public again.” All the same, Armstrong was sure to insist: “But all this is just me talking to you, for now. Make all the notes you like, but please keep them in your pocket till I give you the signal. If Glaser ever knew what I was thinking—well, I just don’t know how I’m gonna get up the nerve to tell him. I guess maybe I’ll let Lucille do it for me.” Scott believed that Armstrong’s statement in Oregon was tantamount to his giving him “the signal.” This was his rationale for publishing their July conversation: “Armstrong has decided that he never will get up the nerve, and that he can’t, when the chips are down, let Lucille do it for him. Which means that the greatest performer that jazz has known will go on—and on and on—being a sad, scared Satchmo.”23
Scott’s article is singular in the body of literature about Armstrong published during his lifetime. Armstrong’s remarks contradict others he made privately and publicly at the time. Two weeks before Armstrong’s conversation with Scott in July, he was quoted as saying, “You don’t quit when you’re still strong and enjoy your work,” and “I love music just as much as when I first started to play.”24 It is conceivable that Scott caught Armstrong in the dumps in July. Armstrong’s trumpet playing was not the same after his dental surgery, and this must have depressed him greatly. He began cutting out some solos, while on others he changed some of his set patterns because he could no longer aim for the stratosphere. But as Lil Hardin had alluded, Armstrong’s stubbornness was legendary. He admitted as much in a letter to Lucille on September 24, 1965, when he related how a reporter from Life magazine had inquired about his dental work. “He really did Blush when I showed him my new Dental work with so many teeth missing—and this Big Ass removal Bridge I have in my mouth. He wondered his Ass off how ’n’ the hell Can you play with all that Bridge work into your mouth. I told him, there ain’t But one Game Sommitch in music and that’s Louis Armstrong.”25
As game as he might have been, after over fifty years of being able to do whatever he desired on his horn, Armstrong now found his chops deserting him at the height of his popularity. His fans still adored him, of course, as he related in a letter to Lucille from September 31, 1965, just days before Scott published Armstrong’s words, writing, “I am fine, doing Great. My public still loves me all the way.”26 But though the adulation was nice, Armstrong’s personal standard remained high, and the fact that he couldn’t get around the trumpet like he used to must have been crushing. There was probably nothing that scared him more, and it was in a depressed moment that he discussed quitting the business with Scott.
Oddly enough, for all the weightiness, Scott’s piece about Armstrong does not seem to have been picked up by any other news outlet or jazz magazine at the time. There is no record of anyone commenting on it.
Perhaps the article was ignored because the prospect of Armstrong’s retirement was inconceivable to all who knew him. When Jewel Brown was asked whether Glaser worked Armstrong unconscionably, she replied: “That’s what Louie wanted. And Louie wanted to die onstage like Big Sid Catlett.”27 Buddy Catlett agreed: “One of the things he used to talk about was he was going to die onstage.” As for Glaser pushing Armstrong too hard, Catlett said, “He wanted to be there. What else was he going to do? You can’t just go and pick the jobs you want. I don’t care if you’re Louie or whoever you are. If you want to play, you got to do that in order to keep some chops up. He couldn’t play two months from now if he hadn’t played at all.”28
Armstrong’s friend trumpeter Ruby Braff remembered a phase late in Louis’s life when the trumpeter became interested in situation comedies on television. “He was screaming about the situation comedies—he says, ‘Jesus Christ, I could make up twenty-five situation comedies with me, then go out on the road, put them all in the can.’ He said, ‘I don’t know,’ ’cause he mentioned Redd Foxx, he said, ‘he’s not as funny as the shit I know.’ He says, ‘We could have some characters,’ he says, ‘people would go insane. But nobody wants me to do anything but play.’ He wanted to do all kinds of shit.” When asked if Armstrong ever made his desires known, Braff said, “Yeah, he spoke up about it, but the thing is, there was so much quick money in his concerts every night and he was booked so far ahead—five, six, ten years ahead, man—that it was hard to separate anything already. It was very complicated. And part of it was his fault, because he insisted on never having a night off, which nobody knows about. He told Joe Glaser, ‘You ever give me a night off, go find yourself a new boy.’ Everyone thought that Joe was a guy that kept pushing him to work. Joe was trying to get him to stop working for four or five weeks at a time so he could figure out other things to do to make more money off of him. But Pops always kept the pressure on him. You know why? Every night was a party for him. For him to have four weeks of no parties was like ‘What are you doing me, a big favor?’ ”29
Whether the sentiments he expressed to Scott were heartfelt or not, Armstrong refused to relent: even as he was always on tour, he had not played in New Orleans, his hometown, in ten long years because of Jim Crow laws preventing integrated bands from performing publicly. Now when these laws had been repealed, Armstrong made a triumphal return to his native city to perform an afternoon concert on October 31 at the Loyola Field House, a benefit for the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Armstrong was greeted by a crowd of hundreds at the New Orleans International Airport (renamed the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in 2001). While being whisked around town in a motorcade, Armstrong reminisced a bit about his youth. “These are my old stomping grounds,” he said. “Everybody was blowin’ good stuff here when I was a kid.” Armstrong also reconnected with Peter Davis, the man responsible for teaching the troubled youngster how to play cornet while he was at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys as a teen. Armstrong told the eighty-seven-year-old Davis, “You sure taught us the rudimentals.”30
As 1965 drew to a close, Armstrong found himself in front of movie cameras again. He had a role meatier than he was accustomed to in A Man Called Adam, a film directed by Leo Penn and starring Sammy Davis Jr. as the title character, fictional jazz trumpeter-singer Adam Johnson, a bitter and angry man so unsympathetic that Howard Thompson concluded his review of the film by writing, “But it’s hard to appreciate a paranoid hero who is his own worst enemy, with more collected misery than even he can shake a trumpet at.”31 The film, however, gave Armstrong a rare opportunity for serious dramatic acting.
Although he appeared in over thirty films, Hollywood rarely utilized Armstrong’s acting abilities. “See, no one in America, unfortunately, knows what an actor he was,” Ruby Braff recalled. “They never found out he was one of the greatest actors that ever lived. Laurence Olivier acknowledged him. He said, ‘Him and Chaplin are two of the best actors I’ve ever seen.’ And that comes from a person who is not an idiot. I mean a man who could, in a studio, when the light goes on, a two-and-a-half-minute record, can make up a ‘Laughin’ Louie’ thing or anything and do a whole drama in three seconds, impromptu, do anything—they don’t have actors like that. He told me he was very frustrated about it.”32
In the film, Armstrong plays a thinly veiled version of himself, Willie “Sweet Daddy” Ferguson, an aging trumpeter whom Davis’s character treats poorly, regarding him as old-fashioned and out of date. Late in the film, Ferguson is seen sitting alone at a party, a poignant moment not unlike what Armstrong’s co-star Ossie Davis had witnessed on the set:
One day at lunch, everybody’d gone out. The set was quiet. As I came back to the set I looked up and there was Louis Armstrong sitting in a chair, the handkerchief tied around his head, looking up with the saddest expression I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. I looked and I was startled and then I started to back away because it seemed such a private moment, but he heard me backing away and he broke out of it right away, “Hey, Pops, looks like these cats are going to starve old Louis to death, hey, man, wow …” And everything you know, I went into it with him but I never forgot that look and it changed my concept of Louis Armstrong. Because I, too, as a boy had objected [to] a lot of what Louis was doing. I figured all them teeth and that handkerchief—we called it ‘ooftah,’ by which we meant you do that to please the white folk. You know, you make them happy and all that stuff, make us look like fools. But it was only then I began to understand something about Louis. He could put on that show, he could do that whole thing, because in that horn of his he had the power to kill. That horn could kill a man. So there was where the truth of Louis Armstrong resided. Whatever he was, the moment he put the trumpet to his lips, a new truth emerged, a new man emerged, a new power emerged and I looked on Louis for what he truly was, after that. You know, he became an angelic presence to me after that moment.33
In his private moments, the wear and tear of decades of one-nighters was beginning to take its toll on the aging trumpeter. The punishing life on the road was instanced by the tragic death of All Stars pianist Billy Kyle on February 23, 1966. Kyle collapsed on February 16 after a gig at the Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, Ohio. Kyle had a history of heavy drinking that had led to past battles with ulcers and ailments that would force him off the bandstand for weeks at a time, but by 1966 he was on the wagon. However, it was the middle of winter, and the All Stars were making another grueling tour, traveling from gig to gig in an unheated bus. By the time they reached Ohio, Kyle was already ailing. Catlett remembered this Ohio performance and Kyle’s condition well: “Number one, they had to help him up the stairs—there were some stairs to get up to the stage. And he was out of breath and couldn’t hardly make it. But he played everything he knew. It was just magnificent playing. That’s the way I heard it.”34 Jewel Brown knew something was wrong when the usually punctual Kyle did not come out of his room the following morning.
Dr. Alexander Schiff, who still traveled with the band, suspected misfortune. He called security to open Kyle’s room, and when they did, according to Brown, “it looked like they had slaughtered a hog. His liver had erupted. Blood was all over the place, from what I understand. I never shall forget, he lived for like a week or so and I understand they had blown balloons up in him in order to try to stop the bleeding or something there. And the night we were in—I forget what city we were in—we had to leave, and that’s when they got Marty Napoleon to take his place. And of course, Louie sent Marty Napoleon out, like, in a hurry, in a jiffy. And we never missed a gig or anything.”35
Even as the band continued performing, Kyle remained in hospital for a week. A preternatural chill overcame one performance, and it remained forever vivid to Brown. She recalls, “Pops started playing, out of the clear blue sky, Pops started blowing ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee.’ And when we came off the bandstand, Dr. Schiff walked up to Pops and told him, he said, ‘I just got a call. Billy just passed.’ So it’s like Pops felt it.”36 The official cause, according to the New York Times obituary, was “complications resulting from hemorrhaging ulcers.”37 Though Kyle was only fifty-three, thirteen years of nonstop traveling had aged him greatly, much as it had Velma Middleton, the only other All Star who died on the road.
Of the pianist, Brown said, “Billy Kyle enhanced that band and enhanced everything that Louie was doing. He was great. He was just absolutely great … He did so many pretty things on piano that pulled so much out of me that I didn’t even know I had … When he had a chance, it was pretty. Just absolutely pretty.”38 To Danny Barcelona, Kyle was “a sweetheart, a gentleman all the time.”39 His elegant, Earl Hines–inspired playing was a perfect fit in the small group, and his simple but effective arrangements greatly enriched the All Stars’ book. Was Kyle’s fate a harbinger for the sixty-five-year-old Armstrong? Armstrong seemed unconcerned, for he and the All Stars spent February and March wending their way through Michigan, Illinois, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles.
It was around this time that Armstrong sat down for an extensive and expansive interview with Richard Meryman. Meryman edited Armstrong’s responses into an autobiographical first-person account of Armstrong’s life. Titled “An Authentic American Genius,” the piece was the cover story of the April 11 issue of Life magazine. It allowed Armstrong to offer candid viewpoints on a variety of subjects, including his relationship with Joe Glaser. On that subject, Armstrong unburdened himself of complex feelings: “I’ve always known my manager Joe Glaser is the only cat that dug Louis Armstrong—like a baby or a little dog always knows the one who ain’t slapping him on the rear all the time. So I go all out to do everything I possibly can to keep him satisfied.”40 Glaser was given his own sidebar in the piece, in which he said of Armstrong, “I guess to me he’s like a son,” before likening him to “a brother. He’s like a younger brother with me.” Glaser also admitted, “I build my whole business, my whole career on my success with Louis Armstrong.” He took credit for turning Armstrong into more of an entertainer: “An entertainer, singer, and musician can make ten times as much money as an ordinary trumpet player. So I used to say, ‘Louis, forget all the goddamn critics, the musicians. Play for the public. Sing and play and smile.”41 But Armstrong had never been “an ordinary trumpet player.”
Armstrong himself discussed his role as entertainer: “See, I think when I commenced to put a little showmanship in with the music, people appreciated me better … long time there we just played one number after another—just another blasting band—and pretty soon you got everybody’s backs. I was blowing my brains out, standing on my head trying to please the other musicians. And the first thing those cats ask, ‘Was you high? Sho’ was blowing, man. Was you high?’ Here you trying to show your art-tis-try and this son-of-a-bitch come up with a bust right off the reel and drag you. And I come to realize the audience, the ordinary public, thought I was a maniac or something, running amuck. I forgot them and it didn’t do me no good.” And so it was that Armstrong always put his audience first. “So I found out, the main thing is to live for that audience. What you’re there for is to please the people—I mean, the best way you can. Those few moments belong to them.”42
But most conspicuously, some of the tiredness and regret that permeated Patrick Scott’s 1965 profile were present in the Life profile. Armstrong dwelled on growing up in New Orleans, but he also spoke philosophically about his later years. “I’m always wondering if it would have been best in my life if I’d just stayed like I was in New Orleans, having a ball … I never did want to be no big star. Some people say, ‘Shoot, he wants to be a big deal, an individual,’ and even from your own musicians you won’t get that same warmth. And all those beggars with their phony poor this, poor that, always got their hand out every time they catch you. What do they do when I ain’t around?” Armstrong addressed his relentless touring: “And this life I got, few can do it, making those gigs sometimes seven days a week—feel like I spent nine thousand hours on buses, planes, getting there just in time to play with cold chops, come off too tired to lift an eyelash—nothing but ringing and twisting and jumping and bumping.”43 Yet Armstrong was quick to point out that he wasn’t complaining. “Don’t get me wrong … I ain’t lazy, I’m grateful. I’ve had some great ovations in my time, had beautiful moments. But seems like I was more content, more relaxed growing up in New Orleans—just being around, playing with the old timers.”44
Meryman’s profile was long to begin with, but he published an extended version of it five years later in which he conveyed Armstrong’s state of mind during this period with quotes on even more serious subjects. Speaking of old timers, Armstrong also discussed his favorite subject, his New Orleans mentor Joe “King” Oliver. Armstrong always spoke of Oliver in happy, reverential terms, but now, as his health and playing ability began to fade, Armstrong began to focus on Oliver’s tragic ending. “See, I don’t never forget what happened to Joe Oliver,” he told Meryman. “By the time he got to New York, they had to tell him he ain’t got nothing to offer. He’d aged up, lost that certain something—the reflexes around the lips … Didn’t have an agent to look after him. Nobody never did stick with him.”45 Armstrong was particularly disgusted by how young musicians treated Oliver, taking advantage of him, laughing at him, even taking his food. “Pulled him down like a barrel of crabs,” he vented. “They should have glorified the man, ’cause he represented so much.” Clearly, Armstrong saw a parallel in how he was being received by young musicians. But most cryptically, he hinted at his own death: “But if I do play till I faint and fall out with a heart attack—wouldn’t get no credit for that,” he told Meryman. “Nooo. They going to say what a darn fool he was. What’s the use of ripping and running and batting my brains out and killing myself. And pretty soon it’s going to be, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is it.’ ”46
Between the Patrick Scott article and the Life cover story, a fair amount of bitterness and a whiff of mortality had crept into Armstrong’s words, something that was not lost on those close to him. When the Life magazine story was published, Jack Bradley wrote to a friend, “We agree with you when you say that you felt Pops’s Life mag. article had bits of bitterness in it. Unfortunately, for the past year or more Pops has developed this attitude and undoubtedly for very good reasons—we know he has been having painful and bad trouble with teeth and chops—and Glaser still cracks that whip—not allowing Louis time to get dental work done properly—with Louis still doing one-nighters although, thank God, not as many as he has done all his life. Still not time for him to mend body and soul.”47
Armstrong finally got some respite from touring during the unusually relaxed summer of 1966; he and the All Stars remained in New York from July through September. The band was appearing in a revue called Mardi Gras at the Jones Beach Marine Theater. Forty years later, Danny Barcelona was still mystified by so long a stretch without one-nighters. “Yeah, we were there through, would you believe, sitting down for three months?” he remembered. “The whole summer, man—Jesus! Actually unbelievable, you know?”48
Armstrong was happy to be a part of the show because it featured Guy Lombardo’s orchestra. The revue, produced by Lombardo with choreography by June Taylor, had a second act depicting New Orleans in 1905. Armstrong and the All Stars played for thirty minutes each night, after which there was a grand finale uniting the All Stars and Lombardo’s orchestra. Of the experience, Armstrong said, “Nice working for Guy Lombardo. I always said he was best.”49
During the Mardi Gras run, Armstrong found success with two more Broadway show tunes. First up was “Mame,” his final recording for Mercury, which aped the “Dolly” formula to a tee. Jerry Herman, who had written “Dolly,” had a new musical opening on Broadway in May, Mame. Once again, to help publicize it, Armstrong agreed to record the theme song, which would soon appear at number sixty on the Cash Box singles chart. Like “Dolly” it’s catchy—banjo and all—but Armstrong’s trumpet is absent. “Mame” quickly lost steam and progressed no further up the chart, but it was a big enough success to become part of the All Stars’ stage repertoire.
A few months later, Armstrong was back in the recording studio of Columbia Records, which had released many an Armstrong classic in the 1950s. It was ironic that Armstrong returned to the label in 1966, because this would have been the tenth and final year of the ten-year contract George Avakian tried to get Armstrong to sign in 1956. Who knows how history would have changed if Armstrong had stayed with one label—a label that took so much care and consideration over his music—for all those years? Even though Avakian was no longer there, Columbia still treated Armstrong with more respect than Mercury, allowing him to record a complete instrumental in King Oliver’s “Canal Street Blues.” It was an odd choice in the middle of all of Armstrong’s attempts to land another pop hit, but it made for one of Armstrong’s finest latter-day recordings. With his superhuman chops finally showing a bit of mortality, Armstrong was forced to more or less invoke the ghost of Oliver, his mentor, playing straight lead for five ensemble choruses. Armstrong doesn’t play any real high notes, but he obviously had Oliver in mind as he fell back on every lesson the King taught him while he was growing up in New Orleans; a very soulful record. That same day, Armstrong also recorded a terrific Broadway show tune, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s “Cabaret,” which fit like a glove. Armstrong knew he had a winner, and just two weeks later, he debuted it on The Ed Sullivan Show, the same night the Rolling Stones performed their famous version of “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Here, Armstrong’s trumpet is extremely weak, with such a delayed entrance, one can see him mentally preparing himself before uttering the first, fragile statement. He recovers and again comes up with something pretty, but it’s clear that at this point in his career, Armstrong’s singing had officially overtaken his powers as a trumpet player. Fortunately, his singing is wonderful as he puts “Cabaret” over like a pro, muttering to Sullivan as he approaches him, “Show business!”
Armstrong offered a lot of “show business” in his television appearances of the period. His popularity was at such a high level that he had begun doing TV commercials for products such as Schaefer beer and Suzy Cute dolls. (On the latter, Armstrong sang and danced with a group of young girls, uttering such lines as “You can bend her legs, bend her arms, and bathe her too!”) He appeared with Bing Crosby on a September episode of The Hollywood Palace and sang the corny lyrics of “Muskrat Ramble” and “Let’s Sing Like a Dixieland Band” with Crosby, as well as performing “Cheesecake,” a bizarre novelty number he made for Mercury. Armstrong’s personality was just as vivacious as ever, but with his trumpet prowess lessening and his new material being of inferior quality, his television appearances were becoming more and more cartoonish. Thus, if you were a young, impressionable person watching Armstrong sing “Cheesecake” or dance with little girls on a Suzy Cute commercial, it was easy to think of him as being more of a funny old out-of-date entertainer than a jazz pioneer. Nevertheless, if these fans went to see Armstrong perform live, they might have been surprised at how much great music he still created night after night. He now had more hits than ever before, and no show would be complete without “Hello, Dolly!” “Mack the Knife,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Mame,” and “Cabaret.” But he also still had that trumpet, and though he couldn’t quite execute anything he wanted to as he had just a few years earlier, his sound was still unlike anything else in jazz, and he continued to push himself on numbers like “The Faithful Hussar” and “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” Jazz historian Ed Berger caught Armstrong live around this time and remembered, “I saw him in person for the first and only time in 1966, when he appeared in Lambertville, NJ with the All Stars for a one-nighter. I was 17, and had recently heard Dizzy, Miles, Jonah Jones and the Ellington orchestra in person. Armstrong gave his usual show which included a lot of novelties and features for the sidemen. But when he played, it was a revelation. Even at that stage, it sounded as if he were playing a different instrument, so commanding was his presence and the depth of his sound.”50