New Orleans tour explores origins of jazz
NEW ORLEANS — Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong’s last cornet is here, and so is his first one, a silver, battered horn on which he practiced exhaustingly while a resident of the Colored Waifs’ Home in the early 1900s. The jazz legend said he recognized his old horn by grooves he had decades earlier cut into the mouthpiece.
This setting is New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, a fairly young park — created by legislation in 1994 but not opened to the public until the spring of 2000 — which has been on a long, slow march to reaching final fruition.
It also is an unusual property in the U.S. National Park Service, the only one to commemorate a singularly American art form, one which evolved and came of age in the Crescent City. Marc Becker, who owns the local Bieville House hotel nearby, notes that in a city where on any given night music wafts through the steamy Southern air from innumerable clubs, the site is the the Big Easy’s best kept secret.
Armstrong has a dominant presence in one of the four-acre park’s two visitor centers, a former U.S. Mint. Armstrong was, after all, an icon, goodwill ambassador and one of the best horn players who ever lived. But before there was Armstrong there was Buddy Bolden.
Just after we set off on the “Origins of Jazz” walking tour through the southeast corner of the French Quarter, we pause at the former location of the long lost Funky Butt Hall. Inter- preter Dave Thomas tells us that if it wasn’t for Bolden, we might never have heard of Louis Armstrong.
Buddy Bolden, says Thomas, was playing jazz before it was called jazz.
Late in life, Armstrong recalled standing outside the Funky Butt and listening to Bolden’s music when he was a kid. Thomas says Bolden is credited as the first horn player to take traditional songs and improvise, playing the popular numbers of the day with a little twist of the blues. The reaction of the gathered crowds, mostly African-Americans, was spontaneous dancing. This was the primeval ancestor of jazz.
Because both jazz and the record industry were toddlers at that time, many early recordings have been lost. If there are any existing recordings of Buddy Bolden, no one knows where they are. Early jazz historians in the mid- to late-1920s tried to rectify that by bringing some of the veteran musicians into the studios to rerecord some of their best.
One, Thomas says, was trumpet player Joe “King” Oliver. Oliver was happy to do so, but by then he had lost his teeth. A set of dentures was crafted, and soon Oliver was once more blowing his trumpet and making records to be saved forever. Thomas takes out a tape deck and plays a few jazz samples including “West End Blues” and “Dippermouth Blues” to give us a taste of Oliver.
Meanwhile, live music awaited us back at the Old U.S. Mint, where interpreter and jazz pianist Jon Beebe renders a wide range of numbers on an upright piano decorated with vibrant depictions of Louisiana’s national parks. When you visit you might hear anything from “St. James Infirmary Blues” to “I’m Walking” to “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?”
“The great thing about jazz is that it came from a melting pot of ideas and musical genres and then helped to inspire even more,” says Beebe.
Live concerts take place upstairs in the old mint. On the day of our visit, the Bradley University Jazz Band played a variety of standards.
A temporary exhibit in the mint is dedicated almost entirely to Satchmo. Despite jazz greats such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Armstrong is still the name most identified in much of the world with the genre. Vintage photos, film and video clips, and copies of Armstrong’s hand-written manuscripts tell the tale of Satchmo’s world beyond music to his side projects (a baseball team), his endless appetite and his experiences with Jim Crow. The segregationist attitude that permeated the South through most of Armstrong’s life is one reason why after leaving New Orleans as a young man for Chicago, then New York, Satchmo rarely returned to his hometown.
Upon his release from the Colored Waifs’ Home, Armstrong took a job on a junk wagon owned by Alex and Tillie Karnofsky, and late in life he recalled his experiences on paper. Poring over portions of a copy of 77-page original manuscript Armstrong wrote replete with cross-outs, insertions and pen points of blue and black, one can imagine the elderly Armstrong letting his memories flow onto the page quickly.
“They (the Karnofskys) were always warm and kind to me,” he wrote, “which was very noticeable to me, just a kid who could use a little word of kindness … I fell in love with their food from those days until now. I still eat their matzos. My wife Lucille keeps them in the bread box so I can nibble on them any time I want.”
If Armstrong had a passion that rivaled music it was food, especially New Orleans food. An marker reads that the cornet player remembered how his mother could take 15 cents down to Poydras Market and buy enough ingredients to cook a full meal. He often signed letters, “Red beans and ricely yours.”
What does that have to do with jazz? It’s part of one big spicy New Orleans concoction, something one would be hard pressed to find elsewhere.