Happy Thanksgiving

I’m almost done reading Terry Teachout’s marvelous biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.  As Satchmo himself might say, “it gassed me, man, it gassed me!”  One of the threads that runs through the book is Armstrong’s life-long willingness to play with white musicians – a trait not shared by very many back in the 1920’s and 30’s.  “Those people who make the restrictions,” he said, “they don’t know nothing about music, it’s no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow.” Armstrong greatly admired Bix Beiderbecke, though the two great trumpeters played together only once (oh, to have been a fly on the wall at that jam session!) before Bix drank himself to death in 1931 at the age of 28.  Armstrong’s All-Stars were integrated for their entire twenty-five year existence.  Perhaps the white musician he had the longest association with was Jack Teagarden, the greatest of all jazz trombonists.  The men had a mutual admiration for each other’s playing, as Teachout explains here:

“Knockin’ a Jug” was Armstrong’s first recording with a mixed band, as well as the first of innumerable occasions on which he would perform with Teagarden.  Their paths had crossed a decade before in New Orleans, where the trombonist heard Armstrong on a Streckfus riverboat: “The boat was still far off.  But in the bow I could see a Negro standing in the wind, holding a trumpet high and sending out the most brilliant notes I ever heard….It was Louis Armstrong descending from the sky like a god.” Armstrong felt the same way about the slow-moving, hard-drinking, virtuoso with patent-leather hair who played the blues in an easygoing yet idiomatic style rarely heard from white musicians in the twenties.  “The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone,” he wrote in Satchmo, “I had goose pimples all over.” It was fitting that their first encounter on record should also be one of the earliest mixed-race recording sessions since both men were devoid of racial prejudice. “He was from Texas,” Armstrong said, “but it was always, ‘You a spade, and I’m an ofay. We got the same soul.  Let’s blow.’” 

“Knockin’ a Jug” was recorded on March 5, 1929 in New York.  I can’t find an embeddable version of the entire song but you can go here to listen to that historic – not to mention marvelous – recording. 

And here are Armstrong and Teagarden twenty-nine years later performing “Jeepers Creepers”:

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.