That Old Black Magic: Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and the Golden Age of Las Vegas Read Online Free Page B

in New Orleans. “The jazz bands are making music for themselves because in New Orleans music is not a luxury, like it is in most American cities. It’s a necessity. This is where New Orleans musicians excel.”
    It was this spirit, or life force, as much as the brilliant music, that Louis Armstrong introduced to the rest of America. He was ready to be the messenger.
    “Armstrong’s reach for urban sophistication in New Orleans had prepared him well for Chicago and New York,” wrote Thomas Brothers in
Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans.
“Was playing like this produced independently in any other southern city? It is highly unlikely. Oliver, Bechet, Armstrong, and their fellow New Orleanians sounded completely fresh when they traveled around the country because no place else had the same social and musical history, with all its layers of patronage and practice and its sequential development, the heyday of which coincided with the first twenty-one years of Armstrong’s life.”
    Armstrong had played with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band for a year and then joined the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. He was also recording as a sideman to Clarence Williams and Bessie Smith as well as Oliver and Henderson. Then, for three years beginning in 1925, Armstrong made the “Hot Fives,” the nickname that has been given to a series of records with a small group that “are by general consensus the most influential of Armstrong’s accomplishments and quite likely the most significant body of work in all of jazz,” according to Will Friedwald in
Jazz Singing.
“Here he changes the face of jazz on every conceivable level. Even before 1928, Armstrong’s achievements begin to elevate from a purely musical plane to a social one, as he launches the shifts in the music that would enable it to become both a high-brow art form and an international pop entertainment.”
    The latter would become especially important to Louis Prima. Armstrong blazed a trail of jazz–popular song fusion (and, later, comedy) that Prima traveled enthusiastically. Both men would be ridiculed and even dismissed by some critics for straying off the jazz reservation into pure entertainment territory. While this sometimes angered Armstrong, Prima couldn’t care less, and pleasing his audience without worrying about aesthetics became his North Star.
    That Armstrong was changing the substance and to some extent the face of American music in the early to mid-1920s was perfect timing for Prima. Back in New Orleans, Angelina’s insistence that her children not go to work so that they could concentrate on school and homework and classical music led, ironically, to Leon and Louis having more time than most youngsters to roam the streets to seek out the hottest music and the best performers in the French Quarter and other neighborhoods. The brothers, in their early teens, could not get into the nightclubs, but they could catch glimpses of the stage through doorways, and many times it was enough to stand outside and listen.
    For two impressionable adolescents, the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Bach could not possibly compete with the sounds of homegrown Dixieland jazz being altered and energized by African American blues and gospel. Despite his shy demeanor, Louis was a restless youngster, and the music simply made him feel that he wanted to dance and that he could connect to others through music. A violin just wasn’t going to do that for him. And, he couldn’t help but notice, women went wild over horn players.
    Leon was the first to defy Angelina. He told his mother that he would no longer take piano lessons. Worse, he was going to learn how to play the cornet. That is what Armstrong and Bechet and Oliver played, and audiences loved them. Piano was fine for ragtime, but that music was out and jazz was in. Angelina was aghast, but Leon was adamant. Papa Anthony most likely had no opinion on the matter and just wanted peace in his house.
    Soon after, Louis made the same