Original subtitles

[applause]

Now, good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm Mr. Armstrong,

and we're gonna swing one of the good ol' good ones for you.

Beautiful number-- I cover the waterfront, I cover the waterfront.

w. Marsalis: You talk about Louis Armstrong, well...

You're talking about

the deepest human feeling,

and the highest level of

musical sophistication.

So that's a rare occurrence in the history of music.

He was chosen to bring the feeling and the message

and the identity of jazz to everybody.

He brought it to all the musicians.

He brought it all over the world.

He's the embodiment of jazz music.

[Pianoflagplaying]

Narrator: The 20th century was not even two decades old

when the first jazz record reached the public in 1917.

But the world had already changed

in ways no one could have predicted.

And the unspeakable carnage of world war I

was only part of that change.

In the new, modern world, human beings could fly.

X-ray photographs could see through skin to bones.

Sigmund Freud, listening to his patients as they spoke to him

from a couch in his office,

found new ways to understand the human mind.

Pablo Picasso painted his subjects from every viewpoint--

all at once.

And Albert Einstein described a continuum of space and time.

Jazz music became the soundtrack to that modern world,

and in america, it became a national craze.

Thanks to the phonograph record, it was everywhere.

Black and white bands delighted dancers--

and outraged their elders--

in every American city.

The music was still closely linked to ragtime--

brassy and hard-driving.

Solos were virtually unknown.

But when the first world war came to an end

and the "jazz age" started in earnest,

the music began to change.

The story of jazz became the story of two great American cities:

Chicago, where black New Orleans musicians found fame

and a new white audience,

and New York, where two very different neighborhoods--

Times Square and Harlem--

played host to a group of dedicated musicians,

each struggling to find his own distinctive voice.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C.,

the privileged son of middle-class parents,

a debonair piano-playing high school dropout

named Edward Kennedy Ellington,

was beginning to write his own music,

and wondered whether he could succeed as a musician

in the wider world.

And in New Orleans, where it had all begun,

a teenage boy was playing cornet in honky Tonks, pulling in crowds,

beginning to make art out of the turbulent, often violent world around him.

His name was Louis Armstrong,

and to many, his extraordinary genius

would seem like a gift from god.

Jacobs: I don't believe Louis Armstrong was a real human being.

I believe, I still believe, that god sent him to this earth

to be a special messenger, to make people happy.

You see, I think that

music is therapy.

For me, music has always been as intoxicating

as alcohol, or a reefer,

or any kind of drugs.

The sound of music could stimulate in me

love, happiness, creativity,

and I think Louis Armstrong was sent here as a messenger of the good lord

to make people happy.

And that's what he dedicated his life to doing.

Giddins: Armstrong is, in a way,

American music's bach, American music's Dante,

American music's Shakespeare.

Why? Because he comes at a point

in the music's history.

It's not the birth of the music;

it's been around for 30 years.

But it's the moment when it becomes an art form.

He is the figure who codifies, who assimilates everything that's happened before,

and he shows where the future is going to be.

[Basin street bluesPlaying]

The trumpet is a sacrificial instrument.

It's the most difficult of

the wind instruments to play,

it's the most demanding,

and he played it with a power

that it never had before, and has not had since.

I don't mean people don't play higher than he played.

But the sheer force and power that he played with,

nobody--i mean, he was like the--he was it.

Narrator: Although he always believed that his birthday was July 4, 1900,

Louis Armstrong was actually born on August 4, 1901,

in a section of New Orleans so violent

it was called "the battlefield."

His father, a day laborer named William Armstrong,

had left the family, and his children rarely saw him.

His mother mayann was only 16 when he was born,

and she sometimes worked as a prostitute

to support herself and her children.

W. Marsalis: Louis Armstrong talks about how sometimes

he didn't know what he was going to eat,

and that sometimes they were on a level of poverty

where he didn't know what was going to come next.

He was used to his stomach growling.

Knife fights, gun fights, razor fights--

this is the environment that Louis Armstrong grew up in.

He saw a certain side of life.

But he saw everything in that side of life.

He didn't see the cliche like what we'd write about.

He didn't see that side of life

from the standpoint of an outsider

who's, "oh, this is such a terrible thing."

He saw the whole thing of it.

He saw the humor in it,

the beauty in it, the ugliness of it.

He saw it all, and he understood it all.

[Texas moaner bluesPlaying]

Narrator: At the age of 7, he went to work for the karnoffskys,

a Russian Jewish immigrant family,

who delivered coal to the prostitutes of storyville.

Louis rode in their wagon,

and blew a long tin horn

to let the karnoffsky's clients know they were coming.

W. Marsalis: You have to think about a little kid

that realizes something is wrong.

And they don't know what it is,

but soon they realize that what's wrong is the color of their skin--

being called "nigger,"

seeing grown men called "boy" and addressed in a disrespectful fashion.

And then, into this environment comes somebody

who's like the people that you have seen degrade all the other people you know.

But all of a sudden, they're nice to you.

They invite you into their home.

They try to look out for you, and "have you had something to eat?"

It's then, with the karnoffskys as a boy,

he understands, well, we're all human beings.

Narrator: Mrs. Karnoffsky insisted he eat a good dinner

every evening before going home,

and Armstrong never forgot the family's kindness to him.

All his life, he would wear a star of David,

and Cherish Mrs. Karnoffsky's lullabies.

One day, Louis spotted a battered cornet in a pawnshop window

and asked the karnoffskys to advance him the $5.00 to buy it.

[Home sweet homPlaying]

"After blowing into it a little while," Armstrong remembered,

"I realized I could play Home sweet home...

then, here come the blues."

The first time he touched the trumpet he sounded great.

I'm sure of that.

He just was one of those people who had the spirit--

the spirit was in him.

And that understanding that comes from the creator of humanity--he had that.

He knew he was good, you know.

He did know that.

He said, "what I have is

god-given." that's what he said.

And he'd always say, "can you imagine me and Gabriel up there?

I'm gonna blow him out of the clouds."

He'd say that all the time, too.

[Make me a palle Playing]

Giddins: It's a general rule that children look for heroes.

They look for people to emulate.

And in that community, at that time,

you were going to either emulate the guy with the pistol

who, you know, whipped his whores in the bar in front of everybody

to show what a man he was,

or the musicians,

because the musicians were very highly respected.

They were an essential part of the community.

Every family function from a birth, to a Sunday picnic, to a funeral,

was a musical event.

Musicians were important.

They dressed well, they were treated well.

Narrator: At age 11, Armstrong dropped out of school for good,

formed a vocal quartet that sang and danced

on the street corners of black storyville,

and listened to the new jazz music that was everywhere around him.

But Armstrong also got into trouble.

"I remember running around with a lot of bad boys

which did a lot of crazy things," he said,

and in 1913 he was arrested

for firing his stepfather's pistol on new year's Eve.

Man: January 2, 1913.

6 white boys were arrested in canal street for disturbing the peace.

The most serious case last night was that of Louis Armstrong,

an 11-year-old negro,

who discharged a revolver at rampart and perdido streets.

Being an old offender, he was sent to the colored waif's home.

New Orleans Times picayune.

[my marylanPlaying]

Narrator: Within a few months of his arrival at the colored waif's home,

Armstrong was the best cornet player in its marching band,

even though its manager was convinced that no boy from "the battlefield"

would ever amount to anything.

Soon, he was the leader.

When Armstrong led the band through his old neighborhood for the first time,

"all the whores, gamblers, thieves, and beggars were waiting for the band

"because they knew that mayann's son would be in it.

They ran to wake up mama, so she could see me go by," he remembered.

"They never dreamed that I would be playing the cornet,

blowing it as good as I could."

Man: He was marching along with the band,

so we got up real close to him

to see if he was actually playing those notes.

We didn't believe he could learn to play in that short time.

I can still remember he was playing Maryland, my Maryland.

and he sure was swingin' out that melody.

Zutty singleton.

Narrator: The onlookers were so proud to see that "little Louis"--

someone from their neighborhood-- had done so well,

that they dropped enough coins in the boys' hats

to pay for brand-new instruments and uniforms

for the whole band.

The only way to sum up music--

it ain't but two things in music: Good and bad.

Now if it sounds good, you don't worry what it is.

Just go on and enjoy it, see what I mean.

Anything you can pat your foot to is good music.

Narrator: In 1914, the year the first world war started in Europe,

Louis Armstrong was released from the waif's home.

[Krooked blu Playing]

He began playing in parades and dance halls

and in seedy bars frequented by a rough and often notorious clientele.

There was funky Stella, and cross-eyed Louise,

roughhouse camel, cocaine buddy,

and black Benny Williams, a 6-foot-6 sometime parade drummer

who acted as young Armstrong's protector for a time.

His new "friends" showered him with new nicknames--

"rhythm jaws," "gatemouth,"

"dippermouth," and "satchelmouth."

He played his cornet whenever he got the chance,

and astonished older musicians with his tone, his power,

and his musical ideas.

W. Marsalis: The thing that made him so great as a musician

is that he heard what everybody was playing.

And not only did he hear what they were playing,

well, he heard what they were Try Ingto play.

And all of that he played.

And people loved him because, you know, they could feel that coming out of him.

So he might be with black Benny, or old stinky rag,

or some of all these different characters that he was around,

and they would call him "little Louis"--they loved him.

Narrator: Armstrong loved listening to jazz:

The kid ory band,

mutt Carey,

bunk Johnson,

Freddie keppard,

and Sidney bechet.

But of all the bands Armstrong heard,

it was the one led by the cornetist "king" Oliver

that meant the most to him.

Joe Oliver was a tough band leader--

"rough as pig iron," one musician said.

He had begun his career as a trombonist,

then switched to the cornet

and became a perennial favorite at one of the city's toughest clubs,

Pete lala's, in storyville.

Armstrong remembered delivering coal

to one prostitute who lived next door,

and lingering as long as he could

just to hear Oliver, his idol, play.

[Dippermouth blu Eplaying]

So king Oliver would create vocal effects like this one.

Giddins: Oliver was a big, impressive-looking man.

He had a gorgeous sound.

He had a lot of authority, and he knew how to put together a band.

And Oliver obviously liked him.

Armstrong was allowed to carry his trumpet, which was an honor,

and I think he took him kind of under his wing.

Narrator: "I loved Joe Oliver," Louis Armstrong said.

"He did more for young musicians than anyone I know of."

Between engagements, Oliver would sometimes stop on the street

and offer Armstrong advice on how to play.

Armstrong: We'd be walking up rampart street

and run into Joe Oliver.

We might have a lesson or a piece of music

that was buggin' us.

And I'd say, "papa Joe, how do you divide that?"

He'd stop, no matter where he was going, and show it to us,

while the rest of the musicians would say,

"boy, I ain't got no time!

Breaking my neck to get to the eagle saloon," see?

That's why we all love Joe Oliver.

Narrator: In 1918, the year American troops went to war,

king Oliver left New Orleans for the big city of Chicago,

and Armstrong took over as cornetist in his old band.

His reputation grew,

and soon he, too, had offers of work from out of town.

But Armstrong had no thought of ever leaving New Orleans.

He was married now to an ex-prostitute named Daisy,

and besides, he had seen too many other musicians fail.

"Wasn't nobody going to get Me To leave New Orleans," he said,

"but papa Joe."

[Potato head blu Eplaying]

Armstrong spent the next 3 summers playing aboard steamboats

plowing up and down the Mississippi,

from New Orleans all the way north to St. Paul, Minnesota,

but always back home again.

Armstrong remembered that "we were the first colored band

to play most of the towns at which we stopped."

The white people, "the ofays," he said,

"were not used to seeing colored boys blowing horns

"and making fine music for them to dance by,

but before the evening was over, they loved us."

When his boat tied up at Davenport, Iowa,

a 17-year-old high school student named bix beiderbecke

heard him play-- and never forgot it.

Neither did a young Texas trombonist named Jack teagarden,

who happened to be standing on the New Orleans levee one moonlit evening

when he heard the distant sound of a cornet

from somewhere across the water.

[Cornet continues playing]

He couldn't see anything at first,

just the vague form of an excursion boat

gliding toward him through the mist.

But the sound, growing louder as the boat neared shore,

was unlike anything he had ever heard before.

[Cornet continues playing]

It was Louis Armstrong, he remembered,

"descending from the sky like a god."

Early: Jazz seemed to so much capture the absurdity of the modern world,

because of course the modern

world had become absolutely

absurd because of world war I.

Narrator: As Americans prepared for war with Germany,

African-Americans living in Harlem

persuaded the governor of New York

to Grant them their own unit:

The 15th infantry regiment.

They would also need their own regimental band.

The man who was asked to lead it was James Reese Europe,

the best-known orchestra leader in New York,

who had begun to incorporate elements of jazz

into his infectious, syncopated ragtime music.

[My chocolate soldier Sammy bo Yplaying]

[La marseillaisPlaying]

The regiment arrived in France on new year's day, 1918.

Europe and his men played The marseillaise With such drive and excitement

that the waiting French crowd took a while to recognize it.

American officers were so impressed with Europe's unique sound

that they sent the band on a tour of army camps and French villages.

They played French and American marches,

"plantation melodies,"

and the song Europe had made famous--

the Memphis blues.

[Memphis blu Playing]

Man: With a soul-rousing crash of cymbals,

cornet and clarinet players began to manipulate notes

in that typical rhythm which no artist has ever put down on paper.

Then, as the drummers struck their stride, their shoulders shaking in time,

the audience could stand it no longer.

The "jazz germ" hit them

and it seemed to find the vital spot,

loosening all muscles and causing what is known in American

as an "eagle rocking it."

And I am satisfied that American music

will one day be the world's music.

Private noble sissle.

Narrator: French and British band leaders were convinced

that Europe's men were using trick instruments.

Otherwise, they said, such sounds were not possible.

[Explosions]

On April 20, 1918,

lieutenant James Reese Europe accompanied a French night patrol

across no-man's land under heavy enemy fire,

and became the first African-American officer to face combat during the war.

The men of the 15th regiment would survive 191 days of fierce combat,

receive the Croix de guerre,

and be chosen by the French high command

to lead the allied forces to the rhine.

By the end of the war, 171 men of the 15th infantry

were decorated for bravery,

more than from any other American regiment.

The men took special pride in the name the French gave them:

The hellfighters.

[That moaning trombo Nplaying]

And when they came home at last in February 1919,

for a victory parade up fifth Avenue to Harlem,

new yorkers, black and white,

poured into the streets to cheer them.

That spring, Europe and his hellfighters band cut 24 records,

and made a triumphant tour of the country,

spreading their hot new music

and drawing big, cheering, integrated crowds

everywhere they went.

W. Marsalis: Well, James Reese Europe is similar

to many of the great figures in American music

in that he's always trying to synthesize elements around him

that seem to disagree.

And when people start to hear this band, the concert band,

which is usually playing in that kind of strict, stiff way,

playing this loose, kind of grooving, lilting fashion,

they can't believe what they're hearing.

Man, everybody is going crazy,

and James Reese Europe is looking at the response of the people,

and he's saying to himself, "let's do this some more."

Narrator: James Reese Europe had big plans for peacetime:

To merge jazz and ragtime

into a wholly new kind of African-American music.

"We won France by playing music which was ours,

and not a pale imitation of others," he said,

"and if we are to develop in america,

we must develop along our own lines."

[Memphis blu Playing]

Narrator: On the morning of may 9, 1919,

Europe was in Boston, scheduled to lay a wreath

at the base of the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts volunteers,

the first black regiment to fight in the civil war.

But the evening before the ceremony,

Europe was confronted by one of his drummers,

a high-strung man named Herbert Wright.

The two men had words.

Wright accused his boss of treating him unfairly,

then suddenly stabbed Europe in the neck with a pen knife.

That night, James Reese Europe bled to death.

The loss was incalculable, said the new york Times.

"ragtime may be negro music, but it is Americ Annegro music,

"more alive than much other American music;

"and Europe was one of the Americans

who was contributing most to its development."

The city of New York gave him an official funeral--

the first ever granted to a black citizen.

Thousands of mourners, black and white,

turned out to see the procession pass from Harlem

down the West Side to St. Mark's episcopal church.

"He took the colored of this city from their Porter's places," said the priest,

"and raised them to positions of importance as real musicians."

[Military drums playing]

The cheers that had greeted the "hellfighters" did not echo long.

The ku klux klan was on the march now,

in New York state, and new england, and Washington, D.C.,

as well as in the old confederacy,

determined to crush the aspirations of every minority.

During the summer of 1919,

African-Americans were their most frequent targets.

More than 70 blacks were killed by white mobs

during the last 9 months of the year--

10 of them returning soldiers, still in uniform.

Man: We return from the slavery of uniform,

which the world's madness demanded of us,

to Don the freedom of civil garb.

We stand again to look america squarely in the face.

This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed,

is yet a shameful land.

It lynches.

It disenfranchises its own citizens.

It encourages ignorance.

It steals from us.

It insults us.

We return from fighting.

We return fighting.

Make way for democracy!

We saved it in France,

and by the great jehovah,

we will save it in the u.S.A.

Or know the reason why.

W.e.b. Du bois.

[Salty d Playing]

Narrator: Out of the continuing violence against African-Americans,

a new assertiveness grew.

Man: The Old Negro goes.

His abject crawling and pleading have availed the cause nothing.

Harlem Crusader.

woman: The new negro, unlike the old time negro,

does not fear the face of day.

The time for cringing is over.

The Kansas city Call.

narrator: The national association for the advancement of colored people

launched a nationwide crusade against lynching.

Marcus garvey, the black nationalist leader,

called upon his people to abandon any hope of help from white america

and look to themselves.

"No more fear," he said,

"no more begging and pleading."

Everywhere, African-Americans began to build their own institutions--

banks, businesses, baseball teams.

And black writers and artists and musicians

now began to talk of a cultural rebirth.

Early: You had people who created a music that's really celebrating,

in its own way, Democratic possibilities--

liberation, freedom of the spirit--

who really hadn't experienced everything

that Democratic society had to offer,

but who could look around and see the promise embedded in the society.

Jazz is a kind of lyricism about the great American promise...

And our inability to live up to it, in some ways.

[South Carolina charleston Playing]

Man: Jazz is the product of a restless age:

An age in which the fever of war

is only now beginning to abate its fury;

when men and women, after their efforts in the great struggle,

are still too much disturbed to be content with a tranquil existence;

when freaks and stunts and sensations

are the order--or disorder-- of the day;

when painters delight in portraying that which is not,

and sculptors in twisting the human limbs into strange, fantastic shapes;

when america is turning out her merchandise at an unprecedented speed;

when aeroplanes are beating successive records,

and ladies are in so great a hurry

that they wear short skirts which enable them to move fast

and cut off their hair to save a few precious moments of the day;

when the extremes of bolshevism and fascism

are pursuing their own ways simultaneously,

and the whole world is rushing helter-skelter in unknown directions.

Giddins: Then in 1920, the best thing that could have happened for jazz,

they passed the most idiotic law in the history of the United States:

Prohibition.

Well, from a handful of saloons around the country,

you now have thousands and thousands of speakeasies,

especially in all the major cities.

I mean, at one point in New York City alone,

Manhattan had 5,000 speakeasies.

And in the competition, you want to bring in people, you have music.

So suddenly, there's work--

there's tons of work for jazz musicians.

Also, prohibition is loosening up morals.

It's doing exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do.

Women, for example, did not drink in saloons.

They sure drank in speakeasies.

So the jazz age became a kind of umbrella term

for this whole loosening up,

this whole lubrication thanks to prohibition,

when everybody was drinking more than they should

just to defy an absolutely unenforceable law.

Man: Amid this seething, bubbling turmoil,

jazz hurried along its course,

riding exultantly on the eddying stream.

Nevertheless, the end of civilization is not yet,

and jazz will either be trained and turned to artistic success

or else vanish utterly from our midst as a living force.

But even if it disappears altogether,

it will not have existed in vain.

For its record will remain as an interesting human document--

the spirit of the age written in the music of the people.

R. W. S. Mendl, The appeal of jazz.

narrator: America was jazz crazy now.

But the jazz most Americans were crazy About

was still primarily a novelty music:

Frenetic...funny...

The perfect accompaniment for fast dancing and high times.

It would take the soaring genius of musicians like Louis Armstrong

to broaden its message, deepen its emotions,

turn it into art.

[Piano playing Black beauty]

Duke Ellington: My story is a very simple story.

You know, it's like once upon a time,

a very pretty lady and a very handsome gentleman

met and fell in love and got married.

And god blessed them with this wonderful baby boy.

And they held him in the palm of the hand,

and nurtured him and spoiled him

until he was about 7, 8 years old.

And then he put, they put his feet on the ground,

and the minute they put his feet on the ground, he ran out the front door,

out across the front lawn, out across the street.

Anyway, the minute he got on the other side of the street,

somebody says, "hey, Edward, up this way."

And the boy was me, incidentally.

[Audience laughter]

And the guy from the next corner says,

"hey, Edward--right.

"Go up there and turn left. You can't miss it."

And it's been going on ever since.

That's the story, that's my biography.

[Laughter]

Narrator: On April 29, 1899,

at 1212 t street

in a comfortable, middle-class, black neighborhood

in northwest Washington D.C.,

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born.

He would one day be hailed as the greatest of all American composers,

jazz music's most prolific-- and least knowable--genius.

His father, James Edward Ellington,

was a Butler who sometimes catered at the white house.

He was a man of modest means,

but raised his family, his son said,

"as if he was a millionaire."

His mother, Daisy, was utterly devoted to her son,

and she would always remain the most important person in his life.

"As though I were some very, very special child," he remembered,

"my mother would say, Edward, you are blessed!"

and when I asked him how his

a bad boy, if he ever did

anything, you know, if he was

reprimanded, what kind of kid

were you, you know. And he said,

"joya, I was raised in the palm of the hand."

He said, "my mother never let my feet touch the ground."

Narrator: Daisy hovered at his bedside whenever he fell ill,

took him twice each Sunday to the 19th street baptist church,

and saw to it that he took regular piano lessons.

M. Ellington: My grandfather must have exhibited

some abnormal quality from the very beginning

to his mother and his father,

and I think his mother was

really listening, and she

recognized that there was

something different about him.

And she was going to give him every opportunity

to use this difference

and to take advantage of it.

My mother used to buy sheet music

and play it on the piano,

and I'll always remember her playing Meditations.

it used to make me cry.

That's a picture of my mother over there on that wall.

This was taken after she moved to New York.

Narrator: Daisy told her son he must allow nothing to stop him.

Unpleasant facts and potential barriers

were simply to be ignored.

He could do anything anyone else could do.

And because shebelieved that,

Ellington would always believe it, too.

His 8th-grade teacher at William Lloyd Garrison junior high school

emphasized proper speech and good manners.

"As representatives of the negro race,

we were to command respect for our people," Ellington remembered.

"They had race pride there, the greatest race pride."

It really had a great deal to do with racial prejudice,

these manners you were taught.

You would be taught--you...

Your manners, your sense of

what you are capable of

will carry you past these slights and insults.

Always carry yourself as if you're above them,

because, in fact, you are.

He had that sense of himself right from the beginning,

and if he hadn't had that sense,

he would never have been able

to accomplish what he did,

because he had to push through

so many obstacles,

and he had to learn so much himself

in order to do what he did.

And in the end, he left us with this enormous body

of absolutely superb music.

[Gladysplaying]

Narrator: Ellington was getting another kind of education as well.

He may have been brought up in a respectable middle-class family,

but at 14, he secretly began visiting

frank holiday's pool room at 7th and t streets--

and slipping into the gayety burlesque theater after school.

Ragtime piano players became his heroes.

Ellington spent hours leaning over the piano

with "both my ears 20 feet high," he said.

He loved playing the piano

because girls seemed to be attracted to piano players

and Hewas attracted to girls.

Ellington began to dress with such precocious elegance

that friends and family alike

started to call him "the Duke."

And he also began to compose his own music.

His first piece was called Soda fountain rag.

the soda fountain rag?

sure.

I can't play it anymore, it's too hard.

[Soda fountain r Aplaying]

Narrator: Soon, he dropped out of school

and formed his own group, the Duke's serenaders.

Whenever he was scheduled to appear in a club or dance hall,

he sent a friend ahead to open the door and announce,

"get out of the way, 'cause here comes the Duke!"

His elegance-- and eager salesmanship--

got him jobs playing ragtime and sweet dance music

at country clubs, embassy dances,

and white Washington's most elegant parties.

From the first, Duke Ellington seemed able to move effortlessly

among the city's many worlds--

rich and poor, black and white,

and all shades in between.

M. Ellington: Age, nationality, race, types of music--

anything that had a label,

he did not want to have anything to do with.

If he were to compliment someone,

the best thing he could say about them was that they were beyond category.

Categories to him were something to be ignored,

completely ignored.

[I'm coming virginiaPlaying]

Narrator: In January 1923, Duke Ellington,

married now and with an infant son,

paid his way into the segregated section of the Howard theater

to hear the New Orleans master Sidney bechet.

Ellington never forgot what he heard that night.

It was "all soul," he said.

"All from the inside."

Bechet seemed to be "calling somebody," whatever he played.

"It was my first encounter with the New Orleans idiom," Ellington remembered.

"It was a completely new sound and conception to me."

As the fervor of the "jazz age" accelerated,

Ellington's own career was beginning to take off.

But he was frustrated playing the kind of music

Washington society wanted to hear.

He yearned for something more,

knehe hadad something to say,

began to look for new worlds to conquer.

[Faint train whistle]

Bowie: Louis Armstrong was one of my first idols,

and I really idolized Louis,

and I wanted to be like Louis.

And I read this story of how

king Oliver had called him up

to come up to Chicago to play with him.

So whenever I would practice,

I would practice with my horn aimed out the window,

in hopes that Louis would drive by and hear me,

and hire me to come play with his band.

And Louis never came by.

[Jazzin' babies blue Playing]

Narrator: On August 8, 1922,

Louis Armstrong boarded the Illinois central at New Orleans,

bound for Chicago.

He was 21 years old, separated from his wife,

and finally going to join his idol, king Oliver.

Giddins: The only person who could have brought him out of New Orleans

was king Oliver.

So when he got the telegram from Oliver:

"Join me at the Lincoln gardens in Chicago,"

his mom packed him a trout sandwich,

he got on the train, and he was gone.

Narrator: He carried only his cornet case

and an old valise that held his patched, threadbare tuxedo.

His mother, mayann, made sure that he was wearing long underwear.

She had heard that where He Was going,

even in midsummer, it was cold.

Armstrong was joining an exodus of African-Americans

in flight from the suffocating poverty

and repressive Jim crow laws

that continued to grip the deep south.

Since the beginning of world war I,

hundreds of thousands of men and women

had boarded trains and headed north

in search of jobs and freedom.

It was called "the great migration,"

and most rail lines led to Chicago.

Terkel: Chicago, to many black people,

especially following world war I, early twenties,

it was the place to go.

People in the fields would hear the whistle

of that Illinois central, going

from New Orleans to Chicago.

Chicago! That where it is!

Chicago, where the work is-- the stockyards, the steel mills,

the farm equipment, the heavy industry.

Sandburg's poem may have been corny, but true.

Chicago--"hog butcher for the world"--

there was jobs at the stockyards.

"Stacker of wheat," "center of nation's railroads,"

a thousand passenger trains each day passing through Chicago.

Pullman car porters, of course, and chefs,

and working the tracks,

and of course, the steel mills.

Chicago was the place where you could get a job possibly,

but life would be Different.

narrator: It seemed to an anxious Louis Armstrong

that he had never been so far from home before,

and when he stepped down at 12th street station,

and no one was there to meet him,

he asked himself if he had made a mistake leaving New Orleans.

The tall buildings intimidated him;

he remembered wondering if they were all "universities."

Giddins: Now he gets to Chicago,

and he gets off the train,

and everybody's like giggling when they see him

because he looks like an undertaker.

He's wearing a box-back black coat, a suit,

and his hair is kind of combed in the front

and he really doesn't understand city ways yet.

It took him about two minutes to become the king of the city,

but that's another story.

[Just go Playing]

Narrator: He asked a redcap how he might find Joe Oliver.

The man, who had been told by Oliver to look out for Armstrong,

put him in a taxi and sent him along to the Lincoln gardens,

an ornate dance hall at 31st and cottage grove,

in the heart of the south side--

the lively, sprawling neighborhood

where thousands of black newcomers from the south had settled.

When he got to the Lincoln gardens

and heard the music drifting out onto the street,

he went in and said to himself,

"no, I ain't supposed to be in this band.

They're too good."

But then, Oliver spotted him.

"You little fool," he said. "Come on in here."

"I was home," Armstrong remembered.

Joe Oliver's band would remain Armstrong's home--

his training ground and His"university"--

for two years.

With Armstrong in the group, king Oliver's creole jazz band never sounded better.

The two men perfected a duet style

by which Armstrong seemed instinctively to know

just what his boss was about to play,

and was always ready with the perfect complement to it.

Nothing like it had ever been heard in Chicago before.

Armstrong: The word had spread around:

Joe Oliver got a little second cornet player,

and they making breaks together

and doing a lot of things together--you got to hear him.

I listened to Joe Oliver, and I learned the way he played,

and I practically know everything he played,

so I put notes to it.

Surprised him, how I could make duets to whatever...

[Scats]

I'll make a duet to that!

And all the musicians thought that was great,

and they tried it and everything,

but they didn't concentrate like we did.

They couldn't do it unless they wrote it down.

But we didn't write anything, never did write it down.

Narrator: News of what Oliver and Armstrong were doing at the Lincoln gardens

spread all across the city,

and soon, a few white listeners came to hear them, as well.

[Snake r Playing]

Man: As the door opened, the trumpets--

king and Louis, one or both--

soared above everything else.

The whole joint was rocking.

Tables, chairs, walls, people moved with the rhythm.

It was hypnosis at first hearing.

Armstrong seemed able to hear what Oliver was improvising

and reproduce it himself at the same time.

Then the two wove around each other,

like suspicious women talking about the same man.

Eddie condon.

Narrator: One dazzled young musician remembered

there was so much music in the air

that if you held up a horn, it would play by itself.

[Snake r Continues]

On April 5, 1923,

king Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and the creole jazz band

took the train from Chicago to Richmond, Indiana,

home of gennett records.

Richmond was not especially friendly territory for jazz--

or black Americans.

Much of Indiana was controlled by the ku klux klan.

But now, Louis Armstrong was about to be recorded for the first time.

Giddins: So they go into the recording studio,

and the first thing that they notice--

this is one of the great mythological tales of early jazz--

is that--the band is used to record around a horn,

and then you would cut the sound into a wax disk.

They couldn't work with Armstrong standing around the horn

because he overpowered everybody else in the band,

so he had to stand 10, 15 feet behind the rest--

they had to open the door and have him in the hallway

so that his sound would be balanced against the other musicians.

They make a record--and I think this is unquestionably

a landmark moment in the history of jazz--

called Chimes blues.

[chimes bluePlaying]

Armstrong is assigned, as his first solo, the trio strain.

He's not required, or asked,

nor do they desire him to improvise a single note.

But he plays this trio strain with such bravura,

and such rhythmic intensity,

that when you listen to it, you hear the future.

It's more intense and exciting than all the improvisation

that the entire ensemble is doing around him.

And that Might, That holy sound that he has,

at that moment, you know that something is in the works,

and it's never going to be contained.

And it's only two years later that he finally goes into the studio under his own steam

and virtually codifies what jazz is going to be for the next half-century.

[Chimes belPlaying,ng, Armstrong trumpet solo]

[Trumpet solo continues]

Collier: And I think what you finally have out of this

is what musicians call "telling your story."

You're supposed to tell a story.

You're supposed to be saying something personal,

and this is what you have with Louis,

this quality of...A human being standing there talking to you

and telling you a really coherent and fascinating story.

That, I think, is the essence of Armstrong's genius.

When the word first traveled about Louis Armstrong--

man, there's this trumpet player you have to hear,

he's from New Orleans and nobody can believe it,

I heard him on the riverboat.

You heard him on the riverboat?

Oh, it's unbelievable, the sound and such and such.

Now he's in Chicago.

But now when those records started to come out,

well, then the rest of it is history.

You could hear it-- everybody heard it.

[Keep off the grassPlaying]

Woman: Chicago, January 21:

Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls

through the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music

of jazz orchestras,

according to the Illinois vigilance association.

In Chicago alone, the association's representatives

have traced the fall of 1,000 girls in the last two years

to jazz music.

New york American.

not that the early recordings captured jazz real well,

but it spread jazz.

And people learned from the

recordings, more people were

able to hear this music.

You weren't just--

and this made jazz seem that much more

like a virus or a disease,

which is what the people who hated jazz said.

You know, "this is a disease, it's coming at us, infecting the country."

[The one I love belongs To someone elsPlaying]G

man: If you ride northward the length of Manhattan island,

going through central park and coming out on seventh Avenue

or lenox Avenue at 110th street,

you cannot escape being struck by the sudden change

in the character of the pple you see.

In the middle and lower parts of the city, you have, perhaps,

noted negro faces here and there.

But when you emerge from the park,

you see them everywhere.

And as you go up either of these two great arteries leading out from the north,

you see more and more negroes,

walking in the streets, looking from the windows,

trading in the shops, eating in the restaurants,

going in and coming out of the theaters,

until, nearing 135th street,

90% of the people you see,

including the traffic officers, are negroes.

You have been having a glimpse of Harlem,

the negro Metropolis.

James weldon Johnson.

Narrator: The real migration for African Americans continued,

and by 1920, New York was home to more blacks

than any other northern city, including Chicago.

Most of them lived uptown,

in a particularly beautiful old neighborhood called Harlem.

It was the home of the national association for the advancement of colored people.

The urban league had its headquarters in Harlem.

So did Marcus garvey's universal negro improvement association.

The writer James weldon Johnson,

the poet Langston Hughes,

the writer zora neale hurston,

and the scholar and civil rights activist w.E.B. Dubois

all lived in Harlem, as did many other artists

eagerly examining what it meant to be black and American,

Jazz musicians were drawn to Harlem, too.

There were plenty of theater and nightclub and dance hall jobs--

and Broadway and the record companies were only a subway ride away.

But to many middle class blacks, jazz was an embarrassment--

a vulgar, low-life music,

unworthy of a race now committed to uplifting itself.

But jazz could not be stopped.

[Carolina shouPlaying]

Man: Let the blare of negro jazz bands...

Penetrate the closed ears of the colored, near-intellectuals

until they listen and perhaps understand.

Let them cause the smug negro middle class

to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers,

and catch a glimmer of their own beauty.

We younger artists who create

now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.

If white people are pleased, we are glad.

If they are not, it doesn't matter.

We know we are beautiful

and ugly, too.

The Tom-Tom cries and the Tom-Tom laughs.

Langston Hughes.

Narrator: The musical heroes of Harlem

were the masters of a dazzling virtuoso piano style--stride.

"It was Orchestr Al piano," one of its stars remembered,

full, round, big, widespread chords moving against the right hand."

Its practitioners called themselves "ticklers,"

but the nicknames they awarded one another--

"the bear," "the beetle," "the beast," "the brute"--

were warlike, befitting the perennial piano wars called "cutting contests"

they waged among themselves.

[The charlestoPlaying]

James p. Johnson was the elder statesman,

a composer and conductor as well as a pianist,

who had made something altogether new out of ragtime.

He had, in fact, written the tune that would define the jazz age,

and his playing had helped inspire

a young Duke Ellington to become a musician.

Johnson was shy and soft-spoken most of the time,

but he loved combat with other piano players so much, one of them remembered,

that his wife would sometimes have to come to Harlem from queens

"and go from street to street until she heard the piano,

"recognized his style, and then go up to the apartment

to get him out of there and take him home."

[Finger bust Er

playing]

Johnson's greatest rival was his good friend

William Henry Joseph Bonaparte bertholoff Smith--

Willie "the lion" Smith--

who sometimes said he had earned his nickname

for bravery in battle during world war I,

and at other times claimed he'd been named "the lion of judea"

because of his devotion to judaism.

Smith and Johnson customarily battled to a draw.

"It was never to the blood," a young piano player remembered.

"With those two giants, it was always a sporting event.

"Neither cut the other.

They had too much respect for that."

[Mule walk stomPlaying]

The two men were regulars at Harlem rent parties--

all night dances held in crowded apartments,

where the cost of admission helped hold off the landlord.

Hughes: The Saturday night rent parties that I attended

were often more amusing than any nightclub,

in small apartments, where god knows who lived--

because the guests seldom did--

but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar,

or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street.

And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining

went on until dawn came in at the windows.

Langston Hughes.

[Gut sto Playing]

Narrator: In early 1923, Duke Ellington, together with two old friends,

the drummer Sonny greer and the saxophonist Otto hardwicke,

moved to Harlem, anxious to see if they had what it took

to make it in the city jazz musicians would soon call the "big apple."

"Harlem, in our minds," Ellington remembered,

"had the world's most glamorous atmosphere.

We had to go there."

His first job in New York

was to accompany a vaudeville musician named wilbur sweatman,

who insisted that members of his band use powder to lighten their complexions.

When sweatman left town, Ellington and his friends scuffled for work,

sometimes hustling pool to feed themselves,

but always listening to the stride piano masters.

Willie "the lion" Smith took a shine to Ellington and his friends.

He steered Ellington toward pick-up jobs,

encouraged him to try his hand at cutting contests.

[Choo ch Playing]

In the fall of 1923, Duke Ellington, Sonny greer, and Otto hardwicke

moved downtown to play the Hollywood inn,

a cellar club just off Times Square.

They were now part of a 6-piece band called the washingtonians

that specialized in "sweet" dance music.

It was led by a banjo player and small-time impresario named Elmer snowden.

When the men discovered that snowden

was pocketing more than his share of the band's pay,

they forced him out and made Duke Ellington the new leader.

It was at the Hollywood inn, Ellington said,

"that our music acquired new colors and characteristics."

He was absorbing everything: The ragtime he'd heard as a boy in Washington,

the more sophisticated style of the Harlem stride masters,

and the looser, blues-drenched New Orleans sounds

of Sidney bechet and Louis Armstrong.

All of it would soon be reflected in his music.

W. Marsalis: In the beginning, he played society music.

Like he would say...

So, you know, he'd be playing along with that kind of vibrato,

and then he heard king Oliver's band,

and they were talking about...

So he said, "oh, ok, I want to do that.

"I want to hear that clarinet, I want to hear that trombone

"I want that rhythm and that beat, the big four,

bum, be bum bum, be bum bum bum."

So, he started looking around for musicians who had that sound.

Narrator: The most important addition to the band

was a young trumpeter from south Carolina, a disciple of king Oliver,

who carried Oliver's muted effects to new and startling heights.

His name was James "bubber" Miley.

[Red hot banPlaying]

"He used to growl all night long,

"playing gutbucket on his horn," Ellington said.

"That was when we decided to forget all about the sweet music."

And Duke said we just threw

all that polite music

out the window,

and we went for the hot stuff,

and the whole band changed when bubber came in.

Narrator: The band would stay at the Hollywood inn for 4 years.

Collier: The Hollywood inn was a terrible place to play.

One of the things that you have to remember of course,

there was no air conditioning in those days.

So a place like that in the summer would be absolutely unbearable,

and they had to close it in the summer

because there was no way anybody could stand it.

Well, what they would do was sort of every Memorial Day,

the gangsters who owned the place would torch it,

shut it down, collect the insurance,

and open it up again in the fall.

And they got to the point where they would tell the guys in the band,

they'd say, "say, Sonny," to Sonny greer, the drummer,

"think you'd better take your drums home tonight."

And the guys would clear out their instruments,

and the next day the thing would be in flames,

and that was the kind of joint.

It was a rough club, it was a very rough club,

even though it was right in the heart of glamorous Times Square.

Narrator: After one of its strategically timed fires,

the Hollywood inn closed briefly,

then reopened as the club Kentucky,

featuring the new, hot sound of Duke Ellington.

Billboar Dif anybody can tell us where a hotter aggregation

than Duke Ellington and his club Kentucky serenaders can be found,

we'll buy for the mob.

Possessing a sense of rhythm that is almost uncanny,

the boys in this dusky organization dispense a type of melody

that stamps the outfit as the most torrid in town.

Crouch: He drew from everything that was happening.

From the movies, from Broadway,

from religious music,

from the blues,

from Louis Armstrong, from king Oliver,

from jelly roll Morton, from the competition with other bands.

You know, like somebody coming with a little something,

he'd hear over and he'd say, "oh, that'll be good.

I'll take that, put it over here and turn it into this."

And then, somebody would hear his version and they'd say,

"hah! Well, I'll take that back, and I'll turn into this!"

Then he'd say, "oh. Well, that's not a bad idea, and I'll take that."

And so that was going on, too.

Narrator: By 1924, Duke Ellington was making a name for himself in New York.

He had begun to record and managed to sell some of his tunes

to the song publishers of tin pan alley.

But he was still not satisfied.

And he confessed his unhappiness to his friend will Marion cook,

a classically-trained conductor and Broadway composer.

[The moo Playing]

During long taxi rides through central park,

the two men talked about music.

Cook urged Ellington to get formal training at a conservatory.

Ellington didn't feel he had time for that:

"They're not teaching what I want to learn," he said.

In that case, cook told him, "first, find the logical way,

"and when you find it, avoid it,

"and let your inner self break through and guide you.

Don't try to be anybody but yourself."

It was advice Duke Ellington would follow all his life.

W. Marsalis: Duke Ellington knew how to take what could be and make it what is.

He understood what it took to make something invisible visible.

The greatest practitioners of this music

have been African-American.

It comes from a particular kind

of African-American experience with democracy,

with america, with capitalist society,

with a whole bunch of other stuff.

But, it captured something about

this culture and this society and this life

that as soon as other people heard it, said,

"yeah!, that's me."

Man: Austin, Illinois, was a well-to-do suburb where all the days were sabbaths,

a sleepy-time neighborhood big as a yawn and just about as lively,

loaded with shade trees, clipped lawns,

and a groggy-eyed population

that never came out of its coma except to turn over.

Mezz mezzrow.

[Farewell bluePlaying]

Narrator: Far from the Lincoln gardens,

where Louis Armstrong and Joe Oliver were holding forth,

a group of high school boys in the prosperous Chicago neighborhood of Austin

got together every day after school in the spring of 1923

to listen to jazz in an ice cream parlor called the spoon and straw.

Man: It was just an ice cream parlor.

But they had a victrola there,

and we used to sit around listening to records.

One day, we put on some new records

by the New Orleans rhythm kings.

Boy, when we heard that, I'll tell you,

we were out of our minds. It was wonderful.

We stayed there from about 3:00 in the afternoon until 8:00 at night,

just listening to those records.

And we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys.

Jimmy mcpartland.

Narrator: The aspiring young musicians included

Jimmy mcpartland, struggling to master the cornet,

pianist Joe Sullivan,

clarinetist frank teschmacher,

tenor saxophonist bud Freeman,

and a would-be drummer from

the still more prosperous suburb of oak park named Dave tough.

They would come to be called the Austin high gang.

Terkel: Those boys, those high school kids,

heard something they never heard in their lives.

They may have been

in a school band,

possibly playing marches and

and stuff.

But when they heard that, to them,

it represent a vitality they'd never experienced before,

and they soared with it.

Jimmy would say, "we just flew."

Narrator: The Austin high gang's first heroes

were the New Orleans rhythm kings.

They were white musicians who modeled their own distinctive style in part

on the music king Oliver was playing on the south side.

Soon, the members of the Austin high gang

and dozens of other young white kids

decided to find out for themselves

the source of the new music they found irresistible.

[Froggie moo Playing]

They risked the ridicule of their friends

and the disapproval of their parents

to travel to the Lincoln gardens

to hear Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong play.

W. Marsalis: When these white kids come down to hear

king Oliver and Louis Armstrong playing this music,

we have to realize that this is some of the most abstract and sophisticated music

that anybody has ever heard, short of bach.

But they've been taught their entire lives

that nothing of any good can come out of some niggers.

So, here are these kids,

and here is this new music

that is not legitimate

in any way.

Well, maybe when they first went to hear it,

it was just part of something, you know,

the sort of excitement, rebellion, you know.

Then they hear it, and they realize,

oh, they want to join this world.

They want to be jazz musicians.

They want to become part of something that's new and great.

They have to sense that and that these black people have to teach them.

W. Marsalis: That's how it always is in myth.

Cinderella. The one who you keep out and you push down and you kick,

that's the one with the moral authority, with the gift.

That's as old as night and day. That's as old as dust.

And it's not about black or white.

But here it is now, that same myth, in black and white.

If you a trumpet player and you hear Louis Armstrong, you want to play like him.

Not because he's black.

Because that's the greatest trumpet you've ever heard.

That's what you want to play like.

Man: It was by and for negroes,

and the white kids in short pants who went there,

some of them on bicycles,

to hear the music had good reason to feel slightly uncomfortable

until they had pushed their way close to the bandstand

and had been recognized by Oliver.

A nod or a wave of his hand was all that was necessary.

Then the customers knew that the kids were all right.

Night after night we made the trip.

We sat there, stiff with education, joy,

and a licorice-tasting gin purchased from the waiters for $2 a pint.

Oliver and Louis would roll on and on, piling up choruses,

with the rhythm section building the beat until the whole thing

got inside your head and blew your brains out.

Eddie condon.

[I've found a new ba Bplaying]

Narrator: The young, white musicians who had ventured to the south side

now started to develop their own brand of jazz--

a blend of New Orleans music with a more agitated, aggressive northern sound.

It would soon be called "Chicago style."

Giddins: And as they began to develop, they did develop a style of their own,

their own idiosyncrasies, their own stylistic gambits.

And they had a lot of feeling

and energy,

and they were wild men.

You know, Eddie condon said

when we came to town

the Republicans, you know, ran for cover.

But when they were young, they were among the first to go out into this,

explore this black music and try to claim it for themselves.

Narrator: Chicago had become, one musician proudly remembered,

"the jazz capital of the United States."

But while whites were able to go to the south side

and hear the music of king Oliver and Louis Armstrong,

blacks were not welcome in any club downtown.

There was, in fact, no jazz band in america

in which blacks and whites played side by side.

Well, the rules said that we could not play together,

black and whites together,

but it had nothing to do with

our respect for each other as

musicians, individual musicians.

So, after hours when the clubs were closed,

the musicians black and white would get together.

White musicians could come to the south side,

and after hours when they got off from their jobs,

they would come, and we would trade choruses.

And we would get some of the academics from the white musicians,

and they'd get some of the creativity from the black musicians.

And we had what we called, "breakfast dances,"

went on 5:00 in the morning, after everything was closed,

and we had this great jam session going.

And, this is why Chicago is the basis of really putting this together,

because we found out the music is an auditory art.

We didn't care what color you were or where you came from,

it's how you sound.

[Scissor grinder joePlaying]

Man: We first met, jazz and I,

at a dance hall dive at the barbary coast.

It screeched and bellowed at me from a trick platform

in the middle of a smoke-hazed, beer-fumed room.

And it hit me hard.

Raucous?

Yes.

Crude?

Undoubtedly.

Musical?

As sure as you live.

Paul whiteman.

Narrator: Paul whiteman was a formally trained violinist from Colorado,

who abandoned a symphonic career after hearing

a jazz band one night in San Francisco.

Maher: Absolutely knocked him out.

It was so driving, it was so much fun.

He got up that morning with the blues.

He went home that night feeling floating, you know,

and had a great time.

Now, his way of thinking

because of his training,

his background,

his father is a music educator

playing viola in a symphony orchestra.

Immediately, he is thinking not about playing itthatway

but about converting it Hisway.

Narrator: Whiteman was convinced that he could find a way to orchestrate jazz,

to make it even more commercially viable,

to retain its rhythm and Harmony while rendering it

as precise and predictable as classical music.

His arrangements were intended, he said,

"to make a lady out of jazz."

His concern all the time was

that this is an amazingly important art form.

We just need to be able to score it,

we need to be able to get teams of musicians who can play it.

We just need to be able to take it from its primitive state.

[Whisperinplaying]

Narrator: His first big hit had come in 1920 with Whispering.

soothing, heavily orchestrated, it sold 2.5 million copies--

more than 250 times what Armstrong and Oliver's Chimes blues Would sell.

Paul whiteman's orchestra soon became

the most celebrated and most imitated in america,

launching a whole new trend in society dance music.

On February 12, 1924, a big crowd turned out to hear

the Paul whiteman orchestra play what was billed as

"an experiment in modern music"

at aeolian hall in New York City.

The concert included a brand-new specially commissioned work

by a young New York songwriter, the son of Jewish immigrants,

named George gershwin, who, like Duke Ellington,

had spent hours listening to black piano-players in Harlem.

Gershwin's composition was something altogether new--

a classical piece suffused with jazz feeling,

and it would become one of the best-loved compositions

in all of American music--

rhapsody in blue.

[rhapsody in blu Playing]

The concert was a huge success.

4 hours of elegant and orchestral music without a hint of improvisation.

But almost immediately, Paul whiteman was billed as "the king of jazz."

Jefferson: And of course, it's driving many blacks at the time and since crazy

because, you know it's all too obvious--

Paul "white-man," you know, equals king of jazz.

Whiteman himself actually never seems to have pretended to be any such thing.

[Lonely melo Playing]

Narrator: Critics would one day accuse whiteman of diluting jazz,

of stealing from black Americans.

But whiteman himself always acknowledged the debt he owed.

Early: White people went into jazz not with the idea

that they were going to make fun of black people

or that it was going to be degrading to black people,

but that here was an art form that they were willing to take on its own terms

and wanted to express and actually wanted to respect and elevate.

This is what makes Paul whiteman important.

He wanted to take the music on something like its own terms.

This was going to redound on everyone associated with this music,

whether you're white or black.

Narrator: Whiteman gave behind-the-scenes work to black arrangers

and wanted to hire black musicians for his orchestra.

But even in the jazz age, that was impossible.

[Teapot dome blu Eplaying]

Narrator: The same year as whiteman's triumph at aeolian hall,

a young black bandleader named Fletcher Henderson

opened at New York's premier ballroom,

roseland in Times Square, playing for white dancers only.

Henderson was the soft-spoken son of a piano teacher and a school principal,

and he had come north to New York to pursue

a graduate degree in chemistry at Columbia.

But when his savings ran out,

he turned to music and was swept up in the jazz craze.

At roseland, he made himself famous for playing dance music

with a Polish unmatched by any other black bandleader since James Reese Europe.

There were two kings of the band scene in New York.

There was "white king," Paul whiteman,

who had the best white musicians in the country,

and there was Fletcher Henderson, the king of the black musicians,

who had the best black musicians in the country.

And they were friends.

And they helped each other and traded arrangements and so forth.

Narrator: One evening, whiteman took his band to hear Henderson's,

then told his men, "if Fletcher was a white man, he would be a millionaire."

But like Duke Ellington, Henderson grew restless

with the polite dance music he was playing.

He was determined to create a style all his own,

wanted to combine the elegance of his formal arrangements

with something more exciting, more driving, more spontaneous.

Fletcher Henderson began to look for a soloist--

"a jazz specialist," he called it--

who could help him out.

He knew of a trumpet player in king Oliver's band in Chicago

whose genius other musicians were beginning to talk about.

It would take him a while,

but when he persuaded that "specialist" to come to New York,

it would change jazz forever.

[Muggleplaying]

Glaser: Jazz is the ultimate temporal art form.

It's about the human experience of time-- how is time embodied.

So, you listen to Louis playing a quarter note,

and, suddenly, your whole experience of that day has changed.

You hear him playing this one quarter note,

and time is not moving along in the way that it normally moves along.

He was the first person to embody abstraction musically.

Other people used abstraction

in music, but over time.

Composers would sit down and take an idea and toy with it over time.

But Louis could spontaneously take a melody and abstract it,

that is, remove all the unessentials from this melody

and be left with just this pure vision of what the melody could be.

W. Marsalis: His sound, more than anything,

his sound had a light in it.

That's the only way I can describe it,

you can't practice to get that.

It's like, it's a spiritual presence.

And when that light is in your sound,

it just, when you hear it, it draws--it attracts you.

[Tea Playing]

Narrator: For nearly two years,

Louis Armstrong stayed in king Oliver's creole jazz band.

The band also included a piano player named lil hardin.

She was unlike any woman Louis Armstrong had ever met.

Hardin: All along I been hearing from all the musicians about little Louis,

and he's--what a good trumpet player he was going to be, little Louis.

So when he brought little Louie over to the dreamland to meet me,

little Louis was 226 pounds.

So I said, "little Louis, how come you call him little Louis, big as he is?"

I wasn't impressed at all.

I didn't like anything about him.

I didn't like the way he's dressed, I didn't like the way he talked.

Anyway, he came up on the bandstand.

I used to play--well you know, girls wore garters, you know, on their stockings,

so when I'd sit down to play I would roll my stocking down

so the garter's below my knee.

And first thing Louis spied was, was my knee, and he was looking.

And I said, "this guy's got ideas he'd better not put in words."

[Laughs]

Narrator: Lil hardin was ambitious, articulate

and, like Armstrong, unhappily married.

Despite her first impression, she fell in love with him.

On February 5, 1924, Louis Armstrong,

just divorced from his first wife,

married lil hardin in Chicago.

Once married, lil went to work on her new husband.

Lil decided she was going to make Louis over,

and she tried to get him to lose a little weight,

she took him out and bought him some proper clothes,

so he looked more like a Chicago slick than a New Orleans hick.

And then she decided, you know, that he ought to be out on his own,

he ought to be out from underneath the wing of Joe Oliver.

Hardin: I probably would have never paid any attention to Louis's playing

if king Oliver hadn't said to me one night that Louis could play better than he could.

He says, "but as long as I keep him with me,

"he won't be able to get ahead of me,

and I'll still be the king."

Narrator: Lil urged Armstrong to strike out on his own,

but he was reluctant to leave the man he still called "Mr. Joe."

He owed him a lot, he said, and wasn't sure he could make it on his own.

But lil persisted.

"I don't want to be married to a second trumpet-player," she told him.

I want you to play first."

Then, in the spring of 1924,

Armstrong got an offer he could not ignore.

Fletcher Henderson wanted him to come to New York.

Like his arrival in Chicago two years earlier,

Armstrong's debut in New York was not auspicious.

Man: The drummer, kaiser Marshall, had a car

and brought us downtown to meet Louis.

He was big and fat and wore high top shoes with hooks in them.

When I got a load of that, I said to myself,

who in the hell is this guy?

It can't be Louis Armstrong.

Don redman.

[Go 'long mu Playing]

Narrator: Louis Armstrong, raised poor on the streets of New Orleans,

could not have been more different from his sophisticated new employer.

But almost from the start,

Armstrong was influencing every other jazz musician in town.

Waters: I came to New York in 1924.

That was the first time that I heard Louis in person.

So, Fletcher didn't have

no music for him at that period.

So, he was just sitting up there

like this, with his trumpet

in his hand,

and waiting for his choruses.

So when they got his choruses,

he would stand up and play like hell.

And the people would just rave.

[Shanghai shuffl Playing]

Narrator: Armstrong's choruses transformed the band.

Henderson's arranger, Don redman, now began writing new pieces

that showcased Armstrong's soaring horn--

and his unprecedented sense of rhythm,

what Henderson himself called Armstrong's New Orleans "punch and bounce."

Man: One night at roseland,

Armstrong began Shanghai shuffle.

I think they made him play 10 choruses.

And I stood silent, feeling almost bashful,

asking myself if I would ever be able to attain

a small part of Armstrong's greatness.

Coleman Hawkins.

Giddins: Armstrong transformed the orchestra, transformed all the musicians in it,

and ultimately transformed all the musicians in New York

who were playing jazz, and even popular musicians.

He brought, first of all, a tremendous, rhythmic excitement.

Armstrong was an economist, you know, he played very few notes,

but every note counted, and it stood for something.

Then, equally important, he brought the blues.

Armstrong demonstrated that the blues

might be the greatest musical gift ever to come out of america.

And he played it with such conviction and such feeling and force

that everybody wanted that.

I mean, Duke Ellington was already in New York, he was accompanying singers,

he had small band of his own, but he was missing something,

he didn't know what he was missing until he heard Armstrong.

Narrator: Armstrong's great contribution is impossible to notate,

but it is the characteristic that most clearly defines jazz--

swing.

Shaw: Swing is getting the right note at the right time,

not before or not after.

So in jazz, which is a rhythmic music,

you've got to have the time, and you've got to have the pulse.

You going to be playing, you say...

(Imitates bass)

You can't say...

(Imitates bass)

You got to say...

(Imitates bass, clicking fingers)

You got to just keep that going. Don't move, that's the way.

And believe me when I tell you, that's like a heartbeat.

And you look at the audience, they all get it.

And you see them first start tapping their foot.

And they going to start swinging around.

That's what makes jazz so unique.

Unique and so great.

Narrator: "No one," one musician said,

"knew what swinging was till Louis came along."

Schaap: Louis Armstrong's arrival in September of '24

is pivotal because he's the most important jazz musician on the face of the earth

and he's coming to the country's

biggest city, playing with its

most important band

and teaching them how to swing.

Uptown, he plays dances for the young black adolescents

and turns careers around like Rex Stewart's, gene Rogers',

and the men who play in the saxophone section for Duke Ellington.

Russell procope, he was a violinist when he heard fat Armstrong.

And he said, "unh-unh, man, I'm going with a horn

that you can make this music with."

And he switched to alto saxophone.

Plus, New York was the hotbed of recording activity,

and the great Louis Armstrong gets to make

freelance record dates.

He records with bessie Smith and ma rainey,

and Clarence Williams's blue five, with Sidney bechet.

And those records get to audiences who can't even make it to roseland or go uptown.

Jazz arrives because Louis came to New York and taught the world to swing.

[Applause] Now, ladies and gentlemen,

we're going to take a little trip through the jungle at this time,

and we want you all to travel with us.

The tiger is running so fast,

it's going to take a few choruses to catch him,

so I want you to count with me.

Yes, sir. See if this little selmer trumpet

is going to get away from you this time.

Look out there, boys, I'm ready.

[Plays Tiger rag]

W. Marsalis: Louis Armstrong invented a new style of playing.

Louis Armstrong created the coherent solo.

Louis Armstrong fused the sound of the blues with the American popular song.

Louis Armstrong extended the range of the trumpet.

Louis Armstrong created the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary

that all of the big bands wrote music out of.

Giddins: I think Armstrong boils down to how do you define genius.

And I guess it's partly that you hear something that no one else has heard.

He heard rhythms and melodies and a sound,

a way of extending his voice into the trumpet,

all of which was original with him.

And the result is so overpowering and so spiritual,

it's enough to make the angels weep.

[Red hot banPlaying]