Satchmo Comes Back

Louis Armstrong had forsaken the ways of Mammon and come back to jazz. Shorn of his big (19-piece), brassy, ear-splitting commercial band (TIME, April 29, 1946), he was as happy as a five-year-old with his curls cut off. Billy Berg's neon & chromium Los Angeles jazz temple wasn't big enough to hold the faithful who thronged to welcome him back.

Hoagy Carmichael led the cheering when Old Satchelmouth, his steak-thick lips parted in a grin, stepped on the stand with some of the greatest names in jazz behind him--Clarinetist Barney Bigard, Trombonist Jack Teagarden and Drummer Sid Catlett. Out in the smoke, waiting for the first golden notes, were half the big noises of U.S. sweet & swing--Johnny Mercer, Woody Herman, Abe Lyman, Benny Goodman (see PEOPLE).

Louis didn't let them down. When he swung into I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues, they heard the old, pure, easy phrasing and big, clear, ranging tone that had made Louis King of Jazz. Murmured sentimental, teary-eyed Jazzman Jess Stacy: "I can't tell you how happy this makes me."

Two days before the opening, the boys had gotten together just to get the feel. Satchmo had warmed up, as usual, on a few bars from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, then for an hour they had lazed through old favorites like Basin Street Blues, Fidgety Feet and Sugar. Finally, Louis put down his horn and hit a few high Fs in the plain-talk department.

"I don't need no rehearsals," he crowed. "I don't go through that and never will. All these cats I'm playing with can blow. We don't need no arrangements. I just say, man, what you going to play? They say Musk'at Ramble. I say follow me, and you got the best arrangement you ever heard.

"Take them re-bop* boys. They're great technicians. Mistakes--that's all re-bop is. Man, you've gotta be a technician to know when you make 'em. . . . New York and 52nd Street--that's what messed up jazz. Them cats play too much music --a whole lot of notes, weird notes. . . . That don't mean nothing. . . . You've got to carry a melody.

''Some cats say Old Satch is oldfashioned, not modern enough. Why, man, most of that modern stuff I first heard in 1918. Ain't no music out of date as long as you play it perfect. . . . You give me the music, I'll figure out what to do about it."

*Re-bop (according to Jazz Pedant Rudi Blesh): "Healthy jazz distorted into frantic rhythms, fantastic harmonic non sequiturs, a psychosomatic heterophony."

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