I turn on the CD player, which has a hundred slots, and it randomly selected Louis Armstrong. The first song was, interestingly, “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans.”
Maybe I’m sentimental this evening, but the music from New Orleans’ pride and joy makes me a little verklempt this evening. It’s just so pure and genuine and expressive and wonderful. There’s nothing quite like it. I’d easily vote him greatest American artist. Maybe greatest American, period.
An athiestic way of praying for New Orleans – just listening to the best music America has produced and reflecting on what a great loss it is to see the town go under.
I think my first exposure to Louis Armstrong was in the movie High Society. Using Armstrong and his band as the “Greek chorus” in that movie was just brilliant, and I still love the music. Since I got into his music indirectly, I think that’s what impresses me so much: it’s not just that he was such an accomplished musician, but he knew how to use music to communicate. His appearances in movies and TV shows weren’t just background music, they were him talking through his music – he was always a presence.
Your post got me to buy “Do You Know What it Means…” And the next couple of songs on the shuffle were “When You’re Smiling” and “What a Wonderful World.” So you could look on that as an omen, too – the culture of the city isn’t lost, and the city itself can be rebuilt. There’s just too much there to lose completely. (Plus, I’ve never been and I have to see it before I die).
The best Armstrong is still his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. It’s hard to beat Potato Head Blues, West End Blues, Hotter Than That, Knee Drops. . .
Yeah yeah yeah, I’ve heard it all before. Bix was harmonically more sophisticated, Bunny Berigan a better bandleader, Roy Eldridge could hit clearer high Fs…
…but only Pops was Pops. That voice mumbling tenderly around a lyric, that fat happy home-cooked horn seasoned with a chewy vibrato, that innate glowing warmth and humor and joy…who else had all that? No one. Seldom does genius show such a friendly face.
It is. The script for Philly Story was effectively the same as the play, with a few minor rewrites (eliminating one character and tweaking the plot slightly in consequence), but the High Society script took the plot of the original and wrote a script around Cole Porter’s musical numbers.
