Louis Armstrong recorded 38 discs, including “Heebie Jeebies,” at OKeh Records’ studio in the Chicago Loop.
Louis Armstrong, kneeling in front with trombone, came to Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, shown here in 1922. It’s fitting that today — on Juneteenth National Independence Day — we look back 99 years ago to the day when Louis Armstrong, an aspiring trumpet player from a New Orleans shantytown, liberated himself, his music form and America’s Second City.
But Little Louis transcended those bleak circumstances. The music that his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands set to wax in that cramped studio would become a yardstick against which all other jazz would be measured, then and still. It crafted a new language for the callow genre and transformed an all-ensemble approach into the art of the soloist — the highest art when that solitary performer was Armstrong.
He’d stepped into the city at a magical moment. Chicago was bounding back, recovering from a flu pandemic that killed 8,500 of its residents, from a world war that took another 4,000 and from a race riot that was the deadliest in the country during that Red Summer of 1919, claiming 23 Black lives along with 15 white. By 1922, Chicago had become America’s railroad hub.
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