Here they perform "Umbrella Man" on the Timex All Star Show - The Golden Age of Jazz recorded January 7, 1959.
Although Gillespie had criticized Armstrong as "the plantation character that so many of us resent" in a Down Beat article published in 1949, he later lived near the Armstrongs and apparently visited them frequently at their home in Corona. In his autobiography, Gillespie wrote:
I began to recognize that that what I had considered Pops's grinning in the face of racism was his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile.
Gillespie was an honorary pallbearer at Armstrong's funeral.
This is a piece that Armstrong wrote - perhaps together with his second wife, Lil Hardin. Here's a bit of a performance apparently from 1951. Armstrong recorded this piece forty two times!
Here's a brief clip evidently from the Murrow piece on Armstrong - Satchmo the Great. By the way, Sidney Bechet frequently performed at Le Vieux Colombier with Claude Luter:
Actually, Louis probably got his first horn from the Karnofsky family before going to the Colored Waifs Home. They were junk and coal dealers that Louis worked for as a child. According to his memoirs, Louis played a tin horn to attract customers for them and they later helped him buy his first cornet. To close, here's a performance by the Marsalis family:
Here are a couple of clips from a film Armstrong made together with Mickey Rooney in 1950 - "The Strip." Rooney later described the film as "a low budget musical with a low budget story." Here's a performance of Shadrack:
"Shadrack" was first recorded by Armstrong in June 1938. The film documents one of the earliest incarnations of the All-Stars: Cozy Cole, Barney Bigard, Jack Teagarden and Earl Hines. Hines first worked with Armstrong in 1926 and was included on several of the Hot Five recordings.
According to Rooney, the film cost $885,000 to make and earned back just a bit more. Here's another scene featuring Rooney on drums - who is dubbed by Cozy Cole:
Before joing the All Stars, Cole played in the late 1930s and early 40s with the Cab Calloway band.
The big hit song from the film was "Kiss to Build a Dream On" which is performed three times in the film, including once by Armstrong. The song was written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby and Oscar Hammersten II for the Marx Brothers film "A Night at the Opera." It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song after its use in "The Strip." It then became a staple of Armstrong and the All Stars. Here's a clip of a performance of the song by the All Stars in 1959 in Denmark:
This line up of the All Stars includes Trummy Young on trombone, Danny Barcelona on drums and Billy Kyle on piano. Armstrong also recorded "Ain't Misbehavin'" for the film - but the performance was not included in the finished picture. This was a song that had vaulted Armstrong into popular acclaim in the late 1920s when he performed it as part of the revue "Connie's Hot Chocolates." If you want to get a sense of the genius of Armstrong as a jazz vocalist, compare Armstrong's early version of this song with Fats' own. Here's Fats performing the number in "Stormy Weather." The drummer is Zutty Singleton who played with Armstrong on Fate Marable's riverboat band and recorded with Armstrong on several of the Hot Five numbers:
I posted about Savion's performance at Celebrate Brooklyn previously. Now I find someone recorded it!
Here's a bit of what I said in my earlier post about this performance:
Bill Robinson made a "B" movie called Harlem Is Heaven in which he does his stair dance in a nightclub. The dance sequence is available on a DVD entitled At the Jazz Band Ball. Glover's performance reminded me of this dance. Robinson performs to the tune "Swanee River." Like Glover, he does not look frequently at the audience. (There are a couple of breakaway shots of the audience in the sequence - and they seem oblivious of Robinson). Like Glover, Robinson does very little with his upper body and his movement is pretty much limited to climbing and descending the stairs. Unlike Glover, Robinson is not portrayed as a member of a musical ensemble - he is accompanied only by piano.
Here's the dance by Robinson I mentioned in my post:
What do you think? By the way, Eleanor Powell (in blackface) does an homage to Robinson's stair dance in the film Honolulu - which is occasionally shown on TCM.
PS - recently Glover has been touring in a show in which he performs to classical music. Take a look:
Here's a video of Louis Armstrong from the film "Paris Blues". Armstrong did this scene in the middle of his 1960 trip to Africa for the State Department. For more about the trip, check out the fascinating new book Satchmo Blows Up the World.
I love the look Armstrong gives to Sidney Poitier about 1:40 into the video. The score for the film is by Duke Ellington. Armstrong and Ellington were also paired in "Cabin in the Sky" but Armstrong's scene from that film was cut and is apparently lost. I don't know who the saxophone and trombone players are who played for Poitier and Newman. Vanity said this about the film:
The film is notable for Duke Ellington's moody, stimulating jazz score. There are scenes when the drama itself actually takes a back seat to the music, with unsatisfactory results insofar as dialog is concerned. Along the way there are several full-fledged passages of superior Ellingtonia such as 'Mood Indigo' and 'Sophisticated Lady', and Louis Armstrong is on hand for one flamboyant interlude of hot jazz.
As a bonus, here's some of Ellington from "Cabin in the Sky"
The National Portrait Gallery has an exhibit regarding Baker's life which I recently visited. Baker is a fascinating figure whose career raises numerous questions about issues of race, gender and identity. But she was also, according to contemporaries, a compelling dancer who brought the dance idioms of black Broadway to Europe. She opened in the Revue Negre in Paris in 1925 as part of a company which included Sidney Bechet, Claude Hopkins and the tap dancer Louis Douglas. Baker did a Danse Sauvage which was an enormous sensation. This was emphatically not tap dance. The French apparently didn't much care for tap dancing in the mid-twenties and the producers apparently thought the show as originally conceived featured too much tap.
Instead of tap, Baker's dance drew from popular American dances of the time such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom and a step called "Through the Trenches" which, according to Baker's biographer Phyllis Rose "mimicked the way soldiers moved in a crouch to avoid sniper fire."
Baker's dance played into French stereotypes of "African" dance as openly lascivious and created an enormous sensation. Of course, rather than emanating from an African jungle, Baker's dance reflected the idiom of black Broadway - Baker had danced in Sissle and Blake's Shuffle Along - and its roots in the newly emerging music called jazz. The French critic Andre Levinson wrote of Baker's performance:
There seemed to emanate from her violently shuddering body, her bold dislocations, her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm. . . . It was as though the jazz, catching on the wing the vibrations of this body, was interpreting word by word its fantastic monologue.
I've posted a video of Baker dancing which I should guess dates from 1926-27. Here she's not doing a "savage" dance but a "plantation" bit which of course perpetuated another set of sterotypes about African Americans. At about 1:45 in the video you can see the Through the Trenches step.
Baker published a memoir in 1927 which deeply offended French war veterans. In the book, Baker stated:
I've heard a lot of talk about the war. What a funny story! I swear I don't understand it at all but it disgusts me. I have such a horror of men with only one arm, one leg, one eye.
Of course, in the mid twenties there were probably millions of disabled war veterans in France and their protests forced Baker to disavow these comments and she later staged a benefit for them.
But this didn't end Baker's problems. In 1928 she left Paris for a tour of central Europe. In Vienna, The New York Times reported that Baker required a police escort because of protests by students "who declared their intention of preventing colored artists from playing in Vienna." The next day, the Times reported that the Nationalist Party had petitioned Austria's chancellor to ban Baker's performance. According to the article:
the deputation [to the Chancellor] said the party is receiving thousands of letters daily protesting against "brazen-faced heathen dances and scenes" which, if permitted, are likely to provoke riots.
Baker's performances were allowed to proceed however, and the Times reported that they were opposed not only by right-wing parties but by the Catholic church which held three days of "atonement" services at a church adjoining the Johann Strauss Theater where Baker performed.
To give some idea of the performances which provoked such outrage, here's another clip of Baker performing.
In both of these videos, you get the sense that Baker's facial expressions were an important part of her performance. She was particularly noted for crossing her eyes. Her biographer, Phyllis Rose, thinks this was a way of deflecting attention from her sexual attractiveness. But it's also reminiscent of the kind of "mugging" that Louis Armstrong incorporated into his act. Also, in the second video particularly, I think you can get the sense of how important Baker's rear end was to her dancing. Rose quotes one hostile French critic as saying that he "was willing to bet that she had never thought of founding a new aesthetic on the mobility of her rear end."
