Louis Armstrong and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival

The forthcoming Copenhagen Jazz Festival serves as a reminder of a visit from one of the world’s late jazz greats
When Louis Armstrong first visited Copenhagen in 1933, the huge crowds were so eager to catch a glimpse of the world-famous jazz musician that his first thought was that they were going to lynch him.
The US jazz musician was legendary all over the world, and his fan-base was no less devoted in Scandinavia, which he was to visit many times during his long and illustrious career.
He recorded live sessions and concerts in Denmark; and who could forget the song named after the city itself, the much played ‘Copenhagen’ from 1924?
Armstrong also became a close acquaintance of some of Denmark’s most respected jazz musicians of the time, such as Svend Asmussen and Bent Fabricius-Bjerre.

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, in the US state of Louisiana, on 4 August 1901. He grew up in abject poverty and spent his much of his youth getting into trouble with the authorities. During this delinquent period, he was sent to the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs where he nurtured his talent playing cornet in the band and was given some musical training.
His mentor, Joe ‘King’ Oliver, took him under his wing and in 1922, invited him to Chicago to join his creole jazz band, at that time the best and most influential in town. After this, followed stints in New York, LA and New Orleans, where Armstrong’s reputation grew, firstly as a musician playing the cornet and trumpet, and then as a vocalist, with his trademark deep, gravelly, scat singing style.

Although Armstrong’s decision to tour Europe was in part because he was escaping from the Mob, by the time he embarked on his first European tour in 1933, he was already a household name across most of the globe, after success with hits such as “Ain’t Misbehavin’“ and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust”.
Nicknamed ‘Satchmo’, an abbreviation of ‘Satchelmouth’, due to the comical way his cheeks would puff up like a satchel when he played the trumpet, he arrived at Copenhagen’s main train station in July 1933 to complete pandemonium – and the 3000 fans who were there hoping to meet their idol came as quite a surprise to him.

According to music journalist Henrik W. Iversen, an Armstrong enthusiast, the musician’s origins in the sharply segregated and racially prejudiced US Deep South seemed to come back to him as he saw the waiting mob.
‘He had no idea that he was so popular in Europe, and when he saw so many people his first thought was that they’d come to lynch him, he later admitted,’ said Iversen.
The fans were apparently so frenzied that they began to grab and pull at Satchmo’s clothing, leaving the star half-dressed and in need of a whole new outfit.

This first impression did not deter Armstrong, who was without a doubt the biggest jazz name in Denmark up until the 1950s. By this time, Armstrong had embarked on a successful film career and had even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. When he visited Copenhagen he filled the spacious K.B. Hallen music venue 13 times over in a period of six days, with two concerts a night and three on Saturdays.
Armstrong said that he liked visiting Scandinavia because the public understood how to listen to his music, something which the 1933 jazz film ‘Copenhagen – Kalundborg,’ in which Armstrong makes an appearance with many other jazz greats, testifies.

As the city’s annual jazz festival rapidly approaches, stories of ‘Satchmo’ and other jazz greats who have graced the city in the past are once again relived, as older jazz lovers retell the experience of witnessing some of music history’s most famous names, including Armstrong himself.
Louis Armstrong died of a heart attack on 6 July 1971, aged 69. Shortly before his death, he said, "I think I had a beautiful life. I didn’t wish for anything that I couldn’t get and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it."

The legacy he left – a deep-rooted love of jazz – lives on in many musicians and fans, both home-grown and those who have chosen to make Denmark their base.
http://www.cphpost.dk/culture/denmark-through-the-looking-glass/171-denmark-through-the-looking-glass/46175-louis-armstrong-and-the-copenhagen-jazz-festival.html