When he left, in 1915, it was with the rudiments of the technique that would eventually give him, in the fine words of one biographer, James Lincoln Collier, "that beautiful attack – sharp and clean as a razor cut – and a rich and utterly firm sound, as solid as a bar of brass". He had already sung in a barbershop quartet, and six months after his arrival he was invited to join the home's brass band, quickly graduating from the tambourine via the bass drum and the alto horn to the bugle, and thence to the cornet. Here, homeless black children were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and "garden work". He learned to live on the streets until, in his early teens, various misdemeanours – probably not including the famous but apparently apocryphal story about the firing of a pistol in the street on New Year's Eve – led a juvenile court to sentence him to an indeterminate stay in the Colored Waifs' Home. The child of an absent father and a mother who left him to be brought up by his grandmother and by various friends, Armstrong endured great poverty. Nevertheless it was the instrument with which he would take the first significant steps towards becoming the fons et origo of jazz improvisation: not just the first of the music's major solo voices, emerging loud and clear and unmistakably individual from the collective polyphony of early New Orleans jazz, but the figure who first revealed the inherent nobility of an idiom born in the humblest of material circumstances. The instrument cost $10, and was "all bent up, holes knocked in the bell". L ouis Armstrong bought his first cornet at a New Orleans pawnshop, when he was 15 years old.
0 kommentar(er)
