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For jazz fans, an alternative July 4 tradition: Louis Armstrong
The soundtrack of July 4, as everyone knows, is John Philip Sousa.
Everyone, that is, except some jazz fans.
When the rocket bursts of red, white and blue light up the sky, they won't be listening to "Stars and Stripes Forever." They'll have their radios tuned to WKCR, 89.9 FM, the Columbia University Radio Station, where the annual Louis Armstrong Birthday Broadcast has been a tradition since 1970.
"We're all connected with the Fourth of July, but he connects with it more than I do, and probably you do," says Phil Schaap, the Grammy-winning jazz expert and radio host who launched the annual broadcast the year before Armstrong died.
To the end of his life, Armstrong always insisted that he had been born on the Fourth of July. It was the day he celebrated his birthday. And this year, as always, the 24-hour WKCR show, from midnight to midnight on July 4, will feature a broad range of music from Armstrong's star-spangled career.
You're likely to hear everything from the trailblazing "Hot Five" and "Hot Seven" recordings that revolutionized jazz in the 1920s, to the hits like "Mack the Knife," "Hello Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World" that popularized Satchmo with later generations.
"Louis Armstrong is an icon of American music, not only jazz but I think we can say he represents American music in spirit, " says Adriana Filstrup of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens. The museum occupies the modest house Armstrong moved to in 1943; it's been a museum since 2003.
This year, as always, there will be a birthday party at Louis' house.
Cake, of course. Also a performance by the trumpeter Terell Stafford at 2 p.m. And even a serving of Louis' favorite dish from his New Orleans boyhood: red beans and rice (he was known to sign letters "red beans and ricely yours"). And there will be tours. There are always tours of the Armstrong House Museum on July 4, even when it falls on a Sunday.
"Celebrating his birthday on the same day we celebrate Independence Day is kind of symbolic," Filstrup says,
It was at this house that Armstrong tuned in to Schaap's show on July 4, 1971 — Satchmo's very last birthday, just two days before he died. To this day, Schaap is immensely proud of the honor. It was his second Birthday Broadcast.
"Louis listening to it, that was great," Schaap says. "It makes me old, but it's still great."
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Armstrong had been celebrating with friends out in the garden, and was about to roll out his hi-fi equipment to play some of his own records. "Someone said, 'You don't have to do that, they're playing your music on the radio,'" Schaap says. "So they put the radio on the wall, and we provided Armstrong to Armstrong."
"He celebrated his 71st birthday listening to me, then he died two days later at the age of 69," Schaap says.
Number-crunchers will note a small discrepancy there.
In fact, a birth certificate emerged after Armstrong's death that proved he had been born not July 4, 1900, as he'd always thought, but rather on Aug. 4, 1901. So now WKCR does two birthday broadcasts. The July 4 edition is always referred to as Louis Armstrong's "traditional" birthday.
Still, if anyone deserves to share a birthday with the U.S.A., it's probably Louis — the singer and trumpeter many consider not just the most important name in jazz but also the most important figure in American music.
It was Armstrong who taught jazz players to solo, singers to scat and musicians to swing. Almost every American pop singer, from Sinatra on down, has acknowledged his influence. He was also a kind of hepcat patriot (though he did, scandalously, tell President Eisenhower to "go to hell" when he refused to enforce integration). During the 1950s, he was a goodwill ambassador, touring Europe, Africa and Asia, and doing much to repair America's reputation in the developing world.
"He championed the American spirit, as well as a folk music that became a pop music and now is an internationally embraced art form," Schaap says.
For many music fans, Armstrong is Genesis 1:1. That's why they plan their holidays around the birthday broadcast, or even their holiday weeks. (In special years, the Armstrong broadcast has been expanded to as long as 250 hours, around the clock.) It's why people cancel even big plans, when they conflict with Louis.
People like "Babe," a woman from North Jersey who wrote Schaap in 1996 to say she had turned down an invitation to meet President Bill Clinton, then on the reelection trail, because it would interfere with her Louis time.
"She had been invited to this Fourth of July picnic where he was appearing," Schaap says. "And she said, 'No, I have to listen to Louis.'"
Email: beckerman@northjersey.com
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