:: NEA JAZZ IN THE SCHOOLS

Armstrong was born in 1901 in a poor New Orleans neighborhood so violent its residents called it the Battleground. His mother was a sometime prostitute; he barely knew his father. At 12, he got in trouble with the law and received his first cornet lessons while serving time in a home for delinquent boys. His genius was soon undeniable. By his mid-teens he was playing alongside adults in honkytonks and was already earning fame among musicians for the warmth of his tone and the power and inventiveness with which he played the blues. Before moving north to Chicago to join King Oliver, he spent three summers mastering his craft while playing for dancers aboard Mississippi steamboats.

By the time Armstrong left New Orleans, he was already a legend among musicians there. Now, he and Oliver electrified Chicago musical circles too, performing duet breaks in which the younger man seemed always to know just what his boss was going to play and was ready to provide the perfect complement to it. Would-be musicians, black and white, gathered at the Lincoln Gardens each night to see if they could figure out how it was done—and to experience the energy that flowed from the bandstand. Bud Freeman, a white suburbanite and future saxophone star, never forgot the lessons he learned there.

"In those days," he remembered, "we were brainwashed into believing that blacks were inferior to us ... to look down on any race that wasn't white. Now, here were these black people who were allowed no privileges. They were not allowed to come into our shops and cinemas, but we whites were allowed to go out to their community, where they treated us beautifully. ... It was on the strength of this that I developed a love for them and became a jazz musician."

In the spring of 1924, Louis Armstrong accepted an invitation from Fletcher Henderson, leader of the best-known black dance band in the country, to join him in New York. Seven years after the release of the world's first jazz recording, much of what passed for jazz remained syncopated but stiff and agitated, with short, staccato solos built around what one musician called a "two-beat rhythmic feel." After Armstrong got to Manhattan, all that began to change.

During his time in the Creole Jazz Band, Louis Armstrong had always been careful not to outshine King Oliver, the man who had given him his big chance, but he could not remain in Oliver's shadow for long. He was "the heir of all that had gone before," one fellow trumpet-player recalled, "and the father of all that was to come." And he was about to launch a musical revolution.