Louisiana celebrates life, legacy of Louis Armstrong

Stacey Plaisance

NEW ORLEANS — Musicians came all the way from Japan to perform at last weekend’s celebration of the birth of one of the founding fathers of jazz — Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong.

Among them was 63-year-old trumpet player Yoshio Toyama, who was 20 when he met and performed with Armstrong in Tokyo in 1964.

“I love Louis Armstrong,” said Toyama, a small man who belted out some of Armstrong’s biggest hits — including “What a Wonderful World” — at an outdoor birthday party last Friday in Armstrong Park.

“I’m very proud to be here to play for him,” said Toyama, standing next to a large bronze statue of the jazz king born in New Orleans more than a century ago.

The party, complete with a large cake and ice cream, kicked off a weekend of music touted as Satchmo Summerfest, featuring musical events and seminars held at the Old U.S. Mint and other French Quarter locales.

Among last Saturday’s performers were the Storyville Stompers and the Louis Armstrong Society jazz band, featuring Charmaine Neville. Also Saturday, the Treme brass band planned a children’s workshop, where kids brought their instruments on stage and performed with the band.

On Sunday, Rebirth brass band performed, along with Trombone Shorty and his Orleans Avenue band and Kermit Ruffins and his Barbecue Swingers. Neville and others held a “Props for Pops” session that included songs by and about Armstrong, whose many nicknames included “Pops.”

“Louis Armstrong is such an ambassador for this city, even though he’s not here anymore,” said Chuck Morse, the assistant secretary of the Louisiana Office of Tourism, who attended last Friday’s party. “Celebrating him is a celebration of our culture.”

Last Friday’s party was followed by a red beans and rice luncheon at a downtown New Orleans hotel and seminars about Armstrong.

Other weekend events included a jazz Mass Sunday at St. Augustine Church, one of the nation’s oldest historically black Catholic churches, followed by a second-line parade — a traditional New Orleans foot parade where watchers often fall in to form a second line of paraders.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the festival attracted as many as 50,000 attendees, but that number was cut in half last year — the first post-Katrina Satchmo Summerfest, said Kathleen Alter, the festival’s director.

The first Satchmo Summerfest was held in 2001 to honor what would have been Armstrong’s 100th birthday. Though there is some dispute over the exact date of the jazz man’s birth, festival organizers recognize it as Aug. 4, 1901.

By the time of Armstrong’s death in 1971, he was widely recognized as a founding father of jazz.

(Associated Press)