Satchmo

"In all my whole career the Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who'd stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lost of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all, I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn." So says Louis Armstrong about just one of the places he grew up in, a tough kid who also happened to be a musical genius. This story of his early life, concluding with his departure to Chicago to play with his boyhood idol King Oliver, is a fascinating document. Contrary to popular belief, it turns out that life in New Orleans was an amazingly eventful and a basically happy experience for Louis Armstrong-and he ought to know-for in no other city in the world at the time could a boy discover and learn about the music that he loved, for this was New Orleans, and he was Louis Armstrong.