After years of touring, he settled in Queens, and by the 1950s, he was a national musical icon, assisted in part, by his appearances on radio and in film and television, in addition to his concerts. Hardin became Armstrong's second wife and they returned to Chicago to play together and then he began to form his own "Hot" jazz bands. Henderson persuaded Armstrong to come to New York City, where he became a featured and musically influential band soloist and recording artist. He earned a reputation at " cutting contests" and his fame reached band leader Fletcher Henderson. In Chicago, he spent time with other popular jazz musicians, reconnecting with his friend Bix Beiderbecke and spending time with Hoagy Carmichael and Lil Hardin. Around 1922, he followed his mentor, Joe "King" Oliver, to Chicago to play in the Creole Jazz Band. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an inventive trumpet and cornet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance. Īrmstrong was born and raised in New Orleans. His career spanned five decades and different eras in the history of jazz. He is among the most influential figures in jazz. As he played on, including the melody from the song “Chameleon,” the notes drifted through an open window into the small courtyard outside, where the few students milling about seemed not to notice.Louis Daniel Armstrong (Aug– July 6, 1971), nicknamed " Satchmo", " Satch", and " Pops", was an American trumpeter and vocalist. Akerberg posed as a friend dutifully snapped photos that showed him standing under the poster-size pictures of Armstrong that decorate the archives’ reading room. Picking up the third horn, an ornate trumpet decorated with floral chasing that crawled across the bell-pipe and into the bell, Mr. “This is great,” he announced with a satisfied nod. Akerberg pulled it away from his mouth, opened his eyes, caught his breath, and looked down at the instrument. This particular morning, after improvising awhile on a second horn, Mr. We might have made a big mistake cleaning these horns the first time.” “What with cloning and everything today, you never know. “My only regret is that there might have been some valuable DNA in there that we lost,” Mr. Still, fingerprints are wiped off immediately after the trumpets are handled, and instruments are annually deep-cleaned, lubricated and polished. Cogswell, it’s a tightrope of access versus preservation, but so far the limited exposure of the trumpets - perhaps two to four people play them a year - does not raise concern, he said. The proof of this lies in the archives, in the dozens of photographs showing the musician backstage after concerts with fans enthusiastically trying out his fabled horns.įor Mr. But for all the nightmares that could result, one argument trumps them all: Louis would have wanted it this way. The trumpets are objects of such reverence that some visitors have declined the offer. “For people to actually hold Louis’s own trumpet in their hands, it does touch them in a good way, in a beautiful way.” “There is a talismanic power to an artifact like this,” Mr. “That can’t happen.”īut the fear was quickly replaced by wondering: “What will the sound - my sound - be on Louis Armstrong’s horn?” “That’s not going to happen,” he recalled thinking. And his first thought was an anxious one: Just don’t drop the thing. He was holding one of the Holy Grails of music, a trumpet that once belonged to Louis Armstrong. Akerberg, a 27-year-old amateur trumpet player from Stockholm spending a semester studying business at Berkeley College in Manhattan, was anxious, and with good reason. Drawing a breath, he put the horn to his mouth, and he began to play. Then he held the trumpet in front of him. Akerberg fingered the valves knowingly, making sure that they sprang back to attention, and blew a little warm air into the mouthpiece before placing it in the instrument. ONE day late last month, inside a reading room in the library at Queens College, a young visitor from Sweden named Erik Akerberg was handed a gold-plated Selmer trumpet with a small ding in the bell.