Ricky Riccardi
speaker
185 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Ricky Riccardi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so he would come home, he would sleep for maybe an hour, then put on a pair of long pants and then go out and play the cornet maybe until 4 in the morning. sleep one or two hours and do it again. So that's part of his childhood. The Kronofsky family, though, he always gave them credit. He said they treated him like a human being.
And the other benefit of working for the Kronofsky family is their coal wagon delivered coal to the prostitutes in the red light district of New Orleans, which was later known as Storyville. And, you know, African-American kids could not walk around Storyville unless they were with, um, They're white boss. And so Armstrong had Morris Karnofsky and he was his boss there.
He would stay on the coal cart and Lewis would go around delivering the coal. But this is also the time that the red light district starts bringing in jazz bands. And so this is Armstrong's first time hearing King Oliver and Freddie Keppard and Manuel Perez. And so, you know, there are benefits to this work.
He always had this way of kind of finding the good in these situations, situations that I think if anybody else had lived them or spent their lives talking about them or writing about them would have come off as horror stories. But Armstrong, he always found a lesson that he learned and internalized. And in his mind, everything he did made him a better person.
Well, the amazing thing for me is Cornette Chop Suey was the next song recorded after heebie-jeebies. So I always like to make the point that You know, you can name a million great vocalists and a million great instrumentalists and Armstrong's the only person who totally changed the way people sang and he totally changed the way people soloed and played music on their instruments.
And he really does it. on one day, February 26, 1926. But Cornet Chop Suey was kind of his coming out party to show all the tools in his toolbox of what he could do with his cornet. And so it opens with his dazzling, unaccompanied introduction, just letting everybody know, I'm here, I'm the leader. And then the melody, I was just talking to the great multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson.
We were saying, you can play that melody tonight in the 21st century, and it sounds fresh, it sounds modern. And so that was a melody that he had written two years earlier for But the main part was this stop time solo. And I think trumpet players and trombonists and guitarists and piano players, they all heard that. And they said, wow, that's how you tell a story.
You know, that's how you really solo. And it's not just arpeggios. It's not just, you know, just playing quick or whatever this technical stuff. It's actually got a beginning, middle and an end. And so Cornet Chop Suey was analyzed as this masterpiece of improvisation music.
Until the 1990s, when it was discovered that Armstrong had copyrighted the song two years earlier and he had written down the whole solo note for note. And then in the 1950s, when that record was played for some of his old New Orleans contemporaries, they all said, oh, my goodness, that's Buddy Petit. And Buddy Petit was a cornet player that Armstrong heard and admired when he was a kid.
But Buddy Petit never recorded it. He died in 1931, left behind no record. And so to me, Cornet Chop Suey is on surface level. You'll hear it. You know, it's still it sounds modern and fresh and we can still learn a lot from it.
But to me, it's also Armstrong serious about his craft, writing down the melody, writing down the solo, showing off the influence of a musician who never got to record and, you know, simultaneously forecasting the shape of jazz to come, but also really leaning into his New Orleans roots.
Sure. So stop time, you know, usually you get the rhythm section is hitting a The beats on every beat, every quarter note, yeah, bum, bum, bum, bum. Well, stop time, they all just focus on the first beat. So it's like one, two, three, four. They hit one note, one accent, and that just lets Lewis, he's out there, you know, without a parachute.
He just has to play without that chugging, swinging rhythm section behind him. They're just accenting the first beat of every measure. And it's hard to do that because, you know, you could lose your time. You could lose your equilibrium, the band. They also have to hit that first beat all together on the nose. And it's become a kind of a lost art form in certain circles.
But few did it better than the Hot Five.
Yes, both.
His doctor, Gary Zucker, basically told him, all right, you can do the gig, but we're going to turn your hotel room basically into a triage at a hospital. And every night before and after each show, I will come in. I'll do your blood pressure. I'll test your vitals. As the gig went on, Lewis started suffering from heart failure.
And Dr. Zucker said, you know, we'll try to keep the heart failure at bay. But he knew he wasn't going to stop him. He tried stopping him, but he said Armstrong almost got into a possessed state. And he said, Doc, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn. The people are waiting for me. I can't let them down.
So Armstrong made it through the entire Waldorf gig, two shows a night for two weeks. And two days later, he had a major heart attack, ended up in the hospital for almost eight weeks and ended up passing away in July of 71. So it really is his last stand. And it really is also, to me, him going out on his shield.
And he probably could have lived another five, 10 years if he could just put the horn down, retire, relax. He had money. He had a house that was paid off. He had his wife. He had his tapes. He had everything he wanted in Corona Queens, but he needed to be out there performing for his fans. He knew, even his old friend, the drummer Zutty Singleton, said that, you know, don't let anybody fool you.
He knew the end was near, but I think he was satisfied that he had finished the gig and was still on his feet at the end.
Showing 141–160 of 185 · page 8 of 10
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