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
Well, he takes a three-chorus solo. It's his longest solo on record. And to me, he opens off, I kind of jokingly refer to it as Cantor Louis Armstrong. It's like, you know, this minor keyed song, and he opens almost like he's blowing the shofar. And so, you know, the influence of the Kronofsky family is immediately right there. Then there's comedy.
You know, people always said, you know, well, Armstrong can mug and fool around. But when he picked up the horn, that's when he was serious. Well, to an extent, but he was also very funny on the trumpet. And so there was something called the Streets of Cairo, which is interesting. known as the Snake Charmer song. And so he takes that and turns it into a musical quote.
And of course, you know, the hip hop world now, they call it sampling, but this was something Armstrong brought to the jazz world of taking a preexisting melody and incorporating it into his improvisation. And it's funny, but he also really makes a meal out of it, stretching it out and everything. Meanwhile, the band in the background, they turn
They're backing into kind of a Spanish rhythm, what Jelly Roll Morton called the Spanish tinge. And, of course, that's another ingredient of the New Orleans sound, the Cuban influence, Afro-Cuban influence, all that. So all these different things, comedy, the Jewish influence, New Orleans influence, everything that he had heard is all coming together.
And eventually it all builds to this climax where he is wailing in the upper register. High notes, opera, Enrico Caruso, everything he learned from buying opera records as a teenager, it's all coming out of his trumpet. And I make the point that this three-chorus solo, the way it builds and builds and builds, it starts off so slow and quiet, and by the end, it's like this roof-shaking climax.
That's the blueprint for all kind of extended solos. And in the book, I just use guitarists, but Jimmy Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, it's the blueprint. It doesn't even have to be jazz. Anybody who is improvising, taking a solo, starting off quietly, building and building and building, and boom, here's the big high-note ending. they're all taking a page out of tight like this.
So to me, this is Louis Armstrong's life up to 1928 in three minutes.
I mean, to me, they're all gems. But the big takeaway is that what you see is what you got. You know, the Armstrong who had the time of his life and always said he was there in the cause of happiness on stage. He's that guy offstage. He is laughing the loudest and telling the dirtiest jokes. And he's, you know, so accessible with his friends and with his family and everything.
with fans, you know, he had an open door policy and he would sometimes tape record those conversations and, you know, just so sweet, so genuine, so earnest. But at the same time, the tapes also showcase him as a human being. You hear him cursing, you hear him angry, you hear him upset about racism and about the way he was being treated.
And I think that's kind of the big takeaway, the big discovery for me. And I tried getting that into all three books. is that sometime Armstrong is painted as kind of a man-child, like that smiling, eye-rolling persona. People think, well, that's all he was.
He didn't really know how to navigate the world, and he needed a white manager like Joe Glazer, and he just wanted to make fans happy and smile, and he just was totally kind of ignorant about the situation.
Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that started early and kind of haunted him for years. And it actually clung to him to the first maybe 10, 20 years after he died. That was a big part of many of the writings about Armstrong. And all of that changed when his archives became available. You know, his archives went to Queens College in 1991.
the first writers, beginning with Gary Giddens and then all through the 90s and, you know, Winter Marsalis, of course, and the Jazz Lincoln Center tributes and the Ken Burns documentary.
All of a sudden, once people had access to these tapes and to these journals and to these scrapbooks and his unpublished writings, it was like, oh my goodness, you know, this guy, he was aware, he knew the story and he was street smart. And I think that this book, you know, kind of doing it in backwards fashion the way I did, you realize that what he learned on those streets in New Orleans was
Nobody was going to pull the wool over his eyes. He was aware at all times of who he was. He was aware of his talent. He was aware that people wanted him to perform and all this stuff. But he knew how the money worked. He knew how the country worked. He puts his career on the line to tell off President Eisenhower over the way he handled Little Rock.
And so all that stuff is bubbling under the surface. And he did it himself. You know, he was his own archivist. He makes these tapes. He curates his own archive. And I think he realized on a deep level that he could not go on Johnny Carson or Ed Sullivan in 1967 and talk about being black in America and talk about marijuana and talk about all these subjects.
But he left behind a record of his feelings on all these things. And so now, you know, I've done three books, but I honestly there's enough information. in those archives for 50 more books. And I really feel like he was playing the long game. He knew that one day future historians and musicologists would want to study his life.
He even said, I quote it in the book, he said, they're going to write about me in the history book someday. And so as long as he was in charge of his own archives, people would have to go to him. And you could agree or disagree with his takeaways, but the key is he is now allowed to speak for himself.
You read my mind.
Yeah. So the next chapter of Armstrong's life was covered in the previous chapter of my previous book, which was called Heart Full of Rhythm, The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong. Again, my intention was never to do this in reverse chronology, but it actually kind of worked out pretty interestingly.
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