Then the Saints Came Marching In

"Satchmo! Pops! Mr. Louis! Mr. Armstrong!" Flash, Flash, Flash, Flash. Cameras ahead. All he could do was smile in reply, with his big grin, and keep on moving through the crowd. Behind him, his entourage followed along trepidly.

The Louis Armstrong band, or in their own terms, the OJ Express: the Original Jazz Express. But when Louis was feeling down, he would refer to the group as the Old Jazz Express, because the jazz that they made was ancient, by now. But this concert was different. They were in Communists' country, in Prague, in 1965. Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars band would be performing at the Lucerna Grand Ballroom, which is smack in the center of town.

Most unusual for this situation, they had accepted the offer to stay in the city for ten days. Satchmo could not remember any time that he had ever had ten days off from the road, from performing the hits that he had written, and he'd been singing them since he was a kid on the streets of New Orleans, the original jazz kid; he had earned that nickname.

Looking around at all of the paparazzi in his face, the media, the fans, the organizers, and the police on the sides, he was suddenly a star again, and he thought to himself, "Yeah, what a wonderful world it is, and all of this here attention is thanks to my new song 'Hello, Dolly!'"

He had recorded "Hello, Dolly!" one year earlier, and it was a hit; more than that, it was at the Top of the Pops, so Mr. Pops himself was up there with that new sound by the English boys' band, The Beatles. Pops had no idea, that one month later, back home in the United States, he would get the award for Song of the Year "Hello, Dolly!" and in the pop category for the "Best Male Vocal Performance" for the same song at the 7th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony in Beverly Hills, at the Beverly Hilton, California. And at the same awards ceremony, those young boys, The Beatles, would get the award for "Best New Artist" in the Pop category (1964).

There was only one thing that worried Pops about accepting this invitation. How was he going to get by for a week without Gold Leaf, because he was told it would be off limits there. It was not any secret in jazz circles that Satchmo liked to get high. Not only before the shows or after, or throughout the nights, but Pops liked to be high all the time, just buzzed, as often as he could do it. And that didn't make him an addict or junkie, in his view. It relieved the stress. He had asked about this right away, and his manager said, absolutely not; so Pops said, "What's that? No Gold Leaf weeds over there? No party tea? That's not any civilization then!"

Pops had expected a cold reception, after all they were going behind the Iron Curtain. He was anticipating soldiers to be marching around and pointing their rifles at him and his entourage, at the border, at the airport, and just everywhere that they would be taking them. But once he was there, he was shocked to see the civilization that they had built over so many centuries. They took him to the church, as he requested, on their first morning of visits. It was raining on the day that they went up to the Prague Castle and into the gloomy and dark interior of the St. Vitus Cathedral; and yet with such a majestic air and sad beauty to the towering stone-space, there was an overwhelming feeling that Pops could not suppress. "What a wonderful world," he said, as being there put him in a much better mood for the rest of the day.

The next day they took him to the Charles Bridge and the first thing that he asked was, "Dis is the St. Charles Bridge?" while at the same time, the long-time favorite of his band's repertoire "When the Saints Come Marchin In" suddenly rang in his ears; after all, Charles Bridge is lined with dozens of Saints in baroque sculptures like nowhere else on earth.

"Not St. Charles," replied a Czech in the entourage, "It was built by our greatest Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, as Prague was once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire."

As they kept their slow pace across the over 500-years-old stone bridge, crossing the river from the Old Town to the Lesser Town, Satchmo began to sing out loud to the Saints (with the young female vocalist on his tour, Jewel Brown, joining in on the refrain and not to his surprise), joining them to his alma mater, to Storyville, his streets of New Orleans, Louisiana.

"Oh, when the saints (when the saints), Go Marchin In (go marchin in), Now, when the saints go marching in (marching in), Yes, I want to be in that number..."

On an evening visit to the Semafor theatre, a jazz cabaret venue, he saw performances of Dixieland bands, one with a raspy-voiced Satchmo impersonator (singing in Czech). It was a gas to see this, like a time capsule of the jazz and blues era that Pops had grown up in and kept in his heart, so that at the end of their show, he joined them for a jam session then and there. It was the only chance for the band to let loose, get off the set list, and play it for real. Didn't these dear people know, or should he tell them anything about the so many changes in jazz since Dixieland, and Swing, as this was all they seemed to know? Did he need to tell them about Charles Mingus? What's that newest sound by Miles Davis, far out John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman? Or why should he tell them, So What?

More important was the lingering dilemma of getting Gold Leaf for the concert. So this was left up to Lucille, his wife who always came on the road with him just for these kinds of responsibilities. Yes, it would be tougher in Prague, yet nothing was impossible. All he ever had to tell her was this: "Honey, Do!" Then a little more explaining like, "Lucille, I need some gage, baby, I need Gold Leaf, otherwise it's just not gonna be right for these dear people. I gotta make it right. I love these people, and they love me back, yeah."

After some coy questioning of the Pragoconcert staff, who were hanging around during rehearsals, someone finally told Lucille about a cat named Marek, a Slovak, who'd get her "tea." With that news, she handed over an empty can of Prince Albert tobacco, and said, "Put it here."

When they arrived to the art nouveau Lucerna building on Wencesclaus Square, it was an area with a hustlin' and bustlin' that put the band at ease, and Satchmo also thought that the square reminded him of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, except that it wasn't as colorful, of course, and it wasn't as warm outside. Inside the ballroom, which is a three-level underground labyrinth shaped like a shoebox, with the stage at one end, the audience was already gathering when they arrived. The songs, from the concert itself, were nothing to write home about, but still there were the American foreign correspondents (spooks) in the hall just in case, and keeping an eye on him.

They opened with "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," a slow, and bluesy trance-inducing tune when enough of the herbal essence is consumed before or during the performance. The song ended with Pops' characteristic scat, as his call to arms to the audience to get hip. "Ba-dee-da-zee-oh-za-dot—yeah—Good evening, everybody!" and with a laugh they were off. "The Bucket's Got a Hole in It," a Dixieland traditional got the audience moving in their seats, which is all that he wanted for the time being, just to get them loosened up for more. Then they did "Tiger Rag," a fast feast of horns at a dizzying pace, Pops wanted to make sure that everyone in the room knew (or would know) that he was as fast as any be-bopper. "Louisiana" was another fast-paced ode to the dear Old South, all anthems in their repertoire. Pianist Billy Kyle tears it up on the solo for this one, then bassist Arvell Shaw using his bow, then clarinetist Eddie Shu taking it as high as it gets, with Pops keeping it there.

"Hello, Dolly!" is extended to a six-minute dance or party hall version and once it hits its stride, Pops could notice some female dancers up on the terraces, swinging in the darkness. This is all he needed to see to know that he had gotten at least some of those pretty ladies and their male partners in the audience to where it's at, or where they truly yearned to be. So it was time, they had been primed enough for "When the Saints Come Marchin' In." Never had Pops sung and played this one with so much love in his heart, or at least this is what he thought to himself: "Love baby, love. That's the secret." He could see people up on their feet, some men taking off their dark suit jackets, encouraged by their most excited female partners. All Satchmo wanted that night, or all any jazzman of his generation from New Orleans, the O.J. men, whenever they played it was mostly to get those ladies to feel that love, whether sitting and moving around their butt in their seats, or up on their feet in a sweaty dance.

The band took their break after the Saints. In the dressing room, it seemed like the first time that they were given some privacy with no staff from the Pragokoncert or even fans around. So Satchmo asked Lucille for the tin container of Prince Albert for a quick smoke of the local herbal "tea" (courtesy of Marek the Slovak). What he and Lucille did not know was that it was impossible for Marek to get genuine Gold Leaf, Party Tea, back then still called reefer. The younger jazz-lovers knew that Satchmo liked to get high, so Marek had understood his task, but his understanding of English was so terrible, that when Lucille had asked him in her flirting way using terms like "spice" and "tea" or "thyme" for them, he thought that she really wanted the herb mixed in with thyme and green tea. So he ended up giving her back his own concoction of thyme, green tea, nutmeg, and mountain-grown marijuana from his cottage in the high Tatras of eastern Slovakia. He had rolled it up in two joints for Pops, just as Lucille had requested it.

Pops smoked it in a rush, and he did not really notice the odd mixture, since he was already high from the performance itself—he had not been so excited about a live show in years. Now at the age of 65, the only time that Pops had ever gotten such wild fans for his arrival into a town was on the set for "Paris, Blues," shot in the early '60s where he plays Wild Man Moore, a superstar jazz trumpeter, so simply playing himself as he was back in the 1920s or '30s. In the film, when Pops brings his swinging little band down into the underground Club 33 chez Marie Seoul, he gets the young and hip Parisians into a dance frenzy, and even though it was only a scene in the film, he insists to himself that it was a genuine enthusiasm there in Europe that he had never experienced back home. The film was shot five years earlier, made right at the moment that modern jazz would usher Old Pops out to pasture, or at least that's how everyone saw it, including himself, until his comeback thanks to the success of "Hello, Dolly!"

After the break, and back up on the stage of the Lucerna Grand Ballroom with the band, Satchmo was smiling so wide that the nearest at hand security personnel had to become a little suspicious. He glided by them giggling, waving to the crowd, then shook his head wildly.The drummer Danny Barcelona began with a roll and a bang, and they were off for the second set with "Royal Garden Blues." Pops could not get out of his head the Prague Castle's Royal Garden that he had visited a few days ago, the grandest one he had ever seen in his life. The crowd roared like Pops had not heard in years, a rowdy cheer he needed to hear. But then they made a mistake. They played "The Faithful Hussar" because Pops had thought it was paying the audience an honor, for their hero Jan Hus (leader of the Hussites), who had such a magnificent statue in the middle of Old Town Square. But Hussars are Hungarian soldiers, not Czechs. Although there was a slight applause for this one, many of the men in the audience left their seats to go back to the bar for beer. Then they played Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brech's "Mack the Knife." Already irked by the Hungarian reference, if there is any way to fully annoy Czechs, it is to try and please them with German greetings or songs, German lyrics, German references of anything in their Bohemian town, even though Prague was for centuries a German-speaking town under the Hapsburg Empire. So during this one, the women got up to go to the powder room, or look for their dates lingering at the bar and downing beers until that one was over.

When the band started to play "Struttin' With Some Barbecue," everyone suddenly ran back to their seats or found a little corner on the dance floor or hallways to get down and boogie. The band had been forgiven in a flash and according to historical notes from the era, the Lucerna Grand Ballroom had never before nor ever after had such frantic jazz dancing. Pops could feel it and he knew that it was the herbs concoction that had helped him sparkle that night. He sang about finding his thrill on "Blueberry Hill" as if transported back-in-time to Storyville, a boy delivering coal to honky-tonks, or hearing jazz from Funky Butt Hall in the air. According to the set list for this tour, they should have then gone back to "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," while placing within that the refrain to "Hello, Dolly!" to bring the performance to its close. But Pops was having too good of a time to end just at this point. So he huddled with the band and said, "Well boys, let's play some viper tunes, "Muggles," "Song of the Vipers" and "Swing You Cats," then back to the 'Saints' so I can talk to the animals, as I got rhythm, and that's my desire in Prague so they will never forget it, they'll love us, yeah!"

As "'Muggles," 'Song of the Vipers" and "Swing You Cats" are raunchy-blues or get-down and let's-have-sex instrumentals made for the nights in honky-tonks in New Orleans, Pops decided that he needed to add some sort of an introduction or explanation for the added tunes.

"These songs, ladies and gentlemen, is gonna have a little of the viper's language, we're gonna swing upon ya, for the first-time ever in Prague, boo-ya-yah! And first, this song's called "Muggles," an instrumental to get you into the mood." This one was a drowsy blues with a torch of fire in the center; a little skip into a lazy dance melody, then they shifted to "Song of The Vipers," a gage-smokers' anthem back in the day, meaning when he first recorded it in the '20s. Then in his ebullient way: "Okay, here we go, Ba-ba-do-we-do-lala-do-do, get a load of this viper's language, in your city of magic, here-ah-here-ah-see-why-ee-dee-wah-bah-boom. Ee-ee-wah-dee-dee-dee-wop, zee-za-zee-zee-vop, you're the ones we love, ee-zee-doo-doo-zoo, ee-we-boo-boo-for you!..."

Unplanned, they soared into a furious version of "Short, But Sweet." The sound of Pops' horn soared up through the audience, caressing the roof of the darkly mysterious three-floored underground ballroom with its dark-violet paisley-designs placed along the walls, the vaulted walkways on the terraces and on the ceiling. He could see it. By the time they wrapped it up with "The Saints" as the encore, Pops ran backstage briefly to spark up his second joint. The band kept going till he returned; when he was back on stage, after smoking his hooter, he shouted out: "Yeah, a-ha, sure, uh-hu, love, baby, let's go!"

Only the mammoth Tyree Glenn, the trombonist, seemed to be as ecstatic beside his boss Satchmo playing these extra tunes. The rest of the band seemed not to understand what was going on. At that moment, Pops had a mystical vision that he could never admit to anyone, since he did not want to cause problems for Marek or Lucille, for their secret "tea-time" dealings. From the other end of the Lucerna Grand Ballroom, slowly coming up the center aisle and in a march as solos, pairs or trios as in a procession after descending the main stairway of the concert hall, (only) Pops could see the Charles Bridge pantheon of Saints come marching in. He remembered them as they were on Prague's Bridge of Saints, baroque stone statutes come to life, spirit guides, celebrating in jazz and led by St. Bernard, the honey-sweet Cistercian abbot from Burgundy, holding his hand on his chest in a burning love for the Virgin Mary. Closely behind him was St. Ivo, advocate of the poor, another Frenchman, but from Brittany. He is wearing his robe and with his biretta, pulled down low, so breaking loose from his usually upstanding form. He twists his torso then stretches out his arms, pointing to the crowd. Following these leaders of the procession, a Saints holy duo stepped onto the main floor with St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelic Italian doctor with a little white dove nestled beside his head, and gliding alongside him was the calm Spaniard St. Dominic, aka the Lord's Dog. In back of them were Saints Barbara, Margaret, and Elisabeth. St. Elisabeth of Thuringia, once a noble princess, has a scepter in her hand; St. Margaret of Antioch shines out like a sparkling pearl—small, white and perfect in her appearance. Still, those two seem diminutive (just as on the bridge) to the glorious St. Barbara, from Turkish Nicomedia or perhaps Lebanon, as the one who was beheaded by her own father, but who is now the most radiant of the trio, and glowing with an effervescent peacock feather placed by the holy crown on her head.

Closely behind them was St. Anne, Mother of the Virgin Mary, content in her grandeur. And behind her, St. Joseph, cuckold foster-father of Jesus, holds a lily, a sign of purity. Another couple comes up behind the holy family, with Saints Cyril and Methodius, great Apostles of the Slavs, though they were born in the Byzantine. Cyril is in a monk's dress, and Methodius is in his usual bishop's attire, eternal traveling buddies-in-arms, these two. Then there was the first Francis in the line, St. Francis Xavier, Jesuit missionary of the Far East, originally a nobleman from Navarre, when at that time it was of the Basque kingdom. Behind him strolled St. John the Baptist, with his long mangled hair and beard, dressed in rough camel's skin with his shell for scooping up baptismal water tied to his waist. Next, St. Christopher, a giant and furry pagan seeking the true faith, is the saint of the travelers. On the bridge, he carries the baby Jesus on his shoulders but here it is a gnarled stick. He is followed by St. Norbert, aka the Angel of Peace, a German wearing a religious habit carrying a chalice (filled with red wine spilling out onto the floor). At St. Norbert's side is St. Sigismund, son of the king of Burgundy, and a king in his own right, with a beard and sword. Then comes another Frances, this time St. Francis of Borgia, the Spanish duke, monk, and general wearing a Jesuit robe and a ducal crown. He slyly breaks into a shuffle for an instant. John of Nepomuk, the most celebrated Czech among the Saints, is next wearing priestly vestments with a biretta and around his head is a halo of five celestial lights or stars. The Czech grand dame follows behind him, St. Ludmila, Princess of the Czech people or the mother figure of the Czechs and educator of the nation wearing a veil on her head. St. Anthony of Padua, as a young beardless monk in a monastic habit, the most humble or modest of all, with a halo over his head, but for some reason it resembles a tiny propeller. Behind him follows St. Francis Seraph (Francis of Assisi) in a simple monk's habit. He appears as the oddest ball of the procession, in his most tattered of habits compared to the others. Then there is St. Jude Thaddeus, the only real deal direct disciple of Jesus in the pack, a higher breed among Saints, calm and robust with a heavy club in his hands. He does a wiggle. After him, St. Procopius, the first Czech saint, another hairy Slavic monk, renowned for harnessing the devil to a plough and then putting him to work in the Bohemian countryside. Beside him, just as they are companions on the bridge, St. Vincent Ferrer, or the Angel of the Apocalypse, known for raising the dead and saving of so many souls at a time of the eminent end of the world, due to plagues and the Hundred Year's war between England and France in his era. Behind them, the high-brow, St. Augustine, a corrupted teen turned philosopher and theologian, born in Algiers, and holding high in his right hand, not a book but a burning heart. St. Nicolas of Tolentino marches behind him with a star on his chest and he is holding a basket of bread, handing out pieces of miraculous bread to enliven the crowd, raise their spirits. Behind him St. Cajetan, originally an Italian count and the so-called soul catcher, floats in on a mist of cloud puffs with a multitude of birds, including a stork, an eagle, a dove and lark. Obscured by the trail of cloud puffs of St. Cajetan, Pops can barely make out St. Lutgardis, the blind Belgian nun and mystic in her deep sensual ecstasy with the crucified Christ.

There is a pause in the procession behind St. Lugardis, out of respect for her intimate moment at Christ's wounded heart, but then comes St. Phillip Benizi, the Italian healer, miracle-worker and peacemaker, also known as the White Eagle, raises his arms to affect their hearing. Another local eminence comes after this, St. Vitus, a Sicilian and the mystic protector of the Charles Bridge, does a surprisingly old version of the twisted steps of the St. Vitus dance. The duo behind him keeps to the shift from a march to a weird shuffle with two French hermits, Felix of Valois and John of Matha, both in white habits with a red and blue cross and carrying with them broken chains and shackles (as slave redeemers for Christians held in Muslim captivity). Closely behind is the Czech hermit Ivan, of St. John under the Rock, with his long hair and beard wearing a hooded robe, keeping in step with the demented St. Vitus dance moves. Another couple steps up, the twins from Syria, Saints Cosma and Damian, wearing period gowns with birettas as university masters, and carrying medicinal jars as they are best known as physicians of the body and of the soul, each raising their arms to help the audience see. Last in line, due to his stature, was St. Wenceslaus, Prince of the Czech lands, and the only one in a knightly armor, so wobbling along like a Don Quixote with his banner and shield.

Satchmo with a sweaty face and ecstatic grin shrieks out louder than he had ever dared on his horn, finally as loud as Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans horn-player who blew so hard that he blew out his mind. Pops screams out: EE-EE-WAH-HOLY SCHMOLY! I CAN SEE THEM SAINTS!..."

Comments