Tag Archives: Louis Armstrong

Black History Month Spotlight – Taborian Hall and Dreamland Ballroom

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The new Arkansas Civil Rights History Audio Tour was launched in November 2015. Produced by the City of Little Rock and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock allows the many places and stories of the City’s Civil Rights history to come to life an interactive tour.  This month, during Black History Month, the Culture Vulture looks at some of the stops on this tour which focus on African American history.

Completed in 1918, Taborian Hall stands as one of the last reminders of the once-prosperous West Ninth Street African-American business and cultural district. West Ninth Street buildings included offices for black professionals, businesses, hotels, and entertainment venues. In 1916, the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, a fraternal insurance organization, hired local black contractor Simeon Johnson to enlarge an existing building to accommodate their activities, other offices and a ballroom.

During World War I, black soldiers from Camp Pike came to the Negro Soldiers Service Center here. In World War II, Taborian Hall was home to the Ninth Street USO, catering to black soldiers from Camp Robinson. By 1936, Dreamland Ballroom hosted basketball games, boxing matches, concerts and dances.

A regular stop for popular black entertainers on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” Dreamland hosted Cab Callaway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, B.B. King, Earl “Fatha” Hines and Ray Charles. Arkansas’s own Louis Jordan also performed here. Between the 1960s and 1980s, West Ninth Street declined, and many buildings were demolished. In 1991, Taborian Hall was renovated to house Arkansas Flag and Banner. Once again, Dreamland Ballroom hosts concerts and social events.

The app, funded by a generous grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council, was a collaboration among UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the City of Little Rock, the Mayor’s Tourism Commission, and KUAR, UALR’s public radio station, with assistance from the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau.

2015 In Memoriam – Jim Porter

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1515 Porter

In these final days of 2015, we pause to look back at 15 who influenced Little Rock’s cultural scene who left us in 2015.

Jim Porter, Jr., spent a lifetime promoting music in Little Rock.  Along the way, he created social change as well.

A native of Little Rock, he graduated from Little Rock High School and the University of Arkansas.  After college, Jim started out in the family businesses and tried to follow a “traditional” path that his father had paved for him. Working in sales and public relations, he became active doing volunteer work.  Jim realized that the “traditional” path was not for him, and while working in the family businesses, he started bringing in top name entertainers, many of them black, to perform in Little Rock. He was not a singer, nor did he play any instrument, but his love for music and all things connected to music led him towards his calling as an agent/manager and promoter of musicians.

As a promoter of national artists and bands, Jim ran into southern racism and segregation. The Central High crisis in 1957 caused many black artists to refuse to come to Little Rock, fearful for their safety. Jim was forced to concentrate more on booking and managing local musicians through what was at the time Arkansas’ only full time booking and talent agency, Consolidated Talent Corporation (later to become Porter Entertainment). During his booking career from the late 50’s until his retirement in 2001, Jim placed talent across Arkansas (and even in Las Vegas) at clubs, hotels, restaurants, and private functions- anywhere that people needed entertainment.

Jim saw first hand the inequities of black musicians in Arkansas, the separate and very unequal accommodations, and the segregated venues. Never giving up promoting national artists, the 60’s led him and his co-investors to bring in such national names (mostly jazz artists) such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Woody Herman, the Four Freshman, Dave Brubeck, George Shearing, Harry James and others.

In 1961, he was arrested for integrating a concert at Robinson Auditorium. A white man, he had entered the segregated balcony.  Knowing the challenges of booking acts in a segregated house (indeed Duke Ellington would cancel his booking at Robinson), Porter had tried to get the facility to change its rules.  It was 1966, when Louis Armstrong returned to Little Rock and played before an integrated house that the new rules were here to stay.  In the early 1970s, he helped bring the musical Hair to Little Rock, with the specter of full nudity causing consternation to Robinson Auditorium and some of the citizenry.

Jim was inducted into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Arkansas Jazz Heritage Foundation Hall of Fame in 2006. He was appointed to the Martin Luther King Commission in 2005 and entered politics to serve as a member of the Pulaski County Quorum Court from 1998 until 2006.

Always an entrepreneur, Jim also started MusAd Recording Studio, where commercial jingles were produced and bands could record demo tapes. The Hot Air Balloon Theatre (in the old Center Theatre on Main Street) was the site for G-movies and live entertainment for kids. The Yellow Rocket, an arcade in the “Heights” is still remembered by now middle-aged adults who spent afternoons and weekends feeding money into the game machines and eating snacks. Jim wrote several books, hosted TV shows (“After Five” and “Scene Around”) featuring restaurants, bars, clubs and their patrons and employees. He was featured on a weekly radio show about dining and entertainment, and wrote “Scene Around” columns and a dining and entertainment guide for the Arkansas Democrat.

Little Rock Look Back: Louis Armstrong

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SatchmoLouis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901 in New Orleans.  As he rose to fame, he would play Little Rock numerous times in a variety of venues.

As the Civil Rights movement started taking hold in the mid-1950s, many African American entertainers were vocal in their support.  Armstrong stayed silent.  Until, that is, September 17, 1957.  That night, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, he blasted President Dwight Eisenhower for his lack of action to make Governor Orval Faubus obey the law.  This was in an interview conducted by a 21 year old University of North Dakota journalism student named Larry Lubenow.

Journalist David Margolick wrote about the incident in The New York Times in September 2007 in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School.  He recounted how the story, written for the Grand Forks Herald, was picked up all over the country.  The entire Margolick piece can be read here.  Margolick tells that when Armstrong was given the chance to back off the comments, he asserted that he meant all of it.

On September 24, 1957, the night that the 101st Airborne was being mobilized to come into Little Rock, Armstrong sent Eisenhower a telegram again criticizing him for lack of action.  He used colorful language which sarcastically spoofed the “Uncle Tom” moniker which some of his critics had bestowed when they felt he was not doing enough for Civil Rights.  The Eisenhower Presidential Library has a copy of that telegram.  The incident between Satchmo and Ike was the basis for two different plays: Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf and Ishmael Reed’s The C Above C Above High C.

Armstrong would again play a part in Little Rock’s Civil Rights history.  In September 1966, he played the first major concert in Robinson Auditorium that was before a fully integrated audience.  Since the early 1960s, there had been a few sporadic concerts which had been before integrated audiences. But the policy of the Auditorium Commission remained that the building was to be segregated.  Following the approval of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, public facilities had to be integrated. Louis Armstrong played before a full house at Robinson Auditorium that night.

Black History Month Spotlight – Louis Jordan

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bhm louis-jordanSince tonight is the 57th Grammy Awards presentation, today’s spotlight looks at a musician who has several entries in the Grammy Hall of Fame – Louis Jordan.

Louis Thomas Jordan was born on July 8, 1908 in Brinkley. The son of a musician, he learned to play the saxophone as a youth and majored in music later at Arkansas Baptist College and performed with Jimmy Pryor’s Imperial Serenaders in Little Rock. He also toured with the famed Rabbit Foot Minstrels, who were the backing musicians for a number of blues legends. In the mid-Thirties, Jordan, now an accomplished jazz saxophonist, moved to New York, working with such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong. He joined drummer Chick Webb’s swing band in 1936.

After honing up his singing skills, he left the band in 1938 to start up his own band. Called the Elks Rendez-Vous Band, after the name of the club where they were playing a long-term engagement, Jordan signed with the Decca label. The band’s name was changed to the Tympany Five in 1939 and between 1941 and 1949; they had a series of hit records that were distinct of the “jump style” rhythm and blues style of music. These included “Choo Choo Cha Boogie,” “Saturday Night Fish Fry,”  and “Let The Good Times Roll.”

Jordan’s hits continued into the early 1950s, by which time his popularity on the R&B scene was enormous. His musical influence was far more reaching, with future rock ‘n’ roll stars like Bill Haley and Chuck Berry, fashioning their sound after Jordan’s style, particularly his vocal approach, song structures and lyrics and treatment of the guitars and horns. When Jordan left Decca in 1954, his popularity began to diminish quickly.

He continued to record and tour throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but rock ‘n’ roll, the music he helped foster, was a major contributing factor in his downfall. Louis Jordan died from heart failure in Los Angeles on February 4, 1975. In the early 1990’s, a revue called Five Guys Named Moe, based on Jordan’s music, was performed on London’s West End and New York’s Broadway.

Louis Jordan was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.  He was posthumously inducted into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2005. In 2008, the centennial year of his birth, he was featured on a postage stamp.

For more on Louis Jordan and other inductees into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, visit the permanent exhibit at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center. That museum is an agency of the Department of Arkansas Heritage.

The Hot Sardines at Wildwood Tonight!

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Wildwood Park for the ArtsThe Hot Sardines will be in concert tonight at Wildwood Park for the Arts.  The music will start at 8pm; tickets range from $35 to $75.

Take a blustery brass lineup, layer it over a rhythm section led by a stride-piano virtuoso in the Fats Waller vein, and tie the whole thing together with a one-of-the-boys frontwoman with a voice from another era, and you have the Hot Sardines. (We haven’t even told you about the tap dancer yet.)

In a short time, the Hot Sardines have gone from their first gig – at a coffeeshop on the last Q train stop in Queens – to selling out Joe’s Pub five times in as many months, headlining at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing, and opening for the Bad Plus, Lulu Gainsbourg and French gypsy-jazz artist Zaz. Through it all they’ve become regulars at the Shanghai Mermaid speakeasy and turned The Standard, where they play regularly, into their own “saloon in the sky” (The Wall Street Journal) – complete with tap dancing on the bar – honing a live persona that’s been called “unforgettably wild” and “consistently electrifying” (Popmatters).

The Sardine sound – wartime Paris via New Orleans, or the other way around – is steeped in hot jazz, salty stride piano, and the kind of music Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt and Waller used to make: Straight-up, foot-stomping jazz. (Literally – the band includes a tap dancer whose feet count as two members of the rhythm section). They manage to invoke the sounds of a near-century ago and stay resolutely in step with the current age. And while their roots run deep into jazz, that most American of genres, they’re intertwined with French influences via their frontwoman, who was born and raised in Paris (and writes songs in both languages).

The band was born when said Parisian (“Miz Elizabeth” Bougerol) met a stride piano player (bandleader Evan “Bibs” Palazzo) at a jam session they found on Craigslist. Above a noodle shop on Manhattan’s 49th Street, they discovered a mutual love for songs from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s that no-one really plays anymore. Or if they play them, “they handle them with kid gloves, like pieces in a museum,” says Evan, underscoring a point the pair can’t stress enough: “This music isn’t historical artifact. It’s a living, breathing, always-evolving thing.”

The hosts for the evening are: Dr. F. Richard Jordan, Gert Clark, Lee and Dale Ronnel, Jane Wilson, Buff Blass and Walt Winters