Reefer tapes of Louis Armstrong | Hacker News Reader

Reefer tapes of Louis Armstrong

booyorkcity.com

81 pointsmoonka20 comments

For anyone looking for an insider view into the crazy, early days of Jazz, I highly Recommend Sidney Bechet's Treat it Gentle and Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues, which also include many fascinating stories about Armstrong - like the time he improvised the song Heebie Jeebies (about Grass)[0].

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksmGt2U-xTE&pxtry=1

Miles Davis' autobiography is also an amazing, vulgar, honest and incredible work as well. The audible audio book is especially good because the narrator nails his raspy but dogged voice. Highly NSFW and highly recommended.

great book. Quincy Jones autobiography is also fantastic

Worth a read for the 30ies slang alone:

> Armstrong said: “This dick confidentially told me, he said ‘When that cat called us and stool-pigeoned on you, they sent me and my partner to come up for the assignment…when we found out that you was the one that we must nab, it broke our hearts. You must understand, we can get you six months for a roach’.

Interesting also that the fact that it was Louis Armstrong made them contemplate this on a level that they would never have for a lesser god or an ordinary individual. So much for the justice is blind mantra. Following up on a competitor trying to harm Armstrong is already quite a nice show of solidarity between musicians and on top of that shows the police's willingness to have the law used in matters of economics where the party doing the reporting (or anybody else for that matter) suffered no harm at all from the alleged crime.

Did anybody ever believe justice was truly blind, particularly in the US? You've always had just as much justice as you can afford there.

I find it anachronistic that I'm invited to make an appointment to listen to the tapes in New York.

Why wouldn't the museum simply publish them online ?

I imagine that digitizing the analogue tapes would have a lossy effect on the quality.

Four fifths of f-all in comparison to the inconvenience. It's entirely related to monetising the whole thing, rather than giving it away online for free.

It is trivial today to sample audio in a rate and sensitivity which greatly surpass both the density of the pherromagnetic material in the tapes and the fidelity of the original recording equipment.

Even "analogue" sound depends on the resolution of the underlying technology, so no, there doesn't have to be any data loss.

And that's just on the philosophical level, about which our limited ears care very little :)

> Music legend Louis Armstrong is recorded on secret tapes ... From December 1950, until his death in 1971, Louis documented his life ‘for posterity’ on to 750 tapes, totaling thousands of hours of recordings, now owned by Louis Armstrong House Museum.

This isn't just weird but mad.

At least his laxative habit was legal and above board.

More seriously, Armstrong getting Joe Glaser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Glaser to fix his arrest problem for him is a sad reminder of how he and many other US musicians of the time (probably the whole jazz scene?) were deeply in bed with organised crime.

They didn't exactly have a legal option to get what they craved. As soon as you criminalize something you relegate all of the 'fringe' to dealing with organized crime.

What they were mainly after was employment as jazzmen, though: IIRC (I'm not an expert) the main connection was originally the shadiness of many nightclub venues, especially during Prohibition.

Prohibition is just another form of the same.

When the adult population of a country craves something that is (potentially) bad for it then that's an education issue and a medical issue, not a criminal issue.

As the son of an alcoholic I've seen up close what alcohol can do to an individual, even so making it an illegal substance would just have jacked up the budget and risked run-ins with the law (more than there already were).

I don't smoke pot, don't drink alcohol, in general am a pretty boring person (especially when it comes to imbibing mind altering substances in company other than sweet tea) but I support those who do feel the need to do any or all of the above simply because society could not function if all these people were behind bars and every one of them has the reins of their lives firmly in their own hands. It's all about choices and mentality, making these things crimes is not helping anybody and simply drives the problems underground and creates a fertile ground for organized crime to flourish on.

What if it is the idea, to let criminals deal with criminals. It's a circular reasoning if then the organizdd crime is said to be bad because it supplies drugs, that are dangerous and should be controled. I mean, if crime was only about drugs, the user would support the drug supply, i.e. the support. To support the support doesn't sound very unethical. The matter that is supported is the problem.

Sure, there is worse crime that may use drugmoney, but it might and does use legally optained funds after laundry as well. You might argue that the drug problem itself wouldn't flourish any less, if it was legal. I agree with the educational and medical perspective mentioned, but the medical moral is to not self medicate and the educational that the law is always right.

I can't parse all that you're writing, but to answer those parts that I understand:

Organized crime steps in to supply a market simply because there is a lot of money to be made, that's all that it takes. Making a substance illegal drives up the price. If you made milk illegal tomorrow morning there would be illegal milk available at a substantial mark-up the day after and an underground distribution network would spring up overnight. It's simply economics.

Laundered criminal money is still a problem.

The 'drug problem' would definitely be less if all drugs were legal because it would allow those that are in need of help to apply for that help on a medical basis rather than to have to deal with these issues either on their own or through the justice system if and when they get caught.

The 'law is always right' is a funny one, no, the law isn't always right, it simply defines what is legal and what is not, emphatically NOT what is and isn't right, for that we have morals and ethics, not laws.

For example: slavery was never right, even though it was legal at some point.

This has happened, with 'Raw Milk';

http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/consumers/ucm079516....

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/08/the-latest...

*I have no opinions on Raw Milk.

Legality should follow morality. You argued that it is immoral to prohibit drugs, if that fosters an underground market, because that market is likely violent and otherwise criminal. I say, drug abuse leads to violent or otherwise illegal, or at least immoral behaviour so it's only right to put them users into one bag with hardened criminals. The only market directly fostered by criminalization is the drug market. There are problems like quality control and stigmatization, sure ...

They had no choice. Remember, this was America in the 1920's. Black jazz musicians were not allowed to eat in the clubs they played in. Often times not allowed to walk in the front door of those same establishments. Dealing with organized crime was probably 100th on the list of issues African-Americans had to deal with at the time.

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