[Dixielandjazz] Louis in Glasgow

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I was a bit too young and missed the gig, which was in a football stadium. Years later due to some publishing complications which involved the notorious publisher Robert Maxwell, the bouncing Czech, who had recently disappeared into the sea after some monkey business, I had to transport a load of books from Glasgow to Edinburgh. The guy with the van was talking music, and got round to the time when he met Louis, a schoolboy prodigy on trumpet (son of a big band player, who disapproved his son's transfer from the horn to rock guitar).

He was introduced to Louis onstage, and given words of encouragement, indeed everything you might hope for a young trumpeter. The guy reflected on how probably on a lot of nights during the tour there would be a young musician like himself, and yet again and yet again what could seem like a routine.  But to him it didn't seem anything like a routine. How many more were in the same position he was? But Louis was friendly, encouraging, not at all impersonal with no sign whatever of not being interested, and decades later it seemed all as genuine as it had at the time. 

I liked the clip of film on which Danny Barker presented a simpering smile, and said for the benefit of British viewers it was a ten shilling (now 50p.) smile, the one thing you never got from Louis. Never anything less than the full pound, and Barker's teeth were big and in good order, for he showed them all in the nearest he could do to a Louis smile. 

Inspiring! 

Robert R. Calder