IT was once said of Louis Armstrong that, when asked, ‘What is jazz, anyway?’ he responded, ‘If you got to ask what jazz is all about, man, you’ll never know.”

It was, wrote this newspaper, comparatively easy to spot the jazz initiates in the half-filled arena of Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, when Armstrong and his band breezed into town on May 15, 1956. “There was, for example, a thin elderly man in spectacles with a drooping grey moustache sitting immobile and alone, his hands clasped on his knees in the middle of an otherwise empty row of seats. He listened calmly and he never clapped or applauded, but at moments, in response both to the trumpet of Louis Armstrong and to the trombone of Trummy Young, he nodded his head.”

The great Armstrong and his band played on a raised, revolving stage in the middle of the hall’s circus ring. Their performance “was seemly and esoteric. It was noisy but there was no hysteria, and we saw no hep-cats and only one Teddy boy,” our correspondent wrote.

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Armstrong himself had a talent, not for exciting his hearers, “but for illuminating their faces with fond soft smiles, an effect which seems curious in the midst of the searing competitive noise produced by a combination of trumpet, clarinet, trombone, and the violent clatter of the drums.” So frenzied was the drummer that he burst his drum and had to signal offstage for a replacement.

The music was more or less continuous. “The result was that there was built up a stimulation rather than a tension. It was almost an enthusiastic composure which expressed itself, not in any uproarious finale but in a single voice calling from the back of the hall when the last high note had faded: ‘Good old Satchmo’”.