Last evening I had the pleasure of attending a performance by David Ostwald’s Louis Armstrong Centennial Band at Birdland in New York City, where, for the past eight years,  a devoted coterie of talented performers have gathered weekly to pay tribute to the great Satchmo.

I found myself at Birdland at the invitation of fellow blogger and Louis Armstrong Historian, Ricky Riccardi. For slightly more than a year, Ricky has been - pardon the expression - tooting Armstrong’s horn on his blog, where he regularly writes about his favorite subject  at a level of depth that I can only envy, given my lack of formal musical training.

I first encountered Ricky’s blog when an article he wrote on the musical collaborations of Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra serendipitously showed up in my RSS reader. Since then, I’ve been delighted to make his acquaintance and have learned a great deal about Armstrong not only from reading his blog, but also through our email exchanges, which always seem to answer one question while simultaneously leading to yet another. Such is the nature of the subject matter. I’ve been grateful to Ricky for his patience and impressed with his level of dedication to Pops.

(I also had the distinct honor of briefly meeting George Avakian, the legendary Jazz producer whose name you will find sprinkled liberally throughout the liner notes of albums by such noted Jazz acts as Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and, of course, Louis Armstrong himself. Avakian is now 89 and clearly slowed by age, but he’s lost none of his enthusiasm for the brand of music he helped to produce through his career.)

Accompanying Ricky was his 15-year old nephew, who managed to tolerate quite well a musical performance that, no doubt, most boys his age would consider hopelessly retrograde. Or so I thought; I later learned that his nephew is an Armstrong enthusiast. It should warm the heart of the ardent fan to know there are young ears developing that haven’t closed off to Armstrong’s sound or style and who will continue to pass the torch.

Ricky is currently writing a book on Louis Armstrong which I hope will see publication at some point in the very near future. Among the many comments he made to me, one stood out in particular. He said that throughout all the interviews he conducted with those who knew Armstrong, not a single person ever had anything bad to say about Louis. How many of us can go through life and not make a single enemy? And, yet, it doesn’t seem hard to believe that this is true in the case of Louis Armstrong, a man who spread pure joy throughout the world by playing his horn, charmingly growling his way through lyrics and by just being himself.

So, what does this have to do with Frank Sinatra, one might fairly ask? Just this: it’s because my ‘discovery’ of Sinatra in the early-1990s marked a radical shift in the type of music that I listened to, a sea change, if you will; a door was opened, that led through a hallway, from which other doors opened that led to Big Band, which led to Jazz and, ultimately, my evening at Birdland. The line of demarcation of my musical interests begins circa 1991, when I purchased my very first Frank Sinatra album. Since then, everything I listen to has changed and it’s safe to say I wouldn’t have found myself at Birdland last night, nor would I have made so many other good friends through my years of enjoying and sharing our mutual  musical interests.

In turn, Sinatra, and just about every performer since, owes a debt of gratitude to Louis Armstrong, who changed the face of American music forever.

If you happen to find yourself in New York City on a Wednesday evening, by all means, do yourself a favor and visit Birdland. The atmosphere is pleasant, the music is authentic and energetic and with a cover charge of just $10 you can’t possibly go wrong.