The Trumpet Talks

brass tubing with a cup shaped mouth, three valves and a thousand tones. For the angel Gabriel touched his lips to my mouth and called home the quip in the day.

The Romans blew me when the earth was their empire. I've blown taps for the Caesars and the Napoleon's. My voice has been heard in high and low places but until the kid blew me, I never knew what scales I could climb.

He gave me tones and never knew of my own. He gave me a voice that was free and strong, so that his own could be free and strong. Destination Freedom Destination Freedom. Dramatization of the great democratic traditions of the Negro people is brought to you by Station WMAQ as a part of the pageant of history and of America's own destination freedom.

of the struggles of the Negro people against slavery and ghetto life has come the phenomenon of jazz, a truly American music in one of the world's most potent art forms. It was from the narrow streets of once fabulous New Orleans where jazz was born, and growing up beside it, there came a jazz giant whose careers set the pattern for the development of the new music.

In a chapter entitled The Trumpet Talks, Destination Freedom dramatizes the early life of the King of the trumpeters Lewis Armstrong. I'm the trumpet. Brass tubing and three bells. My tone was militant. The orchestra pits in New Orleans, round 1900. They fondled me with roundos and runs, blue sweet sonatas through my bell. Blared a bit for Wagner and Beidoven,

but left my tones intact as they'd been blown for hundred years. But across the tracks, across the levees and the work camps and the wine rooms and rampet and basin street, husky of browns men filled my mouthpiece with wild winds, blue new notes that made the nerves of New Orleans quiver like a plucked string on a violin, a new rhythm that was running up and down the