Earlier this month my debut novel Yxmannen was published in Sweden by the
wonderful
Kalla
Kulor Förlag who arranged for me to attend the
launch of the book at Stockholm’s main branch of Akademibokhandeln. It was my first visit to Scandinavia, and as I
walked the beautiful Stockholm streets I was reminded that one of the
characters in my book also visited the city a number of times and made quite
the splash while he was there. My book centres on the real-life case of a
serial killer who terrorised New Orleans in the years 1918-1919. As far as I’m
aware the serial killer never visited Stockholm, but one of the other
characters in the book did – Louis Armstrong, who was a teenaged resident of New
Orleans at the time the murders were taking place.
Armstrong first arrived in Stockholm in
October 1933 as part of a European tour. One concert was planned, but such was
the clamour to see him, a further three were arranged (all of which sold out).
In a highly unusual move, Swedish radio cancelled its scheduled programmes to
transmit part of the performance live. A recording still survives, and can be
heard here on YouTube
in rather bad quality. Armstrong was surprised by the level of interest he
caused in northern Europe (at the time he was was still largely outside the
mainstream in America, known mostly just to jazz fans). A few days before the
Stockholm concerts, when he arrived in Copenhagen, the largest crowd he had
ever seen was waiting to greet him: “All I remember is a whole ocean of people
all breaking through the police lines and bearing down on us… They pushed a big
trumpet, all made out of flowers, into my hands and put me into an open
automobile and started a parade.’
(Not to be outdone by the Danes, when
Armstrong returned to Stockholm in 1949, forty thousand people were at the
airport to greet him.)
The 1933 tour was a commercial and critical
success, even if Armstrong did receive racially prejudiced reviews in both the
right-wing and mainstream press in Sweden and England (among other places). Regardless,
Armstrong left something more important in his wake – he inspired a generation
of European musicians to pick up instruments and play jazz, and he showed them
through his virtuosity how to play
jazz.
All of that, though, was a decade and a
half in the future when the serial killings at the centre of Yxmannen were being played out on the
streets of New Orleans. Hopefully the book (as well as exploring the still
unsolved series of killings) gives readers an insight into the teenager who
would go on to become the ambassador of jazz.
// Ray Celestin, London
Ray Celestin är bosatt i London. Han skriver noveller samt manus för film och TV. Yxmannen (Axeman's Jazz) är hans flerfaldigt prisbelönta debutroman.
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