Image by VIVIANE MONCONDUIT from Pixabay

A musician … trying to find THEIR keys … while dealing with a “local” politician … and the weather … in a possible summer scenario for July of this year, somewhere in Florida …

Louisa and Uncle Louis Trump a Problem

My name is Louisa. I'm named after a grandfather and grandson pair of musicians way back in my family history who would be uncles ten and eight times removed, respectively.

It shouldn't matter at this point in history, but, when you meet a big crisis, sometimes you have to dig deep.

The deep side of my musical heritage wasn't what I was thinking of as I came up as a musician – I grew up in the traditions of big jazz and concert bands. I was that little Black girl lugging a tuba around while it was bigger than I was, when not playing every piano in sight. I learned how to play and write for all the instruments in the band by the time I was 18.

My father, Karl, was the city's bandmaster until Mom, who is a nurse, came down with Covid-19 just before the vaccinations really got going. Fortunately, Mom survived, but that “long Covid” thing is serious, and Dad took time off to make sure her recovery stayed on track.

Florida is a little different than many parts of the nation, too – people didn't take Covid-19 all that seriously, so, Dad was expected to show up with the band whenever called for. Fortunately, the band members were all super-careful, and since people didn't necessarily want the band blowing all over them, the band had space from everyone else breathing on them.

I made sure that doors were opened and fresh air situations were maintained during the indoor events we had to manage.

I did a lot of the admin things as my father's assistant, but when he had to go out to take care of Mom, I took over as bandleader, just in time for the mess of the year to arrive in the city.

There are local politicians and there are local politicians here in Florida. One of them, home from national office after failing to be re-elected in Washington, is trying to recreate his old lifestyle here. He has a thing for big entertainment, and Dad and I knew that when a special election had to go down for mayor and he managed to work his magic to get the position, we were going to be in trouble.

Sure enough: on July 4, 2021, trouble arrived, BIGLY.

A sensible mayor would have canceled most midday celebrations on a day that was forecast to be 110 degrees for the high temperature.

Not our new mayor – he was concerned about the optics of his “comeback rehabilitation” plan to get back into national office in 2024, and so wanted to show his party that he could still draw big crowds and put on a big show.

Still, keeping ten thousand people from dying of heat stroke wasn't my problem. I just had to solve that for 72 people in the band, and that was more than enough.

I had an even bigger problem to solve, a problem that became apparent by 11:00 the morning of the Fourth, with the temperature already at 91 degrees.

“We can't tune up!”

What non-musicians and musicians working in the electronic space do not understand: acoustic instruments are sensitive combinations of metal, wood, and skins. Generally speaking, all objects expand and relax in the heat, and contract in the cold. Thus, under extreme conditions, certain instruments cannot be tuned up to regular pitch – they have moved too much because of temperature.

In this particular case …

“Okay, the C-instruments over here are only making it to B flat, and over here, your cymbal is where? Okay ...”

I had to find all their possible keys and then reach really deep to solve the problem.

My uncle, eight times removed, had this problem with his orchestra, one hot summer day in Vienna.

Still, he had never dealt with anyone quite like our mayor.

Our mayor, first of all, has a really low opinion of women like me – smart, first of all, and Black on top of that. A bunch of women named Nancy, Maxine, Fredricka, Alexandra, Ayanna, Omarosa, and Kamala gave him the blues in his old job, and he has forgiven and forgotten nothing. But since smart women of all colors gave him the blues, his encountering me was just going to upgrade his blues to blue-black in hue.

The mayor sent forth a bunch of directives about HIS day – never mind that the Fourth of July is actually Uncle Sam's birthday – and I sent back my concerns and needs as bandleader.

What did I do THAT for?

He came and got in my face, personally, the orange of his face blossoming to a crimson red as he reminded me of who he was and who he had been, and how little he thought I was in comparison.

I told him that I teach Sunday School and deal with big bullies all the time, and that I wasn't impressed: he would either get my band the protection from the sun that it would need or find another band and bandleader, because we would quit, and our reputation was such that we could find work as a private group. Not a one of us was about to fall out on behalf of this man.

Big bullies are cowards, of course, and they back down when you stand up to them. He stormed away in a huff, muttering about “She wouldn't talk that way if I still had my Twitter account... .”

I got on Hive and shared instead: “Our mayor is still the same man he was before January 20th … just goes to show what happens if you insist that having an old White male authoritarian is the best you can do.”

Well, of course at this point I had made an enemy, but see, the town was in an uproar about the election, and if the city band went out, there weren't enough locals that had the skill and were willing to fill the gap. The mayor waited until July 1 to get my requisition filled, but he went on and filled it, because he had no choice.

However … .

“You had better get this right,” he had growled at me on July 1 after our first rehearsal. “Bad things can happen to bandleaders who disgrace the country on a day like the Fourth of July.”

“Sir,” I said, “given the fact that you busted in while we still have the recorder going, and being caught on tape doesn't generally come out well for you, if I were you I'd be worried about myself.”

He departed swiftly, that orange face turning red again, but the band members came around me and looked around.

“That was a threat, Louisa, and that man will have thousands of people here on the Fourth.”

“The home crowd would never see you hurt, but his crew? We gotta get this right. We gotta get this right.”

Those thousands of people were going to have plenty of problems of their own in the heat, yet in the meantime, the band was about to panic, knowing that they couldn't get in tune or even get to the same keys, and that my life might depend on getting the music right.

So, I had to reach all the back to Uncle Louis, one hot day in Vienna.

“Forget it – we'll do the whole concert a whole key down.”

“Yes, but what is that going to do when you join on the keyboard – your music is still in the right key!”

“Don't even worry about it – I'll just transpose the music at sight.”

When I was a little girl, my parents had taught me the importance of not only reading music, but learning how to play things in every key – there are 22, counting the major keys and the minor keys. So, Uncle Louis's knowledge had been passed down after all.

The weather forecast had been a little exaggerated. It only made it to 108 degrees, but I still had to spend the last hour before the band took our shaded stage to raise all kinds of cane about the bottled water and Gatorade I had requisitioned for the band.

Of course I had to deal with the mayor again, and he was on his little power trip until I reminded him: “Sir, if we fail, you fail – since you think this is YOUR city, imagine what all the people that hate you are going to say if you can't keep YOUR city band from falling out in the heat?”

He still didn't get it, though, because after the beverages at last arrived, there came word that the governor of Florida was coming through, drawn by the massive crowd the mayor was drawing, and of course he needed a shady spot to sit in with his associates. Of course the first thing the mayor thought of was the band stage, and he dispatched certain officials to remove our covering.

“Pack up!” I said, and the band started taking stands down, opening up instrument cases, and getting ready to leave.

Someone went back and reported that the band was leaving … and, in the next five minutes, our shade was restored.

“You are one gutsy woman,” a supporter of the mayor in local government said to me, “and every reason why you people need to be better controlled.”

“I would respond to that,” I said as I put my ear plugs in, “but if you don't know what year it is and that slavery and Jim Crow are over, I can't help you.”

The band's tuba players were in position by then to “tune up” on either side of his head – he went away half deaf, head aching, by the time they got finished with him.

Dad and I and the whole band had talked about it: this was going to be our last performance as the city band. Things had been dangerous enough through 2020, but now we had a mayor who didn't have sense enough not to come in out of the extreme heat, and there was going to be too much mess in the next few years that we were going to have to make sound good. We couldn't support the foolishness. It was time to chart our own path. So: we had nothing to lose in standing up for our rights on this day.

We made our own way easy by how we played that day – people from all over were raving about how we put fresh touches on all the old patriotic favorites without being “irreverent.”

That's what happens when you play the same old stuff with your usual grand skill in a different key – we made it all the way through playing a whole step down in key, and no one was the wiser.

Of course, the event didn't last long enough for too many questions to be asked. The mayor's wife was the first person to fall out from the heat, and we kept on playing as the ambulances came along and picked her and a whole bunch of other people up before the mayor finally decided to call it a day – another day of disaster for him, because the national and world press picked it up.

But it was not a disaster for the band. We left covered in glory and honor to go with the sweat and the remaining water we had poured all over each other after the performance, and this day, once we had gotten our vaccination situation squared away and Covid-19 finally began to calm down, set us up for the vast success we enjoy now.

When I at last got over to see my parents, my father wrapped his arms around me and smiled.

“Well, we live from day to day with Louis Armstrong, but Uncle Louis and Uncle Karl on my great-grandfather's side would have been so proud of you!”

I probably only need to say here that Karl is Karl in both English and German, but Louisa is Ludowica and Louis is Ludwig. That's how I knew, from 200 years away, that I could do what Uncle Ludwig had done on a hot day in Vienna with his orchestra. That and a bunch of other old tricks from both Uncle Ludwig and Louis Armstrong, and Dad and I are still doing it big with Beethoven's Bouncing Big-Time Band.