"What a Wonderful World" Musical reading on Saturday, May 10 at the Kulturforum
Musical reading on Saturday afternoon, May 10 at 4 p.m. in the hall of the Kulturforum
60 years ago, there was a sensational report in Neues Deutschland:
"Louis Armstrong, the King of Jazz, makes a guest appearance in the GDR." It was the fourth year after the Wall was built. The Americans had just started bombing North Vietnam and Soviet fighter planes were flying over the Brandenburg Gate in protest because the Bundestag was meeting in West Berlin. Satchmo, as Louis Armstrong was known, drove his tour bus right into the middle of the Cold War and also stopped off in Schwerin. His trumpet worked like an immersion heater. When he held it up to the audience in Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Erfurt or Schwerin, the sold-out auditorium would boil.
Author Stephan Schulz spent two years researching in archives, interviewing contemporary witnesses and reconstructing Louis Armstrong's only GDR tour. The result is an album of memories with warm-hearted and funny stories - also from Schwerin.
Stephan Schulz, born in 1972, grew up in Burg near Magdeburg. His book "What a Wonderful World - When Louis Armstrong toured the East" won the Swinging Hamburg Jazz Award. The author tells the story of one of the King of Jazz's most unusual concert tours with great humor. It is about antiques and hunting weapons that were used to finance the performances of Armstrong and his Allstars. And it's about a clever Schwerin concert manager who brought the world star to Schwerin with a white lie.
Admission is €8. Tickets are available at the box office of the Kulturforum.
