Spreading Satchmo’s Spirit

One couple’s lifetime devotion to the music of Louis Armstrong.

Yoshio Toyama nervously knocked on the backstage door of the concert hall in Kyoto. One of the world’s most recognizable voices answered.

Toyama turned the doorknob and came face-to-face with the megawatt smile of Louis Armstrong.

“I opened the door and there he was, about my height,” Toyama, 78, says of that 1964 encounter with the jazz legend. “I saw his trumpet, picked it up and he was still smiling. He let me blow it for a short while. That was one of the things that made me want to visit his hometown, New Orleans, which gave birth to jazz itself.”

Toyama became hooked on Dixieland and found a soulmate in his Waseda University sweetheart, Keiko. They listened to jazz music and learned to play the standards on trumpet and banjo. And when American jazz greats toured Japan, they were there.

In 1967, Yoshio quit his insurance job, and the couple boarded a ship bound for Brazil. They disembarked in Los Angeles and hopped on a plane for the Big Easy. They had little money and limited language skills, but jazz friends set them up in an old Bourbon Street apartment by Preservation Hall, the famous French Quarter jazz venue.

“We were like hatchlings, learning the roots of jazz by going there every day and listening to musicians who were born in the 1890s,” says Toyama. “They now had new rights and dreams from the civil rights movement, so even these old-timers, when they played, their tone was shining with hope, like ‘Yeah, we’re gonna have a new world!’”

“The people there accepted us because we played their music,” says Keiko Toyama, 80. “Music was how we communicated. They were all very friendly.”

In 1973, with their visas set to expire, the Toyamas returned to Japan and worked as musicians, later beginning a 23-year stint as Dixieland performers at Tokyo Disneyland. Determined to spread the legacy of the man behind such hits as What a Wonderful World and When the Saints Go Marching In, they started the Wonderful World Jazz Foundation in 1994.

The couple staged concerts with their band Yoshio Toyama and the Dixie Saints, set to play at this month’s TAC Talk, and other Armstrong-themed events. Toyama became known as the “Japanese Satchmo.”

Concerned about rising crime in New Orleans in the 1990s, the Toyamas began sending donated instruments to the city as part of a youth outreach program. That goodwill was repaid in the aftermath of 2011’s Tohoku earthquake when people in New Orleans raised funds for the disaster-hit region. A jazz exchange program followed.

Last year, the 120th anniversary of Armstrong’s birth and 50th anniversary of his death, the couple produced a book, Louis Armstrong: Satchmo’s Spirit Lives on Forever, about their love for Satchmo and the power of his music.

“Jazz conquered the world after the disaster of the Spanish flu,” Toyama says. “Then the swing jazz boom began after the Depression. And jazz made people in Japan happy after the war. So now, after Covid-19, jazz will bring light to the world again.”