[Dixielandjazz] New Book about Louis Armstrong & New Orleans

[Steve barbone]

April 23, 2006 - NY TIMES - Big Easy Listening - Book Review by JASON BERRY

'Louis Armstrong's New Orleans,' by Thomas Brothers

Louis Armstrong, at 20, was a New Orleans cornet player sharpening his chops
when he landed in the Tuxedo Brass Band. It was 1921 and, for Armstrong, a
move up. In "Louis Armstrong's New Orleans," Thomas Brothers portrays him as
a grandson of slaves who brought "a culture based on blues, on communal
singing in church and on the string-band tradition of ragging tunes" into a
band led by "Creoles of color."

Many free people of color owned slaves before the Civil War. At the turn of
the century, Jim Crow laws squeezed Creoles into segregated status with
former slaves or their children. Armstrong's mother was 15 when he was born.
He was all but fatherless, at 11, when a judge sent him to the Colored
Waif's Home for Boys after he was arrested for firing a gun. There he got
his first horn, and musical discipline. Back on his own in his teens, he
found a surrogate father in Joe Oliver, a gifted cornetist and the emerging
king of New Orleans jazz.

Tensions between caste and color in New Orleans have drawn scrutiny in some
jazz histories. Brothers has done the most thorough job yet of exploring the
social distance between Armstrong's early years in Back of Town ‹ the
central city ghetto, once a swamp back of the plantation houses ‹ and the
world of the downtown Creoles, below Canal Street. Many Creoles still spoke
French, and most were classically trained. Lorenzo Tio Jr. was an esteemed
clarinetist among a school of reed players in the downtown Seventh Ward.
Oliver, who lived uptown, played by ear, improvising on the melody. Creoles
considered this playing raggedy, but the poor folk from uptown and Back of
Town who filled up dance halls signaled where the culture, and the music,
were heading.

The harmonies of choirs in the small Sanctified churches melded with the
blues and syncopated rags in a musical stylization quite different from
society orchestral fare. There is an enduring stereotype of the Storyville
red-light district as the incubator of early jazz. The bordellos and
cabarets with sawdust floors did provide key music venues and the raw stuff
for many lyrics, like those for "Basin Street Blues." But Brothers rightly
examines the spiritual imagination that fired the voicelike phrasings of the
wind players; the many mingled echoes of the sacred and profane gave dancers
in the clubs a stomp-down good time.

Brothers, a professor of music at Duke University and the editor of an
anthology of Armstrong's writings, culled many oral history interviews in
the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in forming his picture of the
society that bloomed around Armstrong and his early peers.

His treatment of Armstrong's mother is poignant. In his 1954 memoir,
"Satchmo," Armstrong hints that she resorted to part-time prostitution to
support him and his sister. Brothers's insight into this woman, of whom we
know too little, deepens her humanity: "May Ann made a choice about where
she belonged. She brought her son into the emotional-communal world of her
tradition, not the assimilative tradition of the new Baptists and definitely
not the French tradition of the Catholic Creoles, but the one that was
closest to the ring shouts of slavery, the one that featured communal focus
on a direct experience of the Holy Spirit, the one that cultivated vigorous
rhythms that made your body move and deeply felt melody that made your heart
pour out."

Creole musicians like Tio discovered a new way of playing as the dance halls
welcomed parade music, and the likes of Oliver and Armstrong fused rhythms
of the pews, rags and marches with the cool and burning pathos of the blues.
As society orchestras leaned toward bravura music with improvisational
weavings, dark and lighter jazz artists used an idiom that had never existed
before.

"Louis Armstrong's New Orleans" is not a biography, although Brothers
follows Armstrong through the cultural terrain in which he matured. The
curtain lowered on Act I of that grand life in August 1922. May Ann made him
a trout-loaf sandwich and waved at the train depot as he left for Chicago to
join Joe Oliver in the Creole Jazz Band.

The author writes about Armstrong, "In his cornet one could still hear the
caressing, arousing gestures of the blues, which still made the chick slap
the cheeks of her behind, grind her hips, explode with laughter, all in
dialogue with the music and the other dancers."

Certain passages on musical technique will make some readers skim. Still,
this is superb history and a rocking good read.

Jason Berry, a jazz historian and investigative journalist, is the author of
"Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of
Children" and of a forthcoming novel, "Last of the Red Hot Poppas."