[Dixielandjazz] New Armstrong biography

[Charles Suhor]

Hey, Listmates--

Below is a review of Thomas Brothers' second book on Louis Armstrong. I 
liked the book both because and in spite of the fact that it's 
controversial. The review appears in the December issue of JAZZ NOTES, 
the journal of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). For more on JJA 
visit their website, www.jazzhouse.org

Charlie Suhor


LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S NEW ORLEANS
By Thomas Brothers
W.W. Norton, New York, 2006
386 pp.; $26.95 hardcover

Review by Charles Suhor

The word “entertaining” doesn’t usually show up in reviews of deeply 
researched works, but Thomas Brothers’ book is an exception. His new 
volume (following the excellent "Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words") is 
a good read for literate squares, jazz fans, and scholars alike.

Part of this broad accommodation is a brisk, journalistic writing style 
and dozens of well-placed photos and other graphics. Brothers’ method 
of citation is also refreshing—no clutter of footnotes, superscribed 
numbers, or names and dates parenthesized in the text. Instead, the 
notes section at the end gives a virtually line-by-line accounting of 
the sources, reflecting Brothers’ knowledge of traditional materials 
and intensive work at major oral history archives (Tulane, Rutgers, 
Queens College, and others).

Brothers’ goal is to go beyond conventional biography and take a 
wide-lens view of the larger environment that helped to shape 
Armstrong’s consciousness and his music. He calls it a “decentered” 
biography “…organized around the flow of his [Armstrong’s] life.” (p. 
6)

Some of the personal, sociocultural, and musicological influences that 
Brothers traces are familiar, others less so. But through creative (and 
sometimes risky) selection of supportive quotes and interpretive leaps, 
Brothers redistributes the weight of the influences. Among his topics 
are:
•	childhood—street quartet, Waif’s Home, etc.
•	the downtown creoles and uptown blacks
•	music of the Sanctified Church
•	street musicians, especially tinhorn players
•	music as a passport to white sections of town
•	music/social clubs/parades as assertions of masculine dignity
•	musical influences from black migrations from the plantations
•	ragging the melody, heterophony, “monkeyshines,” “freak music”
•	in earliest jazz, prevalence of a “flat four” feeling (vs. two-beat)
•	Armstrong’s lack of interest in musical assimilation

Possibly, Armstrong biographers could raise some fine-grained questions 
about the details of Brothers’ presentation. I’m not in that rarified 
number, so my two concerns are broader. First, Brothers adopts the 
now-fashionable position that the rhythmic pulse of the earliest jazz 
(by which he means the music of the uptown black musicians before 
recordings were made) wasn’t the oom-pah two-beat but a “flat 4/4—a 
steady background pulse of four undifferentiated beats per measure.” 
(pp. 43, 285-86) This is plausible for the “slow drag” blues introduced 
by Bolden but not for moderate and fast tempos, where the needs of 
dancers called for a bouncier “in 2” feeling. Also, the persistence of 
march influences in the early repertoire and the presence of tubas and 
drumsets suggest the dominance of two-beat rhythms.

Absent conclusive oral testimony, a both/and  (or a 
sometimes-but-not-always) view seems right. In recordings of 1920s New 
Orleans bands, the guitar, banjo, and piano often laid down a solid 
four even as the tuba and drums played an engaging two-beat. 
(Exceptions like the wonderfully stomping Andrew Morgan Band are 
sometimes cited as the rule.) It’s inferable that the earliest 
musicians had it both ways, adapting at will for different tempos, 
audiences and acoustical settings.

My larger concern relates to Brothers’ execution of his premise. The 
contextual “flow of Armstrong’s life” that he presents is limited to 
descriptions of the African and African-American influences on his 
music. Certainly, focusing on particular aspects of a subject is a 
common and legitimate research goal, and Brothers’ introduction does 
indeed emphasize Armstrong’s immersion in the black vernacular music of 
New Orleans. But a well-wrought rationale for “highlighting the African 
legacy” doesn’t appear until the middle of the book (pp. 138-39).

Parts of the last chapter might have been presented up front, as they 
give the clearest notice of Brothers’ perspective, and perhaps his 
bias. His criticism of simplistic “melting pot” and “gumbo” 
characterizations of jazz is both fair and familiar, but he goes on to 
categorically deny that European influences significantly affected 
Armstrong’s art. After acknowledging that “marches, hymns, and 
ragtime—even Italian opera, ritual singing of Jewish cantors, and 
French folk songs…unquestionably put Eurocentric harmony in Armstrong’s 
ear,” he leaps to the dismissive conclusion that “Armstrong’s musical 
development would not have been one whit different had he never heard 
an Italian aria or a French folk song.” (p. 303) Clearly, Armstrong’s 
genius involved a brilliant interaction of African-American vernacular 
elements and European harmony and song structure. Also, ample 
scholarship has shown particular links with various idioms.

Elsewhere, Brothers rightly describes the culture of oppression in 
which jazz arose but makes needless stretches of inference along stale 
Marxian or Freudian lines. The two-bar jazz “break” is an assertion of 
“class values.” Bolden's music and manners “waged a kind of class 
warfare” in the interest of “the plantation immigrants who were looking 
for common ground in the dance halls.” Bolden’s risk-taking music is 
fancifully compared to balloon flights of a notorious pimp named Buddy 
Bartley. Freddie Keppard’s manner of pointing his cornet in the air is 
read as “mimicking erection,” a sign of masculine power.

But these interpretive excesses don’t, as Holden Caulfield said, ruin 
everything. Brothers’ book is fun to read, painstakingly researched, 
and well stocked with provocative ideas. His treatment of heterophony 
in black church music as an early model for improvisation is 
beautifully argued. His descriptions of tinhorn street musicians, 
“freak music,” and “monkeyshines” smartly underline the radical 
differences between European and African-American conceptions of how 
musical instruments can function expressively. And he throws new light 
on the importance of black migrations into New Orleans and on the 
neglected influence of the Sanctified churches. If Brothers sometimes 
over-reaches it’s because he has the vision to reach. And that’s a good 
reason to add Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans to your collection.


Charles Suhor is a former Down Beat writer and author of “Jazz in New 
Orleans—The Postwar Years Through 1970” (Scarecrow Press/Rutgers 
Institute of Jazz Studies, 2001).