[Dixielandjazz] Oops! sent again by mistake

[Charles Suhor]

Sorry, I meant to re-address this to a cyber-pen pal named Dan but it 
went to the DJML by mistake. My last of 2006, I hope.--Charlie

Hello, Dan--

Below is a review of Thomas Brothers' new book on Louis Armstrong. I
liked the book both because and in spite of the fact that it's
controversial. The review was in the December issue of JAZZ NOTES,
the journal of the Jazz Journalists Association.

I hope you're having a good holiday and are up for a good '07.

See you Thursday.

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).















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