[Dixielandjazz] Another Review, on Terry Teachout New Book On Louis Armstrong

[Robert Ringwald]

The Man Who Sang, Played and Smiled
by David Margolick
New York Times, December 6, 2009
One of the hardest parts of writing a biography is finding a fit subject, but sometimes
they're in plain sight. Despite his incalculable contributions to American culture,
there has never been a fully adequate narrative biography of Louis Armstrong. Terry
Teachout now fills that void with "Pops." He begins by suggesting how this omission
came to be, then persisted for so long.
No one disputes that Armstrong revolutionized music, helped popularize jazz throughout
the world and created countless imitators. Even his sometimes disparaging successors
readily acknowledged their debt. "You can't play nothing on trumpet that doesn't
come from him," Miles Davis once said. Satchmo's influence spilled over into the
rest of American culture, particularly regarding race. Through recordings, concerts,
movies, magazine interviews, and radio and television appearances, he was the first
black man whom millions of white Americans allowed into their homes, and hearts.
Why, then, the scholarly neglect? Teachout maintains that Armstrong's detractors
were so critical or uncomfortable over his public persona -- the sweaty brow, the
megawatt smile, the crowd-pleasing, ingratiating manner -- that they ignored his
enormous, continuing contributions to music and to civilization. To them, he was
simply too entertaining, too popular or too pandering to be taken seriously.
Too pandering to whites, that is. Dizzy Gillespie complained of his "Uncle Tom-like
subservience" and "plantation character," for instance, while the narrator in a James
Baldwin short story disparaged his "old-time, down-home crap." Armstrong unabashedly
liked whites, and wasn't shy about saying so. "Believe it -- the White Folks did
everything that's decent for me," he once wrote, before comparing them favorably,
in terms of kindness and industriousness, to blacks (and "blacks" was not the word
he used). He particularly liked Jews, in part because it may have been a Jewish junk
dealer named Karnofsky who helped him buy his first cornet.
Given this disrepute among some blacks, what white liberal would dare write about
him, let alone extol him? Instead, enter the chief culture critic of Commentary and
drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, which is what Teachout is. And Armstrong
could not have a more impassioned advocate. At times, "Pops" reads like a defense
brief, but a very loving and knowledgeable one.
Teachout leads us along Armstrong's familiar path from the black Storyville section
of New Orleans, where he was born in August 1901, the son of a father he barely knew
and a 15-year-old servant girl (and probable prostitute). The road then leads to
a honky-tonk where young Louis sneaked listens to the black cornet players Buddy
Bolden, Joe Oliver and Bunk Johnson, then to the Colored Waifs' Home for Boys, where
he might have first played the cornet, holding the instrument improperly enough against
his lips so that he eventually mangled them.
>From there, he journeyed on Mississippi River steamboats, where he honed his ability
to read music (and may first have developed his trademark hoarseness), then Chicago,
then New York, then Chicago again. There, in his mid-20s, he formed his Hot Five
and Hot Seven, with whom he recorded, for $50 a side, what Teachout quite properly
calls the "Old Testament of classic jazz."
There is a kind of perfunctory, dutiful quality to this part of Teachout's tale;
where Armstrong's brilliance is beyond dispute, Teachout doesn't seem fully engaged.
Perhaps one simply can't describe what's so astonishing about "Potato Head Blues"
-- to me, it's that Armstrong has miraculously made a trumpet laugh -- but someone
who's thought about it as much as Teachout has should at least try, rather than leaning
excessively (and pretentiously) on Woody Allen to do the job. Similarly, his account
of the even more awesome "West End Blues" is clotted with hifalutin musical technicalities.
It's odd, because elsewhere Teachout praises Armstrong for avoiding musical jargon
when talking about his music. The book sends you fleeing to your CDs, or to YouTube,
just to figure out what he's talking about.
Only when the critics start dumping on Armstrong does Teachout become energized.
That started in 1929, when Armstrong abandoned small ensembles and took a big band
on the road and, though he returned to more intimate groups -- for many years after
World War II, Armstrong had his All Stars -- the attacks continued. Always, the charge
was the same: that he'd sold out, playing or recording what one leftist critic called
"the white man's notion of Harlem jazz."
To purists, the villain was Armstrong's manager, Joe Glaser. With his mob connections,
Glaser was able to get the gangsters off Armstrong's back, and Armstrong was grateful,
some felt, to the point of servility; if Glaser told him to "play for the public.
Sing and play and smile," then that's what Armstrong did. (In any case, that's where
the money was.) But to Teachout, the purists themselves were the ogres. The most
heinous was the record producer John Hammond, who has been credited with helping
start the careers of Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bob Dylan, among others. Teachout
labels him, with uncharacteristic spleen, "a coupon-clipping Ivy League dilettante."
(He's kinder to another Armstrong critic, Gunther Schuller, but then, Schuller's
still alive.)
Teachout concedes that for long stretches of time, the musicians around Armstrong
were often second-rate, the musical selections pedestrian, the recordings often so-so
or worse. But so prodigiously talented was he, Teachout insists, that "even when
he was at his most trivial, seriousness kept breaking in." And enough of Armstrong's
work, like his 1950s albums devoted to the music of W. C. Handy and Fats Waller,
was great enough that his legacy only grew.
Teachout also acknowledges that on racial matters as well, Armstrong's behavior --
appearing as "King of the Zulus" at Mardi Gras, or adopting "When It's Sleepy Time
Down South" as his theme song despite its reference to "darkies" -- could be, to
use one of his terms, "wince-making." Over time, his popularity among blacks waned,
and younger black performers like the Davises, Miles and Ossie, saw him as a groveling
relic, Stepin Fetchit with a horn.
But here, too, Teachout writes, Armstrong was maligned. For all his bonhomie, he
had few illusions about American racism. In myriad ways -- like integrating the airwaves
and innumerable hotels -- Armstrong was a quiet revolutionary, and that was before,
much to everyone's surprise, he publicly denounced President Eisenhower for dragging
his feet on school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark.
But Satchmo -- it comes from Armstrong's original nickname, "Satchelmouth," as foreshortened
by a lock-jawed Briton -- wasn't pandering at all, Teachout maintains; ebullience
was his very nature. And that ebullience was a statement in itself, persisting despite
the decades of indignities he suffered. (Even his buddy Bing Crosby never invited
him to his home.) To Teachout, Armstrong's greatest contribution to civil rights
was the enormous love he generated, a contribution that even Martin Luther King Jr.
couldn't have made.
The book is marred only by excess erudition. Teachout loves to show off his cultural
smarts; he's the sort to include a reference to the "Jupiter" Symphony without bothering
to say who wrote it. One can't help thinking he cites Philip Larkin and Herbert von
Karajan and Jackson Pollock and Le Corbusier and Kingsley Amis and Darius Milhaud
not just to tout Armstrong, but to toss around their names. Armstrong forever railed
against people (including a couple of his wives) for putting on "aires"; he called
a king of England "Rex" to his face, and joked about his lovemaking to a pope. Pops
(it's what everyone who really knew him called him) might describe "Pops" the way
he once characterized Fletcher Henderson's band: "a little stuck up."
In some ways, Armstrong regained his reputation long before Teachout came along.
In his later years, he became America's foremost cultural ambassador, met by rapturous
admirers wherever he went. Denigrators like Dizzy Gillespie recanted. In 1964, "Hello,
Dolly" bumped the Beatles off the top slot on the charts.
Since Armstrong's death in 1971, Wynton Marsalis has vouched for him, and his house
in Corona, Queens, is now a museum. Every Wednesday for the past nine years, you
have been able to hear his "good ol' good ones" performed at Birdland. But Teachout
nails the case. Everyone now acknowledges what he amply documents: not just Armstrong's
prodigious talent, but his wit, courage, kindness, loyalty, charm. And his quirks:
he smoked marijuana almost daily for 40 years -- it "makes you forget all the bad
things that happen to a Negro," he once said -- and he took (and touted) a laxative
named Swiss Kriss just as enthusiastically.
It's striking how many greats -- Hoagy Carmichael, Jack Teagarden, Teddy Wilson,
Django Reinhardt, Bunny Berigan, Bing Crosby, Gene Krupa -- were moved to feats of
great eloquence describing Satchmo. Another was Murray Kempton, who observed that
"the pure and the cheap, clown and creator, god and buffoon" were all encompassed
in him. But those contradictions ceased to matter, Teachout says, whenever Louis
Armstrong raised his trumpet to his lips, "for that was when the laughter stopped
and the beauty began."
_____
David Margolick, a contributor to Newsweek, is writing a book about the Little Rock
school desegregation crisis of 1957.
-30

--Bob Ringwald K6YBV
rsr at ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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