[Dixielandjazz] Another "Pops" Review

[Stephen G Barbone]

Biography looks at Louis Armstrong through his art

Below is a review from the Philadelphia Paper about Teachout's book. I  
post it because it is a bit different from some of the others we've  
seen.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
http://www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Pops  A Life of Louis Armstrong
By Terry Teachout

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  475 pp. $30

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

There probably is no such thing as a definitive biography of anyone,  
but Terry Teachout's Pops is likely to remain indispensable to any and  
all seeking to understand trumpeter extraordinaire Louis Armstrong.
Teachout looks at the jazzman through the lens of his art, which  
provides the clearest view of the man, for if anyone ever lived by his  
art it was Armstrong. He may have been "deserted by his father when he  
was born, raised by a part-time prostitute, and sentenced at the age  
of eleven to the Colored Waif's Home, an orphanage-like reform school"  
in New Orleans, but he ended up lying in state at the Seventh Avenue  
Armory on New York's Park Avenue, where 25,000 people filed past his  
coffin.

The thread running through this "epic journey from squalor to  
immortality" is the music - and the marvel of Teachout's book is the  
way in which his descriptions of that music illuminate the life.  
Here's what he has to say about Armstrong's 1933 recording of Harold  
Arlen's "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues":

Armstrong, in a departure from his customary practice on ballads,  
dispenses almost entirely with Arlen's melody, substituting instead a  
series of rhythmically free phrases that lead upward to a high B-flat.  
Four times he falls off from that shining note - and then comes the  
fifth fall, at the bottom of which he changes course and swoops  
gracefully upward to a full-throated D . . . Armstrong seems to have  
broken through to a realm of abstract lyricism that transcends  
ordinary human emotion. Only then does he condescend to ease back into  
the vicinity of the tune, returning the bedazzled listener to the  
everyday world.

Taken together, those free phrases, graceful swoops, and easeful  
return to the everyday world encapsulate both performance and  
performer. As Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal,  
amply demonstrates, Louis Armstrong was a good deal more  
sophisticated, both musically and otherwise, than he was wont to let  
on. He learned to read music in the Colored Waif's Home, where he  
played cornet in the band (he started out as a cornetist). As he later  
said: "I played all classical music when I was in the orphanage. . . .  
That instills the soul in you. You know? Liszt, Bach, Rachmaninoff,  
Gustav Mahler, and Haydn."

Armstrong was also - from his earliest years, apparently - both a fan  
of and influenced by opera. He bought his first record player when he  
was in his teens and said later that "most of my records were the  
Original Dixieland Jazz Band . . . I had Caruso, too, and Henry Burr,  
Galli-Curci, Tettrazzini - they were all my favorites. Then there was  
the Irish tenor, McCormack - beautiful phrasing."

As Teachout notes, it is no accident that the trumpet solo concluding  
that '33 recording of "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues" sounds "for  
all the world like a lordly turn-of-the-century tenor."

Armstrong also was very much the writer, describing himself as "a two- 
fingered blip on my portable typewriter." Over the years, "in between  
playing three hundred shows a year, he turned out two memoirs, several  
autobiographical manuscripts, dozens of magazine and newspaper  
articles, and thousands of personal letters to friends and fans."

Armstrong could certainly turn a phrase. In what Teachout calls "an  
apostrophe to 'Mary Warner' " that Armstrong taped, the lifelong  
marijuana-user explained why he gave up rolling joints in the open:  
"At first you was a mis-do-meaner. . . . But as the years rolled by  
you lost your misdo and got meaner and meaner, jailhousely speaking."

Teachout is unabashedly a fan, but by no means uncritical. Writing of  
Armstrong's early vocal recordings, Teachout says that "nowhere in his  
records of the period, or for long afterward, is it possible to hear  
arrangements comparable in craftsmanship to the ones that can be heard  
on the contemporary recordings of [Fletcher] Henderson, Duke  
Ellington, Paul Whiteman, or the Casa Loma Orchestra, to name four big  
bands that aspired to an ensemble polish that Armstrong's groups never  
achieved."

On the other hand, Teachout has no patience with those, starting with  
producer John Hammond - nicely described as "a coupon-clipping Ivy  
League dilettante" - who thought that Armstrong was "too popular to be  
good."

What they failed to see, Teachout is at pains to make clear, is that  
in addition to being a musician of unsurpassed originality, Louis  
Armstrong was also a great natural entertainer. Pleasing audiences had  
made that "epic journey from squalor to immortality" both easier and  
more pleasant.

As Armstrong put it himself, in a letter to a friend written not long  
before his death on July 6, 1971: "My whole life has been happiness.  
Through all of the misfortunes, etc., I did not plan anything. Life  
was there for me and I accepted it. And life, what ever came out, has  
been beautiful to me, and I love everybody."