[Dixielandjazz] Another "Pops" Review

[Marek Boym]

Now that is a great review!
Happy New Year to you all.

On 30/12/2009, Stephen G Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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."
>
>
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