[Dixielandjazz] 'Pops' Tells Satchmo Story, Review

[Robert Ringwald]

'Pops' Tells Satchmo Story
by Jim Abbott
Orlando Sentinel, January 13, 2010

Author Terry Teachout has spent a lifetime absorbing Louis Armstrong's music, but
it was another listening experience that inspired his new biography of the American
icon.
"Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" ($30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is the first version
of the Satchmo tale to benefit from the hundreds of hours of interviews that the
trumpeter taped over the course of his lifetime. The tapes, recorded in late-night-dressing
rooms, at home and in other out-of-the-spotlight situations, were recently made public
at the Armstrong Archives at Queens College, New York.
Teachout, drama critic at The Wall Street Journal and author of books on George Balanchine
and H.L. Mencken, was the first biographer to hear them.
"It was like being a fly on the wall in Armstrong's life," says Teachout, a scholar-in-residence
at the Winter Park Institute. He will talk about Armstrong's life and music at 7
p.m. Thursday at Tiedtke Concert Hall at Rollins College. "I never met him and being
able to listen to him in completely informal settings talk about his life, his work,
is as close as I'm going to get to knowing Louis."
"Pops" also offers an examination of the magic of Armstrong's playing, a tough thing
to reduce into words. At Thursday's event, that problem will be side-stepped by the
presence of a jazz ensemble to offer musical demonstrations of the trumpeter's blustery,
brilliant solos.
"This is the first time we've tried it," says Teachout, whose book tour has included
recent stops at NPR and C-SPAN. "I had lunch with the guys in the band and we talked
business for about two minutes, then we swapped stories for the rest of the time."
Satchmo stories abound in "Pops," which retraces Armstrong's evolution from a street
urchin in New Orleans, where he was born to a household servant and an absentee father,
two figures that would influence the boy's attitude in opposite, but ultimately positive
ways.
"He got his outlook on life from his mother and from the reform school and he got
it from the negative example of his father, who deserted his family on the day Louis
was born," Teachout says. "His whole life long, I believe, Armstrong was reacting
against his father's irresponsibility, so he was a role model in reverse."
Armstrong's exterior, exemplified in the wide-grinned clowning on stage, enabled
him to be accepted by white audiences long before social attitudes of the day would
have allowed it.
At the same time, such shtick was a sore point among blacks, who considered it an
unwelcome reminder of an old-time minstrel-show mentality that they longed to leave
in the past. Dizzy Gillespie accused Armstrong of engaging in "Uncle Tom-like subservience."
Yet, as "Pops" illustrates, Armstrong was a staunch advocate for equal rights, who
sparked controversy when he told a reporter in 1957 that President Eisenhower had
"no guts" for not backing public-school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark.
Likewise, Armstrong had no patience for minorities expecting entitlements without
effort. "The Lord will help the poor," he said once, "but not the poor lazy."
Politics and Armstrong's occasional temper had no place on stage, where his soaring
solos were a force that no one could deny -- including another legend, Miles Davis:
"You can't play nothing on trumpet that doesn't come from him."


--Bob Ringwald K6YBV
rsr at ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/806-9551

Check out our latest recording at www.ringwald.com/recordings.htm

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