[Dixielandjazz] allstars Armstrong

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I remember Louis was on TV a fair bit during a 1968 tour of Britain, with a 
complete concert much improved for me in comparison with earlier by the 
extravert doings of Tyree Glenn. 

But as I think Humphrey Lyttelton noted,  Louis All-Stars performances were 
strictly scripted and even the supposed jam at an airport brought no more than 
one item from the programme currently being toured. 

Some live performances had disadvantages. One went along hoping to hear 
something  -- and long ago I came home after some blues or jazz concerts 
awarding myself full marks for effort. I paid, I tried.... and sometimes there 
was an unimpressed lady companion.

I do know one American lady musician who grew up in the 1950s out of range of 
serious jazz and exposed to the full distorting oversimplifications the media 
indulged in, who at first mention of Louis supposed he was some sort of media 
product, just on what she had always seen on TV...  and past some sell-by date.  
I regret her ignorance but appreciate the scepticism about celebrity BS this 
implies.  As soon as I learned of specialist mail order jazz record dealers, and 
THE COMPLETE HOT 5s & 7s I found the truth of the legend in Potato Head Blues.

The later Louis all-stars routine pressed various buttons in the machinery of 
passive approval of a wider public, and there was an element of nostalgia well 
short of musical appreciation of the Hot 7 in some people who tapped their feet 
(it can be a little curdling to hear someone enthuse loudly but vaguely about 
Louis then express the same sort of delight in .....  ooooh, dear!). And some of 
those people told their perhaps more musical children how great Louis was and 
the children couldn't hear very much and may well have cottoned on to how 
routine it all was ... and written it all off as a temporal and temporary 
phenomenon.  


In music which hopes for wide appeal, and in education generally, the arrangers 
or facilitators can go on about popularising, and in the end wind up leaving out 
what they were supposed to popularise or extend. There are of course laws about 
how much meat rather than other things is in a British sausage.  Alas even some 
of this meat can be a pig's ear. 

God didn't mean jazz to pander to fickleness and die of premature old age.