[Dixielandjazz] Terry Teachout interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Books: Terry Teachout on How He Handled Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
by Michael Merschel
Dallas Morning News, December 8, 2013
AUSTIN -- Jazz aficionados, curious fans and anyone who appreciates the craft of
biography owes a debt of gratitude to Terry Teachout's father and his creative parenting
skills.
"My father had a basement closet full of 78s and old LPs," the author recalls. "He
was a Big Band guy. I was in junior high school. Very shrewdly, he kept the closet
locked, thus inspiring curiosity on my part for the illicit music that was down there."
It was, his father later admitted, a deliberate ploy. But it worked: On that day
in 1966 or '67, young Teachout jimmied the lock with a coat hanger, popped the closet
door open and discovered Big Band jazz -- and Duke Ellington.
"I listened to it. I fell in love." The budding violinist went so far as to borrow
an instrument and taught himself how to play jazz bass listening to those records.
He ended up playing bass professionally around Kansas City, but his fame would come
as a critic -- he now covers theater nationally for The Wall Street Journal -- and
biographer, most recently of the most iconic names in jazz.
In 2009, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong was declared "the definitive, one-volume,
narrative biography of Louis Armstrong" by the Journal of Jazz Studies and widely
praised by others. Teachout's new work, Duke, (Gotham, $30) has won similar accolades,
including being a finalist for a National Book Award.
The two legends might be as dissimilar as two jazzmen could be.
"They were two radically different personalities," Teachout says over breakfast in
Austin, before his appearance at the Texas Book Festival earlier this year in the
middle of an eight-city tour. "Different in every possible way."
He explains: "Armstrong, whom everybody loved -- and I never talked to anybody who
knew Armstrong who didn't love him -- was completely open, completely transparent
and I think in a basic sense knowable." Ellington, he says, spoke "not to reveal
himself, but to conceal himself."
In his new book, Teachout probes all aspects of Ellington's complicated life. And
it was quite complicated: He maintained a dignified outward appearance while engaging
in a vigorously active sex life. He was a hero of black pride, who celebrated racial
history in epic compositions such as "Black, Brown and Beige," and who earned his
fame playing in the Cotton Club, which excluded blacks.
Ellington was hailed as one of the great composers of the century, but Teachout notes
his struggles with longer-form works and picks apart how he liberally lifted melodies
from his players. And his singular accomplishments are entwined with collaborator
Billy Strayhorn, who made what the book calls "a near-Faustian bargain" with Ellington
that required his own immense talent to be subsumed.
That conflict between Ellington's persona and the real person makes life hard on
a biographer. Though he never holds back on the praise for Ellington, it raises the
question: Did Teachout come to like his subject or loathe him?
"He is so difficult to know," Teachout says. "Nobody who knew him claimed to know
him well. He is immensely charming and charismatic. He is to some degree genuinely
unscrupulous and behaves on occasion very badly toward women....
"Would I have wanted to be his friend? Well, I couldn't have been his friend. Nobody
was his friend, in a way. Would I have wanted to play in the band? Sure. I mean,
how would you have passed up an opportunity to do that?
"Would I have wanted to do business with him? Not a chance."
In the end, Teachout says, it all comes back to the music. Understanding the artists,
he says, changes the way we listen.
"It's as though you start to see colors in the portrait that were not immediately
visible to you," he says. "Listen to Armstrong's music and you feel yourself in the
presence of a profoundly optimistic man. When you learn that that man grew up on
the roughest block of New Orleans, that his mother was a part-time prostitute, that
his childhood was spent in conditions of the most abject poverty, then the spiritual
achievement that issues in his optimism, I think, gives the music an even deeper
resonance.
"With Ellington, you realize that the man who made the music is as complex as the
music itself.... You find that much of the music is a kind of landscape of his interior
life. And in the end, you realize that it's the most you're ever going to know about
him."
One of Teachout's own achievements is that he can write about such complex music
in simple terms without sounding simplistic. For that, we can thank Teachout's upbringing
again. "She's no longer with us -- but I wrote books for my mother," he explains.
Reducing Ellington's sounds into words that a musical novice can relate to is a challenge,
he says. But the New York- and Connecticut-based critic, who has written opera librettos
and a well-reviewed one-man play about Armstrong, is always looking for one. The
journey that began with the records of his father, a hardware salesman, has paid
off well.
"It's fun. It's fun. That's why I do this. It's to not be bored. I mean, my father
didn't like what he did for a living, so I said to myself, 'Somehow I'm going to
arrange my life so that I will.' And now look! They give me money to see plays and
go to jazz clubs and write books about people like Duke and Pops. You know -- where's
the downside to this?
"The downside to that, by the way, is sitting in airports," he says, reflecting on
the tour stops ahead. "Except for that, I have the best job and the best life imaginable."
-30

-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

To the optimist, the glass is half-full. To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.