[Dixielandjazz] Louis Armstrong book reviewed - Master of Modernism' by Thomas Brothers

[Robert Ringwald]

Book Review: 'Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism' by Thomas Brothers. Norton, 594
pages, $39.95.
by David Freeland
Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2014
Last year the former Connie's Inn, at the corner of 131st Street and Seventh Avenue
in Harlem, was torn down. The demolition of this landmark of 1920s jazz closed a
rare window into the life of legendary trumpeter and cornetist Louis Armstrong, who
performed there early in his career. Armstrong shaped his playing in response to
the dynamics of space, and Connie's Inn, like many Prohibition-era clubs, was nestled
in a tiny basement away from public view. Patrons, musicians and dancers all jostled
together to a pulsing beat. Such spaces fostered the culture of improvisation and
experiment that became standard in jazz -- and these qualities worked their way into
the recordings now enshrined in the popular consciousness. Such discs stand on their
own as artistic statements, but they only tell part of the story if we are going
to understand the forces that gave rise to jazz as a performance medium.
One of Thomas Brothers's goals in "Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism" is "to relate
the recordings to what was going on nightly, in Armstrong's working gigs." In one
especially fascinating section, he connects the jazz tradition of "breaks" -- brief
instrumental solos carved out of a larger performance, accompanied by only the rhythm
section -- to the stop-time effects used in African-American dance routines. In this
way, Armstrong's "hot" trumpet solos, so much a part of his recorded legacy, tie
in directly with the kinetic floor shows of Connie's Inn and other cabarets. During
stop-time sequences, Armstrong and a dance team would riff together against a steady
drumbeat, in an integration of music and movement that Mr. Brothers, a jazz historian
and professor of music at Duke University, traces to African performance traditions.
When discussing Armstrong's 1929 recording of "Ain't Misbehavin'," Mr. Brothers describes
the vocal as "barking, explosive," in contrast to a softer, "mellow" quality that
the artist had been cultivating on discs. What accounts for the difference? At the
time, Armstrong was in the midst of delivering this song nightly to signal the end
of a noisy intermission, from the pit of Broadway's Hudson Theater, during his stint
in the African-American musical show "Hot Chocolates." Mr. Brothers notes: "We can
only imagine how loudly he had to sing to get everyone's attention and be heard.
There was certainly no microphone."
Mr. Brothers follows the germ of creation as it moved from the outside world -- cabarets,
nightclubs and theaters -- into the bounded realm of the studio. There it was transformed
by many factors: a three-minute time limit, engineers who positioned the musicians
in unfamiliar configurations and, in the years before electric recording, the need
for players to direct their solos into a large, stationary megaphone. But in time
these recordings, first issued as breakable platters of shellac, became the sole
surviving witnesses to the jazz miracle and, because of their adaptability to new
technologies, continued to offer "priceless access to a monumental musical achievement."
They are, as Mr. Brothers notes, a stilted portrait: "Commercial recordings were
merely a sideshow for Armstrong, while for us they are the main event." In the overall
context of music making, we should understand them as an "entwined supplement," one
that captures Armstrong's melodic invention, if not his onstage vitality and presence.
Conceived as a follow-up to his 2006 "Louis Armstrong's New Orleans," which drew
similar connections between music and the larger environment, Mr. Brothers's book
is less a conventional biography than a rigorous work of social and musicological
analysis, organized chronologically. It centers on the years between 1922 and 1932,
when the young musician, raised in poverty in New Orleans, traveled to Chicago and
New York and slowly, through a combination of hard work and talent, forged a reputation
as one of the greatest players in jazz. General readers may find the many references
to chords, intervals and "harmonic dislocations" challenging, but Mr. Brothers makes
a good argument for their inclusion: "A precise investigation of musical style can
demonstrate how music accomplishes cultural work at a very deep level, deep enough
for long-lasting results."
Such a rarefied approach has drawbacks, though. Mr. Brothers situates Armstrong's
musical performances within their socio-historical context but does not always illumine
what those same performances may be able to tell us about Armstrong as a human being.
We read about the artist's "flexibility of mind" and "musical and social intelligence"
but gain little understanding about how those qualities informed his life choices.
As a result, Louis Armstrong in this account remains a somewhat elusive figure, even
as his artistic world is depicted with clarity and precision.
The chasm between artist and man is widest when Mr. Brothers tries to make sense
of Armstrong's contradictions with regard to race. At times, Armstrong could be intrepid,
even foolish: On one occasion, in 1931, he dedicated a live performance of "I'll
Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You" to the Memphis policemen, seated in the
audience at the elegant Peabody Hotel, who had arrested him the night before for
talking to a white woman in the front seats of his band's chartered bus. But more
often he was accommodating. He appeared in racist films for Paramount in 1932 and
once remarked that "you needed a white man to get along." Such details conform to
the image of Armstrong as the docile African-American and would later make him the
target of scholarly and intellectual opprobrium. In the end, Mr. Brothers implies,
the most judicious way to approach Louis Armstrong is through his music.
The ultimate value of "Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism," which may best be read
in connection with Terry Teachout's more biographical and accessible "Pops" (2009),
lies in its presentation of the artistic enterprise. Armstrong excelled in manipulation
of the "fixed and variable model," through which the melody dips and circles in relation
to a solid, unchanging base. Mr. Brothers mirrors this relationship in the structure
of his book: The "fixed" historical context, uncovered so painstakingly, is offset
by the "variable," free-ranging interpretation of Armstrong's music. What made Armstrong
modern was his ability to combine the most lucent elements from African and European
traditions, creating in the process a new American music that, like all great art,
both reflects its era and transcends it.
__________
Mr. Freeland is the author of "Ladies of Soul" and "Automats, Taxi Dances and Vaudeville:
Excavating Manhattan's Lost Places of Leisure."
-30


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

"Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours." 
--Lawrence Peter (Yogi) Berra