[78-L] Armstrong book review

[Cary Ginell]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/books/review/Margolick-t.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y



December 6, 2009

HOLIDAY BOOKS

The Man Who Sang, Played and Smiled



By DAVID MARGOLICK

POPS





A Life of Louis Armstrong





By Terry Teachout



Illustrated. 475 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $30



One of the hardest parts of writing a biography is finding a fit
subject, but sometimes they’re in plain sight. Despite his incalculable
contributions to American culture, there has never been a fully
adequate narrative biography of Louis Armstrong. Terry Teachout now fills that void with “Pops.” He begins by suggesting how this omission came to be, then persisted for so long.



No one disputes that Armstrong revolutionized music, helped popularize
jazz throughout the world and created countless imitators. Even his
sometimes disparaging successors readily acknowledged their debt. “You
can’t play nothing on trumpet that doesn’t come from him,” Miles
Davis once said. Satchmo’s influence spilled over into the rest of
American culture, particularly regarding race. Through recordings,
concerts, movies, magazine interviews, and radio and television
appearances, he was the first black man whom millions of white
Americans allowed into their homes, and hearts.



Why, then, the scholarly neglect? Teachout maintains that Armstrong’s
detractors were so critical or uncomfortable over his public persona —
the sweaty brow, the megawatt smile, the crowd-pleasing, ingratiating
manner — that they ignored his enormous, continuing contributions to
music and to civilization. To them, he was simply too entertaining, too
popular or too pandering to be taken seriously.



Too pandering to whites, that is. Dizzy Gillespie
complained of his “Uncle Tom-like subservience” and “plantation
character,” for instance, while the narrator in a James Baldwin short
story disparaged his “old-time, down-home crap.” Armstrong unabashedly
liked whites, and wasn’t shy about saying so. “Believe it — the White
Folks did everything that’s decent for me,” he once wrote, before
comparing them favorably, in terms of kindness and industriousness, to
blacks (and “blacks” was not the word he used). He particularly liked
Jews, in part because it may have been a Jewish junk dealer named
Karnofsky who helped him buy his first cornet.



Given this disrepute among some blacks, what white liberal would dare
write about him, let alone extol him? Instead, enter the chief culture
critic of Commentary and drama critic for The Wall Street Journal,
which is what Teach out is. And Armstrong could not have a more
impassioned advocate. At times, “Pops” reads like a defense brief, but
a very loving and knowledgeable one.



Teachout leads us along Armstrong’s familiar path from the black
Storyville section of New Orleans, where he was born in August 1901,
the son of a father he barely knew and a 15-year-old servant girl (and
probable prostitute). The road then leads to a honky-tonk where young
Louis sneaked listens to the black cornet players Buddy Bolden, Joe
Oliver and Bunk Johnson, then to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys,
where he might have first played the cornet, holding the instrument
improperly enough against his lips so that he eventually mangled them.



>From there, he journeyed on Missis sippi River steamboats, where he
honed his ability to read music (and may first have developed his
trademark hoarseness), then Chicago, then New York, then Chicago again.
There, in his mid-20s, he formed his Hot Five and Hot Seven, with whom
he recorded, for $50 a side, what Teachout quite properly calls the
“Old Testament of classic jazz.”



There is a kind of perfunctory, dutiful quality to this part of
Teachout’s tale; where Armstrong’s brilliance is beyond dispute,
Teachout doesn’t seem fully engaged. Perhaps one simply can’t describe
what’s so astonishing about “Potato Head Blues” — to me, it’s that
Armstrong has miraculously made a trumpet laugh — but someone who’s
thought about it as much as Teachout has should at least try, rather
than leaning excessively (and pretentiously) on
Woody Allen to do the job. Similarly, his account of the even more
awesome “West End Blues” is clotted with hifalutin musical
technicalities. It’s odd, because elsewhere ­Teachout praises Armstrong
for avoiding musical jargon when talking about his music. The book
sends you fleeing to your CDs, or to YouTube, just to figure out what
he’s talking about.



Only when the critics start dumping on Armstrong does Teachout become
energized. That started in 1929, when Armstrong abandoned small
ensembles and took a big band on the road and, though he returned to
more intimate groups — for many years after World War II, Armstrong had
his All Stars — the attacks continued. Always, the charge was the same:
that he’d sold out, playing or recording what one leftist critic called
“the white man’s notion of Harlem jazz.”



To purists, the villain was Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser. With his
mob connections, Glaser was able to get the gangsters off Armstrong’s
back, and Armstrong was grateful, some felt, to the point of servility;
if Glaser told him to “play for the public. Sing and play and smile,”
then that’s what Armstrong did. (In any case, that’s where the money
was.) But to Teachout, the purists themselves were the ogres. The most
heinous was the record producer John Hammond, who has been credited
with helping start the careers of Billie Holiday, Count Basie and Bob Dylan, among others. Teachout labels him, with uncharacteristic spleen, “a coupon- clipping Ivy League dilettante.” (He’s kinder to another Armstrong critic, Gunther Schuller, but then, Schuller’s still alive.)



Teachout concedes that for long stretches of time, the musicians around
Armstrong were often second-rate, the musical selections pedestrian,
the recordings often so-so or worse. But so prodigiously talented was
he, Teachout insists, that “even when he was at his most trivial,
seriousness kept breaking in.” And enough of Armstrong’s work, like his
1950s albums devoted to the music of W. C. Handy and Fats Waller, was
great enough that his legacy only grew.



Teachout also acknowledges that on racial matters as well, Armstrong’s
behavior — appearing as “King of the Zulus” at Mardi Gras, or adopting
“When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” as his theme song despite its
reference to “darkies” — could be, to use one of his terms,
“wince-making.” Over time, his popularity among blacks waned, and
younger black performers like the Davises, Miles and Ossie, saw him as
a groveling relic, Stepin Fetchit with a horn.



But here, too, Teachout writes, Armstrong was maligned. For all his
bonhomie, he had few illusions about American racism. In myriad ways —
like integrating the airwaves and innumerable hotels — Armstrong was a
quiet revolutionary, and that was before, much to everyone’s surprise,
he publicly denounced President Eisenhower for dragging his feet on school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark.



But Satchmo — it comes from Armstrong’s original nickname,
“Satchelmouth,” as foreshortened by a lock-jawed Briton — wasn’t
pandering at all, Teach out maintains; ebullience was his very nature.
And that ebullience was a statement in itself, persisting despite the
decades of indignities he suffered. (Even his buddy
Bing Crosby never invited him to his home.) To Teachout, Armstrong’s
greatest contribution to civil rights was the enormous love he
generated, a contribution that even Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t have made.



The book is marred only by excess erudition. Teachout loves to show off
his cultural smarts; he’s the sort to include a reference to the
“Jupiter” Symphony without bothering to say who wrote it. One can’t
help thinking he cites Philip Larkin and Herbert von Karajan and Jackson Pollock
and Le Corbusier and Kingsley Amis and Darius Milhaud not just to tout
Armstrong, but to toss around their names. Armstrong forever railed
against people (including a couple of his wives) for putting on
“aires”; he called a king of England “Rex” to his face, and joked about
his lovemaking to a pope. Pops (it’s what everyone who really knew him
called him) might describe “Pops” the way he once characterized
Fletcher Henderson’s band: “a little stuck up.”



In some ways, Armstrong regained his reputation long before Teachout
came along. In his later years, he became America’s foremost cultural
ambassador, met by rapturous admirers wherever he went. Denigrators
like Dizzy Gillespie recanted. In 1964, “Hello, Dolly” bumped the Beatles off the top slot on the charts.



Since Armstrong’s death in 1971,
Wynton Marsalis has vouched for him, and his house in Corona, Queens,
is now a museum. Every Wednesday for the past nine years, you have been
able to hear his “good ol’ good ones” performed at Birdland. But
Teachout nails the case. Everyone now acknowledges what he amply
documents: not just Armstrong’s prodigious talent, but his wit,
courage, kindness, loyalty, charm. And his quirks: he
smoked marijuana almost daily for 40 years — it “makes you forget all
the bad things that happen to a Negro,” he once said — and he took (and
touted) a laxative named Swiss Kriss just as enthusiastically.



It’s striking how many greats — Hoagy Carmichael, Jack Teagarden, Teddy Wilson, Django Reinhardt, Bunny Berigan, Bing Crosby, Gene Krupa — were moved to feats of great eloquence describing Satchmo. Another
was Murray Kempton, who observed that “the pure and the cheap, clown
and creator, god and buffoon” were all encompassed in him. But those
contradictions ceased to matter, Teachout says, whenever Louis
Armstrong raised his trumpet to his lips, “for that was when the
laughter stopped and the beauty began.”



David Margolick, a contributor to Newsweek, is writing a book about the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957.

 		 	   		  
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