In 1968, the jazz critic Gary Giddins, then an undergraduate at Grinnell College, in Iowa, invited Louis Armstrong to play on campus. The school resisted Giddins’s proposal to give Armstrong an honorary degree, and Giddins had to hide from his guest that some students were picketing because they would rather hear a rock group. Armstrong had only three years to live, and was travelling with a doctor. Giddins later recalled his shock at meeting “an old man in a loose tuxedo, his brown coloring tinctured with gray, his eyes slightly rheumy.” Giddins noted the slack handshake and wondered, “Why does he still bother?” But then Satchmo took the stage:
People who saw Armstrong perform in the latter half of his life often found their expectations exceeded. David Halberstam went to see him expecting “to write a twilight-of-career piece” but came away impressed—“the essence of the trumpet is all there, still able to touch a man in almost any mood.”
While everyone acknowledges Armstrong’s mastery, his importance often falls from view. Perhaps that’s because there are, in effect, two Armstrongs—the genial man croaking “Hello, Dolly” on television, and the meteoric trumpeter of the twenties, a performer with a strong claim to be the founder of jazz as we know it. Terry Teachout confronts this dichotomy in a new biography of Armstrong, “Pops” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $30). Although Laurence Bergreen’s life (1997) has more biographical detail, and biographies by James Lincoln Collier (1983) and Gary Giddins (1988) scrutinize the music more closely, Teachout excels at conveying the interplay between Armstrong the artist and Armstrong the entertainer, and at examining the particular challenge of his legacy. Armstrong survived into an era when his musical style seemed old-fashioned and his stage persona uncomfortably reminiscent of minstrelsy. A tragic by-product of his vaudevillian roots was that a man uniquely at ease with himself came to be dismissed by his own people as a fake.
Armstrong grew up poor in a black district of New Orleans, the son of an absent father and a mother who occasionally resorted to prostitution. He always insisted, patriotically, that he’d been born on the Fourth of July, 1900, but baptismal records reveal that he was born on the less resonant date of August 4, 1901. His birthday was never celebrated when he was a child, and his mother, recalling fireworks the night he was born, misremembered the date.
At the age of eleven, after firing a pistol at a New Year’s celebration, he was hauled off to a local reform school, the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. The school happened to have a brass band, in which Armstrong was able to burnish cornet skills that he had picked up along the way. It was at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys that Armstrong became a musician, and, on his release, a year and a half later, he was reluctant to leave. He began doing menial jobs while playing at clubs by night, and, over the next years, became a local phenomenon. In 1922, he was summoned to Chicago by his idol and mentor, the Louisiana-born trumpeter Joe (King) Oliver, who had formed a new band. Because Oliver made recordings, it is here, in 1923, that we first hear Armstrong play.
On the Oliver 78s, the first real sample of black jazz on record, Armstrong’s cornet solos jump out as something quite unprecedented. Even playing a slide whistle in a half chorus of “Sobbin’ Blues,” he demonstrates a sense of time—the attack an exquisite shade ahead of the beat—that, at this date, was utterly individual. Before long, Armstrong moved to New York, where he gained wider exposure, playing in Fletcher Henderson’s band and contributing memorably to sides by vocalists like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. In “You’ve Been a Good Ole Wagon,” as Smith taunts her ex, praising the talents of her new lover, Armstrong almost upstages her with interjections on his muted cornet, mimicking the discarded fellow with sobbing, growling, and stuttering effects that resolve into supple arpeggios. In 1925, Okeh, a “race record” label, brought Armstrong back to Chicago to record with his own groups, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven.
Teachout notes how difficult it is today to appreciate the value of the Oliver sides, given their dim, crackly sonics. The same problem applies to the Hot Five recordings, especially the earlier ones. It doesn’t help that by modern standards not all of the Five were virtuosos. The trombonist Kid Ory’s intonation could be approximate, and writers compete for ways to disparage Lil Hardin’s herky-jerky piano solos; James Lincoln Collier said that she sounded “like someone elbowing his way through a crowd.” Yet these 78s were as crucial in creating our modern musical sensibility as D. W. Griffith’s films were in creating the grammar of cinematic narrative. To get a sense of how revolutionary the Hot Five were, it helps to sample earlier jazz recordings by groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or Isham Jones’s band, in which everyone tends to play at once against a beat that is peppy but inflexible and a tad frantic, affording little room for anything as idiosyncratic as soul. By contrast, in the Hot Five’s recordings, solo improvisations took pride of place. In “Cornet Chop Suey,” there is Armstrong’s extended segment of freestyle improvisational comments over a stop-time beat; his endlessly celebrated solo on “Big Butter and Egg Man” is a liberated gloss on the banal melody, effortlessly jaunty and propulsive. For those who aren’t jazz buffs, Armstrong’s significance can be elusive: these transformative solos last mere fractions of a minute. But early records, lasting around three minutes a side, capture only a sliver of what his actual nightly work was. On a nineteen-twenties recording of “Shanghai Shuffle,” with the Fletcher Henderson band, Armstrong does a quick solo, but when performing it live he would wow the house with a mounting series of choruses. At Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, people hearing Armstrong’s solos on “West End Blues” actually screamed.
Armstrong gave America a new rhythm, bouncing early jazz into the lighter, subtler magic of swing. The general standard of trumpet technique was elevated in his wake, and he extended the range of jazz singing as well, refracting song with the nonsense syllabicity of scatting. Blacks had heard some unrecorded scatting before, but Armstrong was the first to set it in shellac—on “Heebie Jeebies”—and soon Ethel Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, and even Bing Crosby followed.
For all this, in critics’ discussion of Armstrong’s music after the twenties—that is, most of his life’s work—there is an unmistakable tone of apologia. The fact is that, while performers around him assimilated his innovations, he never really grew. There is no “late” Armstrong, in the manner of the extended and harmonically dense suites that Duke Ellington, two years older, produced from the fifties onward. Nor did Armstrong have any interest in bebop, unlike his contemporary and sometime collaborator the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. For the final four decades of his life, Armstrong just kept on blowing his horn. He led bands of variable quality, playing in a style that Teachout charitably calls “less unabashedly virtuosic.” This was partly the result of a lip so damaged that it occasionally bled down his shirtfront after gigs. Armstrong, like many self-taught geniuses, had a faulty technique, and, by the forties, the scar tissue—alarmingly visible in a closeup shot at the end of the 1956 film “High Society”—was such that rapid-fire cascades of notes no longer came as easily.
Armstrong embodied a peculiar disjunction: he was a trailblazer but not an experimenter. He entered the jazz scene so early, and his gift was so natural, that it barely seems to have occurred to him that what he was doing was art. Jazz, in its early years, did not have the status that it was to acquire by mid-century, when America’s ascendancy occasioned a self-conscious attempt, on the part of artists from Jackson Pollock to Jerome Robbins, to devise quintessentially American styles. Add to this Armstrong’s gift for singing and his taste for clowning between sets, and it is easy to understand that he thought of his trumpet-playing as just one of the ways he could give his audiences pleasure.
For some critics, this eagerness to please is hard to forgive. Collier, in his biography, decried “the bitter waste of his astonishing talent.” But what jazz buffs value in Armstrong, who rarely even referred to his music as jazz, differs from how he saw himself. Teachout—who, in a list of thirty “key” recordings, includes twenty that came after the Hot Five and Seven—takes a more reasonable line, arguing that Armstrong could not have had such influence in American music had he not been “a soloist of genius with a personality to match, a charismatic individual capable of meeting the untutored listener halfway.”
Besides, artistic excellence is measured not only in originality but also in chops. Even his work on the “High Society” soundtrack, with gorgeous decorations elevating the second-drawer songs from the tail end of Cole Porter’s career, was far beyond what any trumpeter before Armstrong could have pulled off. Playing as many as three hundred gigs a year, he hit high C dozens of times a night—and sometimes even a high F—while still spinning out articulate improvisations. There can be mastery in stasis. As the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié said, “Before, his career was a matter of seeking and finding. Now he knows.”
From the late forties until the end of his life, Armstrong travelled with a sextet of ever-changing membership known as the All Stars, resting periodically with his fourth wife, Lucille, in their house in Corona, Queens. As time went by, Armstrong became known less for his improvisational virtuosity than for his onstage shtick: the toothy smile, the head-waggling, and the bug eyes; the sweat-wiping, the corny jokes (“My makeup’s coming off!”), and the genial kowtowing. Armstrong had learned to hold a stage in the nineteen-teens and twenties, an era when black entertainers who wanted to make a living had to swallow their indignation at white privilege. But younger performers came to see his antics as offensive. To Dizzy Gillespie, Armstrong was a “plantation character”; Miles Davis, who admired Armstrong’s musicianship, regretted that “his personality was developed by white people wanting black people to entertain by smiling and jumping around.”
But to view Armstrong as an Uncle Tom, as many did and still do, is to ignore the extent of his anger about the injustices of segregation and of his willingness to speak out. A notable instance occurred in 1957, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, when Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, resisted the desegregation of a high school in Little Rock. Talking to a reporter, Armstrong called Faubus a “no-good motherfucker” (sanitized for publication as “uneducated plowboy”), and said that President Eisenhower was gutless and “two-faced” for failing to intervene. Once Armstrong had spoken, others followed suit, including Jackie Robinson and Eartha Kitt. In 1969, Armstrong turned down an invitation to play at the Nixon White House, suspecting that Nixon wanted only to placate black rage. (“Fuck that shit. . . . The only reason he would want me to play there now is to make some niggers happy.”) On a personal level, he routinely encountered prejudice while touring and was well aware that his white celebrity colleagues never invited him to their homes. The pianist Erroll Garner once peeked into his dressing room and asked, “What’s new?” Satchmo, right on the beat: “Nothin’ new—white folks still ahead.”
What Gillespie’s and Davis’s judgments miss is that jollity can be a form of strength. Armstrong couldn’t imagine letting anyone, as he once said when dressing down a sideman, “fuck with my hustle.” Some have understood this partially, supposing that Armstrong was studiously putting on a brave face; Ralph Ellison said that he was wearing a defensive “mask,” with “sophistication and taste hiding behind clowning and crude manners.” Teachout, similarly, concludes that he “returned love for hatred and sought salvation in work.” But nothing Armstrong ever said or wrote suggests that he was hiding behind anything—“Look, you don’t pose never!” he told an interviewer—nor was there any perceptible space in a joyous soul such as his for anything so gloomy as a quest for “salvation.” To read him as defensively fashioning what we now call a “black identity” is presentist. Ellison came closer to understanding the essence of Armstrong when, in another context, he asked if it was possible for a people to “live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting?” Armstrong was, in his way, more advanced than those whose ethnic identities are radicalized by circumstance. His strength was that he did not react. Armstrong’s voluminous writings—which include two autobiographies and enough letters to constitute a de-facto lifetime journal—are a key to his uncontrived, comfortable essence. “My whole life has been happiness,” he wrote to a friend. “I love everybody.” And his achievement as a writer is considerable; Philip Larkin, in a review of the autobiography “Satchmo,” praised the “compelling quality” of his prose. Armstrong wrote the way he played, with an orthographic jazz of underlinings and punctuation conveying shades of emphasis and attitude. Of his mentor King Oliver, for example:
Armstrong rounded out his fetish for self-documentation with hundreds of hours of home tape recordings of casual chat. Teachout is the first biographer to give us excerpts of these, including a delicious segment in which Armstrong tries to entice Lucille into bed at five in the morning: “It’s up to you to keep the horn percolating.” Lucille felt otherwise, and suggested, “Turn your tape off. In fact, erase off some of that shit.” Luckily for us, he didn’t, and the tapes offer, among much else, Armstrong chewing the fat with Redd Foxx, a recitation by Tallulah Bankhead, a talk with the baritone Robert Merrill, Israeli and Arabic folk songs, Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s funeral service, and the cast album of the 1970 stage musical “Applause.” Armstrong curated these tapes as a hobby: a rooted soul, he felt he had something timeless to say.
W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote of a black “double consciousness,” in which the American and the Negro are “two warring ideals in one black body.” There was no such war in Armstrong. Giddins has observed how consistently those who knew Armstrong said that what you saw was what you got. He was a man entirely content with who he was, despite the imperfections of where he was. Just as paradigm-busting cannot be the only measure of Armstrong’s musical career, his racial authenticity cannot be judged on the extent to which he challenged white power. While there would have been no civil-rights revolution without blacks dedicated to changing the social order, there is no reason not to celebrate others whose participation was less decisive, but who cheered from the sidelines while fashioning lives of quiet dignity. Armstrong’s dignity was just louder.
Gillespie, eventually, realized this: “I began to recognize what I had considered Pops’ grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life.” Call it the pursuit of happiness: despite the tough world he had grown up in and the far from perfect one in which he made his career, Louis Armstrong really did believe that “It’s a Wonderful World.” And the way he played made others believe it, too. Charlie Holmes, one of his saxophone players, summed up this joyous exuberance perfectly: