Terry Teachout
Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of all time and a giant of modern world culture. He stretched music with the fearless freedom that is the very nature of music itself. Stretched it sideways, in and out at the same time, added texture, humor, flavor and kindness. Made the horn sing and his voice trumpet. His rasp and scat makes the ear and heart smile. When he skipped an expected beat, he knew we would fill in the underlying song, words and tone. He brings out the musician in us and we can fill in the blanks or complete the song’s sentence.
Through Louis’ lessons, musicians learned to play while playing. Singers phrased songs timed to emotion rather than a written score because of Louis Armstrong. In a line from Langston Hughes’ poetry book, Ask your Mama, 12 Moods for Jazz, Langston writes about an anthropology student in horned-rimmed glasses who took classes who was taking notes on Mr. Armstrong’s style. “Your read music? And Louie saying: Not enough to hurt my playing.”
Pops is also short for popular. He was a headliner in his twenties and lead jazz into a worldwide phenomenon by his thirties. He knocked The Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies (without a collaborator) and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. 100,000 African fans enjoyed his concert to celebrate Ghana’s independence in 1956. Offstage he was witty, introspective and complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more embittered by racism than his worshipping fans ever knew.
Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on a half ton of important new sources unavailable to previous Armstrong biographers, including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong made throughout the second half of his life. He crafts a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure that shares full, accurate versions of such storied events as Armstrong’s decision to break up his big band and his quarrel with President Eisenhower. Louis was the most effective unofficial Goodwill Ambassador the US had, but he refused a government sponsored trip to the Soviet Union because of Eisenhower’s support of Governor Faubus of Arkansas. Scat that!
Cloth 30.00
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