Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, an exuberant, entertaining, and well documented biography of the undisputed King of Jazz has arrived just in time for the holidays. Written by Terry Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and a former jazz bassist himself, the book makes use of about 650 reel-to-reel tapes that Armstrong recorded from the late 1940s until his death in 1971, along with recent interviews, and a reassessment of source documents. I caught up with Mr. Teachout, a fellow blogger (http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/), at a reading and book signing at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore.

My counter-intuitive experience with musicians is that these non-verbal artists are highly articulate and Mr. Teachout was no exception. Whether this comes from their innate faculties - intelligence or linguistic rhythm - or is honed by repeated efforts to translate what is abstract into what can be clearly understood, the biographer presented the thesis of his book, interspersed with video and audio clips, and took numerous questions during an informative and enjoyable 1 ½ hour presentation, a nice performance piece that would have pleased the subject of his book, who, though uneducated had an original and communicative style all his own.

Mr. Teachout has a gift for synthesizing vast amounts of data and presenting them in a lively and balanced manner (perhaps more so than his blogsite) which I first became aware of in his biography of Mencken (The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken). Here he has a more sympathetic subject with which to engage. Armstrong was born in 1899 with the proverbial deck stacked against him: to a poor unwed black teenage mother in the Deep South, essentially abandoned by his father, with the streets of New Orleans' red-light district as a classroom and a Dickensian crew of reprobates to consort with. And it was only when he ended up in the Colored Waif's Home for Boys (a reform school) that a sense of discipline and his life's purpose began to emerge: for he loved playing the bugle in the band. (It was the cornet he would later master before revolutionizing the playing of the trumpet.) It was at the Waif's Home that he met the first of his mentors and father figures Peter Davis to get him going; the next one, King Oliver, ultimately landed him in Chicago; and certainly not the last, Fletcher Henderson in Harlem, to help launch him further on his way.

Mr. Teachout's book is a tutorial on the early days of jazz. He brings out all the compelling anecdotes of the performers and situates the music and racial attitudes in the context of the times. For those with a musical bent, there is plenty to mull over as the author describes the fine points of composition and performance. He discusses the women (there were four wives and many lovers), drug usage (he smoked marijuana daily), and all the petty grievances, jealousies, and back stabbing that the arts in general, and performing artists in particular, are prone to (And you thought your real-world job was bad!) Two things stand out about Louis Armstrong's personality: he was very easy going - a good kid - and he had a very strong work ethic. Harnessed to a natural talent, during the times in which he lived, he was clearly going places.

At the author's mention of The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, I hauled down my copy and sampled some of the influential Armstrong contributions of the early days, in the roaring 20s and the depression era 30s. There's "Potato Head Blues," "Struttin with Some Barbecue," and the ground-breaking "West End Blues"; "Weather Bird" which he cut with pianist Earl Hines; and "I Got the Right to Sing the Blues." You can see and hear much of the same if you Google on the author and artist's name: there are numerous video and audio performances of Louis Armstrong captured on the web. The cornet and trumpet playing of Armstrong, as well as his vocals, are memorably described by the author. I don't share his enthusiasm for the performer's singing, but he does point out how he scatted and used his voice as a potent instrument on stage.

I wasn't aware of the fallout when Armstrong went to the big band format in the 30s. The cries of sell-out from the jazz community will sound similar to those leveled by the folk society at Bob Dylan in the 60s. These continued with the next generation - the Bebops - who were taking jazz in another direction, one alien to Mr. Armstrong's sensibilities. They seemed particularly offended by his showmanship, grinning, and mugging, which they took as pandering to a white audience. Part of Mr. Teachout's purpose is to rehabilitate this unfounded image and show Armstrong's many later contributions to music and landmark scaling of racial barriers; and to this extent he is largely successful, especially as he makes compelling cases for the direction and achievements in the last four decades of the artist's life. However, I think the book misses a significant part of Armstrong's popularity and that of the big bands across the board: the music was exciting not only to the listeners, but especially the dancers. The trumpeter's playing whipped up a frenzy of participation in the audience - they weren't chanting lyrics and lighting candles - they were on their feet hurtling through the air with their partners to some of the hottest music ever. Armstrong's stage presence, like many of the bandmeisters of the day, got them going in strange and exciting ways.

Lurking in the background, looking to take a rake on all the excitement, especially the illicit kind, was the mob. Mr. Teachout paints an entertaining mural of the times with all the underworld tricksters, shakedown artists, henchmen, and thugs who delivered the booze, broads, and bongs, while collecting the bucks on the nightclub and music scene. The trumpeter may or may not have known who was looking out for his interests at the end of the day, but he surely knew those boys were out there in some capacity.

Mr. Teachout is at his finest as he captures Armstrong's meteoric and problematic rise to superstardom and cultural icon, touching on all the technological (radio and movies) and cultural changes taking place (mixed racial groups, civil rights), and all the players - including, it may surprise you to know, Bing Crosby, who gave him his big break. You'll doubtless be familiar with "Mack the Knife," "Hello Dolly," and "It's a Wonderful World," songs that helped to catapult him there, but there were many regrettable tunes and the "same old, same old good ones" that helped prepare the way. At the end of the day, though, this performer paid a hefty price just to be able to entertain us, let alone survive. But such is part and parcel with artistic excellence in whatever its manifestations and one suspects Pops would never have had it any other way.

Mr. Teachout will be in Washington, DC at Politics & Prose January 7^th at 7 PM to discuss and sign Pops, sure to get consideration for best biography in any of a number of book awards for nonfiction. Don't miss this opportunity to start your new year off on what promises to be a very upbeat note!