Armstrong Autobiography Louis
Longtime jitterbuggers know that we at jitterbuggingforjesus.com are all about the great Louis Armstrong, a true American original. We have sung hosannas here before about Terry Teachout’s wonderful biography of “Satchmo,” and whether you like Armstrong or jazz or not, Teachout’s award-winning book is a wonderful read about the jazz great’s wonderful life. More on the book, “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” after the video.
(For Marty Jones, and Lord help us if the Saints win the Super Bowl–we’ll never hear the end of it from the likes of you, will we Marty?)
From the Los Angeles Times:
Reporting from New York — In 1947, jazz great Louis Armstrong got himself a new gadget — a tape recorder, fresh out on the consumer market. It was a big, boxy machine that he set up in concert halls and jazz joints to record his six-piece All Stars so he could listen to each show in his hotel room and thin out the weak spots for the next gig.
Before long, however, this work tool became a plaything — and, a couple of generations later, a treasure trove for Terry Teachout, author of the new and compelling biography “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 476 pp., $30).
“He started leaving it on and making audio vérité tapes of chunks of his life — dinner parties, getting high in the dressing room after a gig, trying to get his wife into bed,” says Teachout, national drama critic for the Wall Street Journal. “He saved all these tapes. There are 650-odd of them.”
While the tapes have been available to scholars since 2002, Teachout is the first biographer to make full use of them, says Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, N.Y. And although Teachout says the tapes don’t contain any major revelations, they infuse “Pops” with the insights of an eavesdropper.
“Armstrong, although he was very self-aware, was also a very unself-conscious man,” Teachout says in his art-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “He knew what he was. He knew he was a very important figure in the history of American art. And so he saved everything that he could. But in making these tapes, he’s entirely unself-conscious. He just records parts of his life. . . . He is the only major jazz musician who has left behind a very large volume of documents of this kind.”
He also left behind a wealth of photographs. One uncredited shot in the book captures the portly Armstrong in a messy hotel room, wearing nothing but white briefs, his trumpet lying in an open case in the foreground and the tape recorder perched on a table in the back.
This is a little off our usual topics, I guess, but not by much. Great blues and jazz have lived under the same roof for decades, sharing a toothbrush and an attitude about expressing human emotion with music.
I was reminded of the shared history of all that music when I read a New York Times article earlier today about a new biography of one of the most important musicians of the 20th century -- Louis Armstrong. It's called "Pops," and was written by Terry Teacher, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal.
The article includes this quote from Armstrong about what he feels when he plays:
“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.”
If that dosn't sound like the blues, I'm not sure what does. I think you can make a case that however you want to describe Satchmo's music, it had its roots in blues, and the language he played was the language of the blues. The great Lena Horne once called the blues the "mother tongue" of jazz, and I like the sound of that.
But this sounds like a fine book, if you're a fan. I read Teachout's articles now and then, and he writes smartly about music when he's not writing about theater. And the list of classic music performances on his blog that he finds on YouTube inspired me to look into that source of music a while back.
Just to make my point about the language of the blues, here's a 1964 video of Armstrong playing "Basin Street Blues." Listen to those notes:
And here's another video, just for fun, because it goes way back to 1933:
I fogot to add this earlier -- I've always remembered the line from Woody Allen's 1979 film, Manhattan, where Allen's character lists Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues" as one of the reasons that life is worth living.
