Louis Armstrong
With dazzling virtuosity on the
trumpet and an innovative singing style, Satchmo was the fountainhead of a
thoroughly original American sound
By
STANLEY CROUCH
Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He had
perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could be
as lofty as a moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thug
dying in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in jazz, he was a small
man. But the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music and
around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can
easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the
embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to
internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied
revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became
commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.
That
is why Armstrong remains a deep force in our American expression. Not only do
we hear him in those trumpet players who represent the present renaissance in
jazz Ñ Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove,
Nicholas Payton Ñ we can also detect his influence in certain rhythms that
sweep from country-and-western music all the way over to the chanted doggerel
of rap.
For many years it was
thought that Armstrong was born in New Orleans on July 4, 1900, a perfect day
for the man who wrote the musical Declaration of Independence for Americans of
this century. But the estimable writer Gary Giddins discovered the birth
certificate that proves Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901. He grew up at the
bottom, hustling and hustling, trying to bring something home to eat, sometimes
searching garbage cans for food that might still be suitable for supper. The
spirit of Armstrong's world, however, was not dominated by the deprivation of
poverty and the dangers of wild living.
What
struck him most, as his memoir, Satchmo:
My Life in New Orleans, attests,
was the ceremonial vigor of the people. Ranging from almost European pale to
jet black, the Negroes of New Orleans had many social clubs, parades and
picnics. With rags, blues, snippets from opera, church music and whatever else,
a wide breadth of rhythm and tune was created to accompany or stimulate every
kind of human involvement. Before becoming an instrumentalist, Armstrong the
child was either dancing for pennies or singing for his supper with a strolling
quartet of other kids who wandered New Orleans freshening up the subtropical
evening with some sweetly harmonized notes.
He
had some knucklehead in his soul too. While a genial fountain of joy, Armstrong
was a street boy, and he had a dirty mouth. It was his shooting off a pistol on
New Year's Eve that got him thrown into the Colored Waifs' Home, an institution
bent on refining ruffians. It was there that young Louis first put his lips to
the mouthpiece of a cornet. Like any American boy, no matter his point of
social origin, he had his dreams. At night he used to lie in bed, hearing the
masterly Freddie Keppard out in the streets blowing that golden horn, and hope
that he too would someday have command of a clarion sound.
The
sound developed very quickly, and he was soon known around New Orleans as
formidable. The places he played and the people he knew were sweet and innocent
at one end of the spectrum and rough at the other. He played picnics for young
Negro girls, Mississippi riverboats on which the white people had never seen
Negroes in tuxedos before, and dives where the customers cut and shot one
another. One time he witnessed two women fighting to the death with knives. Out
of those experiences, everything from pomp to humor to erotic charisma to grief
to majesty to the profoundly gruesome and monumentally spiritual worked its way
into his tone. He became a beacon of American feeling.
From 1920 on, he was hell
on two feet if somebody was in the mood to challenge him. Musicians then were
wont to have "cutting sessions" Ñ battles of imagination and stamina.
Fairly soon, young Armstrong was left alone. He also did a little pimping but
got out of the game when one of his girls stabbed him. With a trout sandwich
among his effects, Armstrong took a train to Chicago in 1922, where he joined
his mentor Joe Oliver, and the revolution took place in full form. King Oliver
and his Creole Jazz Band, featuring the dark young powerhouse with the large
mouth, brought out the people and all the musicians, black and white, who
wanted to know how it was truly done. The most impressive white musician of his
time, Bix Beiderbecke, jumped up and went glassy-eyed the first time he heard
Armstrong.
When
he was called to New York City in 1924 by the big-time bandleader Fletcher
Henderson, Armstrong looked exactly like what he was, a young man who was not
to be fooled around with and might slap the taste out of your mouth if you went
too far. His improvisations set the city on its head. The stiff rhythms of the
time were slashed away by his combination of the percussive and the soaring. He
soon returned to Chicago, perfected what he was doing and made one record after
another that reordered American music, such as Potato Head Blues
and I'm a Ding Dong Daddy. Needing more space for his improvised line,
Armstrong rejected the contrapuntal New Orleans front line of clarinet, trumpet
and trombone in favor of the single, featured horn, which soon became the
convention. His combination of virtuosity, strength and passion was
unprecedented. No one in Western music Ñ not even Bach Ñ has ever set the innovative
pace on an instrument, then stood up to sing and converted the vocalists. Pops.
Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo.
The melodic and rhythmic
vistas Armstrong opened up solved the mind-body problem as the world witnessed
how the brain and the muscles could work in perfect coordination on the
aesthetic spot. Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a genius
from New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new
terms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted popular
songs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of sentimentality and
elevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, the
most revolutionary rhythm of his century. He learned how to dress and became a
fashion plate. His slang was the lingua franca. Oh, he was something.
Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact,
that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction
from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted
the basics of the idiom Ñ swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms.
While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as
different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank
Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His
freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his
irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death
give his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is the
station of all great art.
Armstrong
traveled the world constantly. One example of his charming brashness revealed
itself when he concertized before the King of England in 1932 and introduced a
number by saying, "This one's for you, Rex: I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You." He had a great love for children, was
always willing to help out fellow musicians and passed out laxatives to royalty
and heads of state. However well he was received in Europe, the large public
celebrations with which West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late
'50s were far more appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.
He
usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn't
accept everything. By the middle '50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by younger
Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial
and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said,
holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn't demanding a certain
level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President
Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration
began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from
anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the way
of the truly great: they do what they do in conjunction or all by themselves.
They get the job done. Louis Daniel Armstrong was that kind.
Essayist Stanley
Crouch's latest book is Always in
Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives
TIME
MAGAZINE, Monday, June 8, 1998
http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/armstrong.html
Feb. 21, 1949
cover, TIME MAGAZINE