Louis Armstrong
With dazzling virtuosity on thetrumpet and an innovative singing style, Satchmo was the fountainhead of athoroughly original American sound
BySTANLEY CROUCH
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He hadperfect pitch and perfect rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could beas lofty as a moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thugdying in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in jazz, he was a smallman. But the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music andaround the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who caneasily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was theembodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity tointernationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong suppliedrevolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it becamecommonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Thatis why Armstrong remains a deep force in our American expression. Not only dowe hear him in those trumpet players who represent the present renaissance injazz Ñ Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard, Roy Hargrove,Nicholas Payton Ñ we can also detect his influence in certain rhythms thatsweep from country-and-western music all the way over to the chanted doggerelof rap.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
For many years it wasthought that Armstrong was born in New Orleans on July 4, 1900, a perfect dayfor the man who wrote the musical Declaration of Independence for Americans ofthis century. But the estimable writer Gary Giddins discovered the birthcertificate that proves Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901. He grew up at thebottom, hustling and hustling, trying to bring something home to eat, sometimessearching garbage cans for food that might still be suitable for supper. Thespirit of Armstrong's world, however, was not dominated by the deprivation ofpoverty and the dangers of wild living.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Whatstruck him most, as his memoir, Satchmo:My Life in New Orleans, attests,was the ceremonial vigor of the people. Ranging from almost European pale tojet black, the Negroes of New Orleans had many social clubs, parades andpicnics. With rags, blues, snippets from opera, church music and whatever else,a wide breadth of rhythm and tune was created to accompany or stimulate everykind of human involvement. Before becoming an instrumentalist, Armstrong thechild was either dancing for pennies or singing for his supper with a strollingquartet of other kids who wandered New Orleans freshening up the subtropicalevening with some sweetly harmonized notes.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Hehad some knucklehead in his soul too. While a genial fountain of joy, Armstrongwas a street boy, and he had a dirty mouth. It was his shooting off a pistol onNew Year's Eve that got him thrown into the Colored Waifs' Home, an institutionbent on refining ruffians. It was there that young Louis first put his lips tothe mouthpiece of a cornet. Like any American boy, no matter his point ofsocial origin, he had his dreams. At night he used to lie in bed, hearing themasterly Freddie Keppard out in the streets blowing that golden horn, and hopethat he too would someday have command of a clarion sound.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Thesound developed very quickly, and he was soon known around New Orleans asformidable. The places he played and the people he knew were sweet and innocentat one end of the spectrum and rough at the other. He played picnics for youngNegro girls, Mississippi riverboats on which the white people had never seenNegroes in tuxedos before, and dives where the customers cut and shot oneanother. One time he witnessed two women fighting to the death with knives. Outof those experiences, everything from pomp to humor to erotic charisma to griefto majesty to the profoundly gruesome and monumentally spiritual worked its wayinto his tone. He became a beacon of American feeling.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
From 1920 on, he was hellon two feet if somebody was in the mood to challenge him. Musicians then werewont to have "cutting sessions" Ñ battles of imagination and stamina.Fairly soon, young Armstrong was left alone. He also did a little pimping butgot out of the game when one of his girls stabbed him. With a trout sandwichamong his effects, Armstrong took a train to Chicago in 1922, where he joinedhis mentor Joe Oliver, and the revolution took place in full form. King Oliverand his Creole Jazz Band, featuring the dark young powerhouse with the largemouth, brought out the people and all the musicians, black and white, whowanted to know how it was truly done. The most impressive white musician of histime, Bix Beiderbecke, jumped up and went glassy-eyed the first time he heardArmstrong.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Whenhe was called to New York City in 1924 by the big-time bandleader FletcherHenderson, Armstrong looked exactly like what he was, a young man who was notto be fooled around with and might slap the taste out of your mouth if you wenttoo far. His improvisations set the city on its head. The stiff rhythms of thetime were slashed away by his combination of the percussive and the soaring. Hesoon returned to Chicago, perfected what he was doing and made one record afteranother that reordered American music, such as Potato Head Bluesand I'm a Ding Dong Daddy. Needing more space for his improvised line,Armstrong rejected the contrapuntal New Orleans front line of clarinet, trumpetand trombone in favor of the single, featured horn, which soon became theconvention. His combination of virtuosity, strength and passion wasunprecedented. No one in Western music Ñ not even Bach Ñ has ever set the innovativepace on an instrument, then stood up to sing and converted the vocalists. Pops.Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
The melodic and rhythmicvistas Armstrong opened up solved the mind-body problem as the world witnessedhow the brain and the muscles could work in perfect coordination on theaesthetic spot. Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a geniusfrom New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely newterms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted popularsongs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of sentimentality andelevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, themost revolutionary rhythm of his century. He learned how to dress and became afashion plate. His slang was the lingua franca. Oh, he was something.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact,that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took directionfrom him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpretedthe basics of the idiom Ñ swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms.While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers asdifferent as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, FrankSinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. Hisfreedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and hisirrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of deathgive his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is thestation of all great art.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Armstrongtraveled the world constantly. One example of his charming brashness revealeditself when he concertized before the King of England in 1932 and introduced anumber 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, wasalways willing to help out fellow musicians and passed out laxatives to royaltyand heads of state. However well he was received in Europe, the large publiccelebrations with which West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late'50s were far more appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Heusually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn'taccept everything. By the middle '50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by youngerNegro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovialand 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 certainlevel of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out PresidentEisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integrationbegan in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard fromanyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the wayof 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.
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Essayist StanleyCrouch's latest book is Always inPursuit: Fresh American Perspectives
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
TIMEMAGAZINE, Monday, June 8, 1998
http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/armstrong.html
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
Feb. 21, 1949cover, TIME MAGAZINE
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]>
<![if !vml]>
<![endif]>
