Oh Lordy Lou There He Goes Again Well
'Pops': Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words Jazz icon Louis Armstrong didn't merely go out behind a treasure trove of musical recordings; he besides documented hundreds of his private conversations on tape. Those recordings served equally the basis for Terry Teachout's new biography of the legendary musician, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
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'Pops': Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words
'Pops': Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words
Louis Armstrong performs with his All Stars in 1956. Terry Teachout'due south new biography of Armstrong is based in function on a cache of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong recorded for himself. Haywood Magee/Getty Images hide explanation
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Haywood Magee/Getty Images
Louis Armstrong performs with his All Stars in 1956. Terry Teachout'south new biography of Armstrong is based in part on a cache of backstage and afterwards-hours conversations that Armstrong recorded for himself.
Haywood Magee/Getty Images
Jazz icon Louis Armstrong didn't just leave behind a treasure trove of musical recordings; he also documented hundreds of his private conversations on tape. Those recordings served as the basis for Terry Teachout's new biography of the legendary musician, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Teachout recently spoke to host Neal Conan about his new book. Beneath, he offers 5 of his favorite musical moments from Armstrong'southward discography.
At present that I've published Pops, people are asking me which Louis Armstrong recordings I like best. That'south a fearsomely tough call. The greatest jazz musician of all time started making records in 1923 and kept at it until 1970, a twelvemonth earlier his death.
And he didn't play favorites.
"Ain't nobody played zip like it since, and tin't nobody play zippo like it now," he told an interviewer around the time that he recorded his last album. "My oldest record, tin can't nobody touch it. And if they say, 'Which record do you like the best?' I like them all, because I didn't hitting no bad notes on any of them."
I'yard not sure I'd go quite that far, but there are precious few Armstrong records that aren't worth a listen, and dozens (note the plural) that are imperishable masterpieces. If I had to choose five without which I wouldn't want to alive, these would rank high among the peak contenders.
Extract: 'Pops'
Annotation: There is language in this excerpt that some readers may notice offensive.
UNTIL THE DAY HE DIED, LOUIS ARMSTRONG CLAIMED that he was born on July iv, 1900. He said and so in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans and Swing That Music, his two published memoirs, and on innumerable other occasions, and while at least 1 biographer constitute the engagement besides pat to be plausible, information technology was merely in 1988 that a researcher located an entry in Latin for "Armstrong (niger, illegitimus)" in the handwritten baptismal register of New Orleans' Sacred Heart of Jesus Church. Co-ordinate to that tape, Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, the natural son of William Armstrong (known as Willie), who spent nigh of his adult life working in a turpentine factory, and Mary Ann Albert (known equally Mayann, though her son spelled it different ways over the years), a xv-twelvemonth-old country girl who came to New Orleans to piece of work as a household retainer. The event went unremarked by the local papers, which had more than important things to cover than the nascence of yet some other "niger, illegitimus." The forepart folio of the next day'southward Daily Picayune concerned itself with a lynching in Mississippi and a speech in which a South Carolina senator declared that "the 'niggers' are not fit to vote." (The latter story too made the front page of the New York Times.) Iii weeks later Armstrong was baptized a Roman Catholic, the religion of his paternal great-grandmother, though he never practiced information technology and did not even know that he had gone through the ceremony as an baby. Past then his begetter had left Mayann for some other adult female. In 1903 Willie and Mayann reconciled for a curt time and had a second child, a daughter named Beatrice (known every bit Mama Lucy), but Armstrong did not live with his father, or spend any amount of time with him, until he was a teenager.
No one knows when or why Armstrong added a year to his age. He never celebrated his altogether as a boy, and it is possible, fifty-fifty likely, that he did non know the true year of his birth. All that tin be said with certainty is that the incorrect year became a matter of legal tape when he registered for the draft in 1918 and that he stuck to it with unswerving consistency thereafter. We practise know, however, that it was Mayann who told him that "the night I was built-in there was a great large shooting scrape" in the neighborhood where he was born. Later on he claimed that it was "a blasting fourth of July, my mother called information technology, that I came into this world and they named me the firecracker infant." She was right about the incident only misremembered the date — information technology took place a month later. It is but because of surviving baptismal and demography records that nosotros now know both the date and year to have been incorrect. Exterior of these records, virtually of the rest of what we know of Armstrong'due south childhood is what he tells us in his writings, augmented by our knowledge of New Orleans and the memories of those who knew him as a male child. He wrote at length nearly his young years, and the picture he paints is often chaotic and sad, though he did not find it and then. But he never glossed over the hardships that he faced, or left much uncertainty as to who he blamed for them.
Across describing him every bit "a precipitous human being, tall and handsome and well built," Armstrong had little to say nigh his father, none of it good. In the same breath that he praised Willie's looks, he added that "my father did not have time to teach me anything; he was too busy chasing chippies." That was in Satchmo, in which he oftentimes withheld annotate nearly matters he otherwise described frankly, letting them speak for themselves. In later years he was franker still:
The man who May Ann told united states was our begetter left usa the day nosotros were born. The next time we heard of him — he had gone into an uptown neighborhood and made several other children past some other adult female. Whether he married the other woman, nosotros're not sure. One thing -- he did not marry May Ann. She had to struggle all by herself, bringing united states of america upward. Mama Lucy + I were bastards from the Start.
From childhood onward he attached himself to older men, and it is reasonable to suppose that he was looking for some pocket-size function of what his own male parent had failed to give him.
Armstrong was built-in in his parents' dwelling, a wooden shack at 723 Jane Aisle, located on the edge of "black Storyville," the separate cerise-calorie-free district three blocks uptown from Storyville where blacks were allowed to purchase sex. When Willie left her, Mayann gave Louis to Josephine Armstrong, Willie's mother, and moved into black Storyville proper. "Whether my female parent did any hustling, I cannot say," he wrote in Satchmo. "If she did, she certainly kept information technology out of sight." In fact she was most certainly working as a prostitute in a part of town that was rough fifty-fifty by New Orleans standards, and when her son finally rejoined her, that was where he would alive too. For the moment he stayed with his grandmother in Jane Alley, and his memories of life there were mostly happy, though it, also, was in a rough neighborhood known to locals every bit "the Battleground." It was, he subsequently wrote, a place full of "churchpeople, gamblers, hustlers, cheap pimps, thieves, prostitutes and lots of children." Josephine kept her grandson as far abroad from the hustlers and pimps as she could, sending him to Sunday school and kindergarten and whipping him with switches that she made him cut from a tree that grew in the front 1000. He sang gospel songs in church, rejoicing in the variegated clouds of audio emitted by a "sanctified" congregation of working-class blacks who took literally the psalmist'due south command to "brand a joyful noise unto the Lord," worshipping loudly, jubilantly, and without any of the self-witting decorum of their better-off brethren: "That, I estimate, is how I caused my singing tactics... the whole Congregration would exist Wailing — Singing like mad and audio so beautiful." On weekdays he played hide-and-seek with the poor white children of the neighborhood and helped evangelize the washing his grandmother took in, earning a nickel each time he carried a load.
At some signal information technology must accept been made known to Louis that his parents were living together again and that he at present had a sister. Yet Willie and Mayann made no endeavor to reclaim their son, and it was not until 1905 or 1906 that he outset saw Mama Lucy. One 24-hour interval Mayann sent a friend to Jane Aisle to tell Josephine that Willie had deserted her in one case again and that she was sick and in desperate need of help. Louis went with his female parent's friend to black Storyville, riding on a segregated streetcar for the start fourth dimension in his life. He constitute Mayann in bed with Mama Lucy in a one-room flat. "I realize I have not done what I should by you lot," she told him. "Simply, son, mama will brand information technology up." Then she sent him to Rampart Street to buy fifty cents' worth of meat, staff of life, red beans, and rice, the staples of her kitchen and the main ingredients of the southern-style home cooking he would enjoy all his life. (As an developed he signed many of his messages "Ruby Beans and Ricely Yours, Louis Armstrong.") On the fashion he ran into a gang of bullies who called him a mama's boy and threw mud on his treasured white Lord Fauntleroy suit. He punched the ringleader in the rima oris and went about his business concern.
Information technology is close to impossible for anyone non born into poverty to movie such a scene, yet Louis appears to accept taken it in footstep, salve for a moment of panic when he first saw his ill mother. After that he adjusted to his new state of affairs with the resiliency of youth. He looked on as ane "stepfather" followed another into Mayann's bed (and remained tactfully silent as he and his sister overheard the sounds of lovemaking in their one-room home). "I couldn't go along runway of the stepdaddies, there must have been a dozen or so, 'cause all I had to do was turn my back and a new pappy would appear," he recalled, adding that some of them "liked to beat on little Louis." Whenever his mother "got the urge to go out on the town" and disappeared "for days and days," he went without complaint to stay with an uncle. Though he had only just begun to attend grade school, he took it for granted that he would as well work at odd jobs to bring in extra coin, and was proud to assistance pay the bills. But he was not a passive onlooker, recording without thinking: the more he saw, the more he questioned, and his father was non the only homo on whom he would someday render judgment.
Louis knew that Mayann, unlike Willie, was doing the best she could to take care of him and his sister, and he loved and admired her for it. All that remains of her is a formally posed family unit portrait taken around 1920 (in which the nineteen-year-old Louis can be seen to take after his broad-beamed, plump-cheeked mother) and the recollections gear up down by her son in Satchmo and his other writings. Yet it is more than enough to come away with a sense of what she was like, and why he revered her memory. A plain-spoken woman who liked a beverage and knew how to fight, she taught him the simple code to which he hewed ever later: "I had to work and help May Ann, — put breadstuff on the table, since it was only the three of us living in this one big room, which was all that we could afford. Just we were happy. My mother had one thing that no matter how much schooling anyone has — and that was Good Common Sense (and respect for homo beings). Yea. That's My Diploma — All through my life I remembered information technology."
Excerpted from Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout, copyright 2009. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
Weather condition Bird
Weather Bird
- from The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings [Columbia/Legacy]
- by Louis Armstrong
Some modern listeners notice it hard to warm up to Armstrong'south early recordings: His sidemen usually aren't as good as he is. "Atmospheric condition Bird," a trumpet-piano duet recorded in 1928, is a shining exception to the rule. Earl Hines, the young master's most sympathetic musical partner, was a brilliantly original pianist who could hit annihilation Satchmo pitched, and both men are at the top of their game in this dazzling musical duel. Without a rhythm department to bog them downwards, they dart effortlessly from idea to idea, tossing off firework-like bursts of virtuosity all along the mode.
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I Gotta Correct to Sing the Blues
I Gotta Right to Sing the Dejection
- from Sugar: The Best of the Consummate RCA Victor Recordings
- by Louis Armstrong
This historic version of Harold Arlen's bluesy ballad, fabricated in 1933, is my all-fourth dimension favorite Louis Armstrong record, the one that I'd tuck under my arm if the firemen told me to jump out the window before the roof vicious in. "I simply played the manner I sang," Armstrong said, and you tin hear what he meant in the vocal chorus that opens the record. Information technology's a beauty, just the all-time is withal to come up. In the serenely climactic trumpet solo, he hovers miles in a higher place the clockwork tyranny of the trounce, sounding for all the earth like a lordly turn-of-the-century tenor. It's equally though he'd broken through to a realm of abstruse lyricism that transcends ordinary man emotion.
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You Rascal You
Y'all Rascal You
- from Ultimate Collection [Verve]
- by Louis Armstrong
Louis meets Louis in this hard-swinging romp through i of Satchmo's "good ol' adept ones" (the phrase with which he introduced his greatest hits on stage). Accompanied to raucous issue by Louis Hashemite kingdom of jordan'southward Tympany Five -- the combo that bridged the gaps between jazz, R&B and rock 'n' roll -- Armstrong ad-libs with colossal gusto, then tosses off 3 trumpet choruses full of the old-time pyrotechnics. Amazingly, he was having an off day when this side was cut. "Louis came in town and his lip had disrepair on him -- had disrepair all the way down," Jordan recalled. "Finally, he says, 'Permit's go,' and we went and played information technology. He even played those loftier Cs and things with his lip busted."
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New Orleans Function: Flee equally a Bird/Oh Didn't He Ramble/March/Parade a
New Orleans Role
- Song: New Orleans Function: Flee as a Bird/Oh Didn't He Constitutional/March/Parade a
- from New Orleans Nights
- by Louis Armstrong
Here's an old-time New Orleans jazz funeral, re-created in the recording studio by the All Stars, the six-piece philharmonic that Armstrong led from 1947 until his death in 1971. The mournful hymn that kicks off the proceedings is "Flee as a Bird," followed by "Oh Didn't He Constitutional," and Armstrong'southward opening narration sets the scene: " 'Course you know at that place was a funeral march in front of 'Didn't He Ramble,' where they take the body to the cemetery and they lower ol' Brother Gate in the footing. And, uh, dig it!" Earl Hines and Jack Teagarden supply blue-chip back up on pianoforte and trombone.
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Summer Song
Summertime Song
- from The Real Ambassadors
- past Dave Brubeck
Armstrong claimed to dislike modern jazz, and he usually meant it -- but non always. In 1961, he teamed upwardly with the rhythm section of the Dave Brubeck Quartet to record this Brubeck-penned carol, in which he sings of the dazzler of a summer day and the mystery of passing time. Though he'd turned 60 a month before "Summer Song" was recorded, the pianist's cool jazz harmonies exit him utterly unfazed. Mind to how he makes magic out of Iola Brubeck's hauntingly nostalgic lyric: "Love to me is like a summer's twenty-four hours / If information technology ends, the memories will stay."
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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121026170
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