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April 24, 2006
Teachout On Armstrong
Terry Teachout favors us with a snippet from his upcoming biography of Louis Armstrong, Hotter Than That. Teachout notes that by 1927 Aaron Copland thought that jazz might be able to carry the full spectrum of human emotion: stretching out well beyond mere party music, the new American music could handle as well the emotions of "love, tragedy, remorse.” But to connect with the mainstream (and I guess there's always been a mainstream, throughout history) and to become truly popular, jazz would require an artist that combined virtuosity with charisma. Teachout:
Such a man existed, and there were those who had an inkling of his potential. When Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael first heard Louis Armstrong playing with the Creole Jazz Band in 1923, they were staggered. Carmichael set down his reaction in his memoirs: “’Why,’ I moaned, ‘why isn’t everybody in the world here to hear that?’ I meant it. Something as unutterably stirring as that deserved to be heard by the world.” Five years later it was being heard by the patrons of Chicago’s Savoy Ballroom, the buyers of race records, the fortunate listeners who happened to tune into Carroll Dickerson’s broadcasts from the Savoy—and no one else.Musicians, to be sure, received Armstrong’s records as life-changing revelations. When Artie Shaw first heard them, he became “obsessed with the idea that this was what you had to do. Something that was your own, that had nothing to do with anybody else….I realized I was no longer playing music, I was playing an art form, something bigger than music.” But even if the Armstrong-Hines recordings of 1928 had circulated more widely at the time of their release, it is still doubtful that they would have made much of an impression on the public at large, consisting as they do of jazz and blues tunes unevenly played by a scrappy little band dominated by two titans. Even on the sides that featured Armstrong’s appealing voice, he was restricted to wordless scat vocals, vaudevillian novelties, or blues-drenched laments like “St. James Infirmary,” the mournful folk ballad about a man who goes to the morgue to behold his lover on a slab: “I went down to St. James Infirmary/Saw my baby there/Stretched out on a long white table/So sweet, so cold, so bare.”
In order for the rest of the world to hear and embrace Armstrong, he would need a more accessible repertoire and a more flattering setting—both of which were close at hand….
Great stuff--Terry Teachout is one of my favorites critics and I can't wait for the book to come out.
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