Throughout his lifetime, Louis Armstrong insisted on remaining a breezy entertainer with all the gravitas of a Jimmy Durante or Dean Martin. Fortunately, that image has recently been deeply reëxamined.
On October 31, 1965, Louis Armstrong gave his first performance in New Orleans, his home town, in nine years. As a boy, he had busked on street corners. At twelve, he marched in parades for the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he was given his first cornet. But he had publicly boycotted the city since its banning of integrated bands, in 1956. It took the Civil Rights Act, of 1964, to undo the law. Returning should have been a victory lap.
And yet little of what Armstrong said about the civil-rights struggle registered. The public image of him, that wide performance smile, the rumbling lilt of his “Hello, Dolly!,” obviated everything else. “As for Satchmo himself,” Kopkind wrote, “he seems untouched by all the doubts around him. He is a New Orleans trumpet player who loves to entertain. He is not very serious about art or politics, or even life.
The key word is “we’re.” Armstrong grew up poor and powerless, and he never forgot it. Despite his fame, he understood the repercussions for a community after the celebrity savior jets home. “I don’t socialize with the top dogs of society after a dance or concert,” he said in a 1964 profile inArmstrong chose his battles carefully.
Brothers also convincingly dismisses the idea that Armstrong was a purely instinctive, improvisational artist, a lucky savant whom fortune favored with a cornet. In recently discovered copyrighted music for “Cornet Chop Suey,” which contains an early gem of a solo registered in 1924, but not recorded until 1926, Brothers shows that Armstrong was, in fact, an intellectual musician who composed his breakthrough solos.
“That he was not interested in cultural assimilation is an indication of psychological security and confidence,” Brothers writes in “Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans.” “It may also be taken as a political stance. To insist on the value of vernacular culture and to reject assimilation was not an idle position to take. There were considerable ideological pressures working in the other direction.”
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