SATCHMO BETTER BLUES

Armstrong, more than anyone else, coaxed it along. Of his popularity and influence, there is no doubt: He is beloved on every continent, and the effects of his career are ubiquitous. The voice? It is, indeed, one of the most familiar sounds on earth: raspy, sunlit, unfailingly musical. Armstrong has been dead for over 25 years, yet the record stores still brim with his cuts, from the 1920s and his group “The Hot Five” to the 1960s and “What a Wonderful World.” Many today are apt to think of him as the sweet, avuncular fellow of this later period, but, in his salad days, Armstrong was the baddest, hippest, most shocking “cat” around (and it was he who placed “cat” in the national vocabulary, along with dozens of other swing terms and phrases — “swing,” for another).

Before Armstrong, jazz was largely a parochial affair. But he plucked it from the brothels, dope dens, and honky-tonks of New Orleans and turned it loose. “No one had ever heard anything like it,” Duke Ellington said, “and his impact cannot be put into words.” His playing reflected his personality exactly. Notes poured from him naturally and easily, as elements of his conversation (which is how he thought of them). He played the cornet like he sang, and he sang like he played the cornet. He was not the most virtuosic of hornmen — he missed notes liberally, he often blared, and his upper register was terribly pinched — but he had enough technical dazzle to make heads spin. He could milk every last ounce of pleasure from a song, and he always imparted his meaning and spirit to the players around him. And no one — but no one — got a bigger kick out of his act than he himself did: In a recording of “Lazy River,” he can be heard to exclaim, after a particularly successful solo, “Oh, you dog, you riffin’ tonight!”

His blues were both joyous and mournful. His improvisations, though not lacking in sophistication, were comprehensible and uncluttered. He may rightly be called the originator — certainly the popularizer — of “scat,” the mode of singing in which nonsense syllables are substituted for words. When he recorded “Heebie Jeebies” in 1926, he had all of Chicago jumping to it, as men greeted one another on the streets with Armstrong’s newly taught ” jive” (“jive” being another of the words he brought from New Orleans). He had the gift of taking something bound to a peculiar place and time — “I’ll Be Glad When You Dead, You Rascal, You,” for example — and universalizing it. One hesitates to say it, but he had extraordinary rhythm, never losing the thread of a piece, even — no, especially — when sustaining a note high above the ruckus.

To his humor and invention, there was no end. In a 1928 recording of “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” he interpolates a bracing quotation from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (then a relatively new work). To open “Cornet Chop Suey,” one of his own compositions, he sounds an elaborate bugle call. He managed to breathe life into even the weakest of songs: Could any other performer possibly bring off “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South”? About a certain Armstrong gimmick, the critic Irving Kolodin wrote, “It’s mad, it’s meaningless, it’s hokum of the first order, but the effect is electrifying.” Next to King Louis, all others were “like so many Salvation Army cornetists.”

So, his playing could hardly be better known. But his personal story, by comparison, is obscure. Why this should be is a mystery. His life — pulsing with exploits, struggle, and originality — fairly cries out for attention. Ralph Ellison once wrote to a friend, “Shakespeare invented Caliban. Who the hell dreamed up Louis?” To the historian, playwright, poet, and filmmaker, there is no shortage of material.

Armstrong was born to the 15-year-old daughter of former slaves. He grew up in the notorious Storyville section of New Orleans amid prostitutes, killers, and thieves. He worked for a time as a pimp — like practically every other male he knew — and took a hooker as the first of his four wives. At 16, he adopted a son, the infant of a family friend who died in childbirth.

His appetite — for women, food, marijuana, and, queerly, laxatives — was gargantuan. He so loved marijuana — which he smoked every day for 40 years — that he planned to title an installment of his autobiography Gage, one of his pet names for the drug. (His manager talked him out of it.) His faith in a particular laxative was so strong that he all but dedicated the final years of his life to evangelizing about it, much to the dismay and embarrassment of those close to him. He chronicled his life obsessively, jotting down observations and reminiscences at every opportunity. He bought his first typewriter in 1922 — so as to send long, detailed letters back home to New Orleans — and he never ceased to type until his death in 1971.

In short, it would seem impossible to write a dull book about him. And Laurence Bergreen biographer previously of Al Capone, Irving Berlin, and James Agee — has not. His new life of Armstrong is unsparingly researched and sparklingly realized. Ralph Ellison was right: It is hard to imagine who dreamed up this character. Shakespeare might have rejected him on grounds of incredibility.

As Armstrong told it — and always understood it — he was born on the Fourth of July, 1900. So did he link himself to the American Century and its sound. (He called the first chapter of his 1952 autobiography “Jazz and I Get Born Together.”) But his actual birth date, sadly, was the more prosaic August 4, 1901. His father abandoned him immediately, and his mother went off to hustle, leaving him with his grandmother. Occasionally, he was taken to a Baptist church, where, as he would remember, “I acquired my singing tactics.” His formal education was almost nil, his prospects frightfully bleak.

At 6, Louis caught one of the most important of his life’s many breaks: He was befriended by an immigrant Jewish family, the Karnoffskys, who were junk peddlers. They fed him, encouraged him, and took him on their daily rounds. In time, Louis paid a dime for a tin horn, with which he attracted customers to the Karnoffsky wagon. He would blow on it anything he could think of, anything he heard. It proved, he would recall, “a great asset,” both in business and in music. Eventually, one of the Karnoffsky brothers found for him a battered old cornet in a pawnshop. It was Louis’s first proper instrument, and he always remembered it with enormous fondness and gratitude.

From the Karnoffskys, he drew many significant social lessons as well, lessons to which he would return again and again, particularly in his twilight years, when he examined his life and his philosophical gleanings intensely. He felt a kinship with the Karnoffskys, who, like their black neighbors, labored against discrimination and abuse. He marveled at their perseverance and thrift. He would write, “Many kids suffered with hungers because their fathers could have done some work for a change. No, they would not do that. It would be too much like right. They’d rather lazy around and gamble.” But the Jews, he noticed, “always managed to put away their nickels and dimes.” “If it wasn’t for the nice Jewish people,” he avowed, “we would have starved many a time. I will love the Jewish people all of my life.”

Meantime, jazz was growing out of its swaddling clothes, and Louis was mesmerized by it, absorbing its cadences in, among other haunts, the infamous “Funky Butt Hall.” Joseph “King” Oliver reigned supreme, and he was Louis’s idol and role model. The mature Armstrong would proclaim that Oliver was “the baddest sombitch in Storyville on cornet — B’lieve that.” Louis was also watching the preachers, criminals, and supernaturalists. He was starting to develop his own musical language, built on the city’s myriad strains. His delight in wordplay — puns, jokes, asides — was perpetual. Where did scat come from? The story is told that Armstrong began to scat when the music fell from his stand and he was forced to abandon the words. But this, though charming, is untrue: Scat came from the minstrels, comedians, and voodoo artists. It had another source, as well: Armstrong once confided to Cab Calloway that he had been influenced by the Jews he heard at prayer. He never mentioned this publicly, however, fearing to give offense.

By the age of 11, Louis had seen more of the wicked world than most people would in several lifetimes. Yet he had barely begun. One night, he was making tough in the streets with his pals and fired off a gun. He was — fortunately — nabbed by the police and sentenced to the “Colored Waif’s Home,” where he thrilled to the discipline and instruction he received. He immediately set his sights on the bugler’s post, and won it. Within a year, he had become leader of the Home’s band. The music director later recollected that his young charge “could sing real well, even though his voice was coarse [then, too]. I’d play the horn and he’d dance, then I’d put down my horn and he’d pick it up and start playing it.” Laurence Bergreen notes that if Louis had been sent to an adult jail, instead of to the Waif’s Home, “the outcome of his entire life might have been drastically different.” Armstrong always spoke reverently about the Home and its rescuing taskmasters, and he took pride in visiting it after he had become the country’s most celebrated musician.

Louis’s musical education proceeded in fits and spurts. He somehow laid his hands on the operatic 78s of the period — Enrico Caruso, Amelita Galli-Curci, John McCormack — and he listened to them repeatedly. He learned to read a little music when he was booked to play with the Fate Marable band on the Dixie Belle, a Mississippi riverboat. The “reading orchestras” had always been disdained as stiff and effete by the Storyville bordello-players (some of whom could, in fact, read music, though they kept this guilty secret to themselves). But Louis perceived that reading would enhance, rather than stifle, his playing: “I wanted to do more than fake the music all the time,” he later explained, “because there is more to music than just style.”

He stayed with the Marable group, up and down the river, for two years, entertaining the boat’s white patrons, entering towns that had seldom seen black people, encountering brute racism all over. In Davenport, Iowa, he met the 17-year-old Bix Beiderbecke, who became a disciple and fast friend. At St. Louis — a redoubt of ragtime — the New Orleans players were introduced as ” honored guests from a town where they even have jazz with their breakfast.” The experience that Louis gained from this tenure was invaluable, but he chafed at conformity, desiring to lead an ensemble, rather than merely blend with one.

Then in 1922, he received the most fabled telegram in the history of jazz: King Oliver, who had left New Orleans for glory in Chicago, was asking Louis to join him — had “sent for me,” as Armstrong would always put it. Before parting, Louis received a piece of advice from a bouncer friend, Slippers: ” When you go up north, Dipper [one of Louis’s innumerable nicknames], be sure and get yourself a white man that will put his hand on your shoulder and say, ‘This is my n—er.'” Slippers, Armstrong later observed, “was a crude sonofabitch, but he loved me and my music.” And Armstrong, even in the fullness of his stardom, clung to the advice unyieldingly.

The white men who controlled King Oliver and every other black musician were mobsters, chief among them Al Capone, whom Louis would describe as “a nice little cute fat boy — young — like some professor who had just come out of college to teach or something.” Armstrong was never free of gangsters – – not even abroad — and he accommodated himself to them, submitting to their tyranny for the protection they might afford.

As Oliver’s apprentice, Louis refined his technique, burnished his distinctive musicality, and in due course surpassed his mentor, whose chops – – after years of overwork and tobaccochewing — were wearing thin. He became acquainted with the most accomplished entertainers of the day, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, whose work he analyzed and copied. He also met the pianist Lil Hardin — “The Hot Miss Lil,” as she was billed — and she became his collaborator and second wife. In April 1923, Louis waxed the first of his thousand-plus records, with Oliver and the “Creole Jazz Band” (which, of course, contained not a single Creole). The company was Gennett, its location Richmond, Indiana, a Klan bastion at the time, where the group could not spend the night.

Louis’s reputation quickly reached New York, and he was again “sent for,” this time by Fletcher Henderson, who held sway at the Roseland Ballroom. So did “Little Louis” from New Orleans — “Dippermouth,” “Gate,” “Satchelmouth,” “Pops,” “Papa Dip” (only white people ever called him “Louie”) — join the Harlem Renaissance, in 1925. The Henderson band, too, was a “reading orchestra,” and Louis had yet to achieve complete proficiency. In an early rehearsal, he roared right through a marking that read pp (meaning pianissimo, or “very soft”). Asked what he was doing, he responded, “I thought it meant ‘pound plenty.'”

He “put the heat to the beat” at the Cotton Club, and was obliged to dance to the tune of Dutch Schultz, the vile mobster whom Bergreen describes as “a one-man crime wave.” Before long, Armstrong was addicted to his constant companion, marijuana, which he called “an assistant, a friend, a nice cheap drunk.” “Very good for asthma,” he remarked, “relaxes your nerves.” Besides which, “I was never born to be a square about anything, no matter what.” The weed took a toll, however, and he was never quite as sharp under it as he supposed. His earliest recordings — pre-dope — are, in most cases, clearly superior to his later ones.

He also ate prodigiously, all the while purging himself with what his mother had called a “physic.” (She had adhered to a homemade recipe, which included “pepper grass” gathered down by the railroad tracks.) Armstrong’s weight fluctuated wildly throughout his adult life, and he pressed his theories about food and hygiene on everyone he met. He enjoyed signing his letters, “Red Beans and Ricely Yours,” in honor of his favorite dish and his hometown’s staple. He passed out cellophane packets of his preferred laxative, “Swiss Kriss,” to one and all — not excluding heads of state and other dignitaries — and, most bizarrely, he had cards printed up that pictured him seated on a toilet, as though glimpsed through a keyhole, and that bore the legend “SATCHMO-SLOGAN (Leave It All Behind Ya).”

The generation of black musicians that succeeded Armstrong — to whom it owed more than it ever knew or acknowledged — had no patience for his antics and long-suffering warmth, nor for his New Orleans-style jazz, which had left the avant-garde for the semi-historical. The bebop crowd regarded him as an embarrassing throwback, shucking and smiling and waving his hands. Miles Davis complained of his elder’s “plantation image.” For his part, Armstrong had equally little use for the boppers, with “that out-of-the-world music, that pipe-dream music, that whole modern malice.” “You get all them weird chords,” he snorted, “which don’t mean nothing, and first people get curious about it just because it’s new, but they get tired of it because it’s really no good and you got no melody to remember, no beat to dance to.” They might scorn him as a shuffling minstrel, but the music they produced — the flatted- fifth miasma — repelled him: “Personally,” he told an interviewer in 1948, ” I wouldn’t play that horn if I played a hundred years. You don’t have to worry about me stealing those riffs.” Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and the rest ” play one note, and nobody knows if it’s the right note or just one of them weird things where you can always make like that was just the note you were trying to hit.”

Armstrong was no radical, but neither was he a racial pushover, and he broke his fair share of barriers (as the first black person to host a national radio program, for example). He liked to point to his instrument and say, “You see that horn? That horn ain’t prejudiced. And neither am I. A note’s a note.” Bergreen writes that, as late as 1960 — in Connecticut, of all places — Armstrong was refused the use of a restroom. A photographer accompanying him recounted, “I will never forget the look on Louis’s face. Hero that he was, world-famous, a favorite to millions of people, America’s most identifiable entertainer, and yet excluded in the most humiliating fashion from a common convenience.”

As Bergreen understands, “The grin was so endearing, and the growl so comforting, that it is easy to overlook Armstrong’s essential subversiveness. Although he seemed to belong wholly to the mainstream, his principal allegiances were to the underground of American existence, from which he had emerged.”

In his final incarnation, as “Ambassador Satch,” Armstrong made goodwill tours for the State Department, received tumultuously in places as dissimilar as Denmark and Ghana. But in 1957, after seeing on television the harassment of black schoolchildren in Little Rock, he canceled a tour, declaring, “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.” He dismissed Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as an “uneducated plow boy.” When President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops, he telegrammed the White House: “If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy.”

Laurence Bergreen has written an enthralling book. At points, it is touched with magic, as it describes, for example, the sound of Fate Marable’s calliope, “amid the quiet,” reverberating “for miles around, the music reflecting off the surface of the water as it flowed around the riverboat.” Bergreen is especially deft at evoking old New Orleans: For a brief history of this least American of American cities, one could do worse than the 10 or so pages at the beginning of Louis Armstrong. He weaves in and out of stories nicely, interspersing social history and jazz commentary, making the most of his subject’s voluminous scribblings. He tells the grand tales almost by accident, pausing briefly to note that Bix Beiderbecke and Babe Ruth were friends and brother guzzlers: “The slugger was so big and Bix’s apartment so small that Ruth took the doors off the hinges so that he could pass from one room to another. These two dying embers of the Jazz Age endlessly drank and talked about music and baseball.”

His book is harmed, just slightly, by a tendency to hyperbole, the itch to overreach: “There was power and even an edge of anger to [Armstrong’s] laughter. It was a cosmic shout of defiance.” “In the end, it was Louis’s animating spirit of joy, as much as his music, that was responsible for his transforming vision.” Bergreen has Armstrong “at the peak of his powers” one too many times. Some of the editing is clumsy: Armstrong exhibits ” uncharacteristic choler” in one paragraph and succumbs to “a flash of rare bitterness” in the next.

But this biography will be devoured by all who pick it up. It is full of the life it describes. Said Armstrong, “My whole life has been happiness. Through all my misfortunes, I did not plan anything. Life was there for me, and I accepted it. And life, whatever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.” And he meant it.

Jay Nordlinger, associate editor and music critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, last wrote about the late Ben Hogan.