Archives for December 2, 2009

A coast-to-coast reminder: I’ll be appearing today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation to talk about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. My part of the show starts at three p.m. on the East Coast and noon on the West Coast. Turn your radio on, or listen at your leisure via streaming audio by clicking on the link.
While you’re waiting for me to go live, you can read the third installment of Marc Myers’ five-part interview about Pops by going here.

Regular readers of this blog may recall what I wrote about the death last year of Dick Sudhalter, a great jazz historian who was also one of my closest friends. Dick’s wise counsel was invaluable to me in the early stages of writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Alas, a disease of the nervous system had robbed him of the ability to speak or write by the time I’d finished the first draft of Pops, and so he was unable to give me any further comments on the book. He did read the manuscript, though, and managed to express his pleasure with the results.
Dorothy Kellogg, Dick’s beloved companion, has now sent me a snapshot in which he can be seen reading the final draft of Pops. How I wish he’d lived to see this joyous day.

Here are excerpts from some of my favorite Amazon customer reviews of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:
• “Given the subject and the author, this biography is self-recommending for its exploration of Armstrong’s seminal role and achievements in the history of jazz.”
• “Terry Teachout, a former jazz musician who played bass professionally for almost a decade, has set out in this biography to rescue probably the most misunderstood figure in popular music–and has succeeded splendidly.”
• “In examining Armstrong’s life, Teachout brings to bear his skills as detective and storyteller. He succeeds in depicting a very human yet enormously gifted performer, a talented musician who was also a superb entertainer. His book easily supersedes earlier biographies of Armstrong in its thoroughness and readability…”
• “I felt as never before that I was getting an entire picture of Louis Armstrong, both as a musician and as a man.”
• “If you know a lot about Armstrong this book will deepen and expand your knowledge. And if you don’t know much about him it’s an absolute ‘must read.'”
• “I think Teachout does a great job of presenting various controversies. His opinion is usually clear, but he doesn’t stack the deck in any obtrusive way….It’s also commendable that Teachout refrains from using the book as an explicit platform for his debates with people like [Wynton] Marsalis and [Stanley] Crouch on the proper place of white musicians in jazz history. Teachout gives musicians like Beiderbecke, Teagarden, and Whiteman what he feels is their appropriate place in Armstrong’s story without ever referring to these debates. These are serious disagreements and I assume that they will continue, but Pops will be part of the evidence, not a part of the argument.”
• “The book is admirably serious for a popular biography, but even more important, it’s always fun! Armstrong was a true character and his personality shines through the stories and memories here.”
• “As a trumpet player, I was looking forward to this book on one of the true masters of not only the trumpet , but also someone who was instrumental in the development of jazz itself. The book did not let me down. I was so enthralled by the writer’s style and wealth of information that I read the book in one sitting…”
And here, in the interest of fairness and balance, is the only negative customer review of Pops to be posted so far:
• “While adequate, this new biography of Louis Armstrong adds little to the existing literature on this icon of jazz and entertainment. It fails to provide a good historical context for Mr. Armstrong’s life and at times one comes away with the distinct feeling that Mr. Teachout has no empathy for either his subject or his music. He seems to take greater delight in debunking the intellectual perspective of the critics of Mr. Armstrong’s ‘sell out’ in moving from the Hot Five and Hot Seven to the big bands than involving the reader in the legand [sic] and his music. This adds very little to Mr. Armstrong’s autobiography.”
You can’t win ’em all!

To celebrate the publication this week of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, I’ll be posting Armstrong videos every day.
In today’s video, filmed at the Amsterdam Concergebouw in 1959, Armstrong and the All Stars perform “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” the trumpeter’s theme song:

“My whole life has been happiness. Through all of the misfortunes, etc, I did not plan anything. Life was there for me and I accepted it. And life, what ever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.”
Louis Armstrong (quoted in Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong)