Louis Armstrong died fifty years ago today at his home in Queens. I have spent much of the last decade and a half thinking and writing about Armstrong—first in a biography, Pops, then in a play, Satchmo at the Waldorf—and I expect I’ve said by now what I have to say about his beautiful, blessed life and work. So instead of trying to find a new way to sum up my feelings, I’ll simply reprint a passage from the last chapter of Pops. I hope you enjoy it.
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Armstrong’s own unpublished and uncollected writings found their way into print with the publication in 1999 of Joshua Berrett’s Louis Armstrong Companion and Thomas Brothers’ Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings. These books showed him as he was, not as others wished or imagined him to be, and the bluntness with which he spoke his mind from beyond the grave gave the lie to a half-century of abuse that Ossie Davis, who acted opposite him in A Man Called Adam, summed up in a reminiscence of their brief acquaintance: “Most of the fellows I grew up with, myself included, we used to laugh at Louis Armstrong. We knew he was good, but that didn’t save him from our malice and our ridicule. Everywhere we’d look, there’d be Louis—sweat popping, eyes bugging, mouth wide open, grinning, oh my Lord, from ear to ear….mopping his brow, ducking his head, doing his thing for the white man.” Davis changed his mind after meeting Armstrong, concluding that his horn was “where Louis kept his manhood hid all those years…enough for him…enough for all of us.” But if he had ever felt the need to hide it, he did so in plain sight, and the admiring musicians who knew him best never doubted that he was not just a man but a miracle. Some, like Teddy Wilson, emphasized his artistry: “I don’t think there has been a musician since Armstrong who had all the factors in balance, all the factors equally developed. Such a balance was the essential thing about Beethoven, I think, and Armstrong, like Beethoven, had this high development of balance. Lyricism. Delicacy. Emotional outburst. Rhythm. Complete mastery of his horn.” Others spoke of his humanity. “As I watched him and talked with him, I felt he was the most natural man,” the pianist Jaki Byard said. “Playing, talking, singing, he was so perfectly natural the tears came to my eyes.” But all agreed on his greatness, and marveled that such a being had walked the earth.
Today we live in a time far removed from his, and it is harder than ever before to bridge the gap and see him clearly. Some now judge him by the standards of a world he never knew, and find him wanting. “The relentlessly beaming smile, the handkerchief dabbing away the sweat, the reflexive bowing, the exaggerated humility and graciousness—all this signaled that he would not breach the manners of segregation, the propriety that required him to be both cheerful and less than fully human,” one recent commentator has written. But that broad smile was no mere game face, donned to please the paying customers: it told the truth about the man who wore it. In return for his unswerving dedication to his art, he knew true happiness, and shared it unstintingly with his fellow men, who responded in kind. Richard Brookhiser tells of how, when doing battle with cancer, he was unable to listen to any music other than the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong: “Bach said everything is in its place; Armstrong said the sun comes shining through.” It was a response that Armstrong would have appreciated. Not long before he died, he wrote to a friend that “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.”
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Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform “On the Sunny Side of the Street” on TV in 1958. This is my favorite film clip of Armstrong in performance:
10. The moment toward the end of the overture to “Gypsy” when the first trumpet in the pit band starts screaming on the strip music. Everybody in the audience on opening night in 1959 must have known right then that the show was going to be a hit….
“Citizens by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review webcasts of two new filmed plays by Reginald Edmund and Alan Ayckbourn. Here’s an excerpt.
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Now that live theatrical performances in the U.S. are resuming, what will happen to webcast theater? At first it was purely a stopgap for onstage productions, but several regional companies have started to stream technically sophisticated shows filmed not in empty theaters but on location…
Might it be that we are seeing the coming of a new genre—one for which the phrase “hybrid theater” has started to be used—that will become a standard part of production alongside conventionally staged shows? Michael Halberstam, the artistic director of Glencoe’s Writers Theatre, America’s foremost regional company, thinks so, arguing that hybrid shows “presage a shift in content, form and delivery.” As if to make his point, Writers Theatre is now streaming Reginald Edmund’s “Ride Share,” a premiere produced in collaboration with Black Lives, Black Words International Project….
Marcus (Kamal Angelo Bolden) is a Chicago executive who has been laid off from his “cush job” with “a joke of a severance package” and no immediate prospects for doing better. To make ends meet, he becomes a ride-share driver who works punishing hours (four to ten a.m., then seven p.m. to two a.m.) and sees “the best and the worst” in the people he drives all over the city….
Alan Ayckbourn’s plays are usually written for his own Stephen Joseph Theatre, a 404-seat theater-in-the-round auditorium in Yorkshire. They rarely reach New York—it’s been nine years since his last Broadway production—and the loss is ours, for he is a kind of English Chekhov who is also an incomparably fine director of his own serious comedies of middle-class melancholy. Hence I’m thrilled to report that a live performance of his staging of “The Girl Next Door,” his 85th and latest play, was filmed earlier this month at the Stephen Joseph Theatre and can be viewed online through Sunday. Ayckbourn buffs will naturally jump at the chance to view it, but “The Girl Next Door” is also an ideal introduction to the playwright and his work….
