Louis Armstrong Mosaic planned with his 1935-1946 Decca sides

[AllenLowe]

thank you Larry - this is happening a bit more than I like here - I am being misquoted and than attacked for the mis-quote -

but I think we have both made our points sufficiently -

[ghost of miles]

I'll get worried only if Allen says something really out there--like claiming, oh, say, that he knows what Buddy Bolden sounded like. Now if that happens, then we're in serious need of an intervention!

[Christiern]

I only have that Bolden info second hand, from Wynton.

[AllenLowe]

well, sometimes late at night, after I've smoked enough tea, taken enough acid, shot enough horse, scarfed down a little meth and chased it all with a nice bottle of muscatel, I, too, speak with Mr. Bolden - unfortunately I can never remember the next morning what the hell he said -

[Christiern]

I know what you mean, it's mostly mumbo gumbo!

[JSngry]

Is he horizontal or vertical while he's speaking?

It matters!

[John L]

Some interesting thoughts, but I don't know. Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson may sound less minstrelsy-like on record than Louis Armstrong often did, but that was not necessarily true of their live shows. Charley Patton had such a reputation for clowning that even Son House became dismissive of him for that reason. Tommy Johnson had a similar reputation. Patton, Johnson, and Armstrong offered very different flavors of the blues, but I don't see any reason to consider the former more authentic than the latter.

Neither I nor Allen, I believe, is saying "more authentic," not at all -- just different in flavor, as you say, and also perhaps different in recipes/ingredients and cooking methods. And those differences are potentially interesting.

Also, minstrelsy and clowning are not necessarily the same thing.

Thanks, Larry. I guess that I misunderstood your post.

The difference between ministrelsy and clowning is an interesting question. I sometimes wonder to the degree that Armstrong's ministrelsy-type clowning was a conscious play at minstrelsy, as opposed to just natural clowning from somebody who grew up surrounded by the tradition of ministrelsy. Maybe the difference is not that important, but it does appear to concern the question of the difference between clowning and ministrelsy. We can only imagine what Patton's clowning might have been like, but I see no reason to assume that it was completely detached from minstrelsy-type humor. Of course, Armstrong's routines were more consciously designed for mixed race or white audiences, which is maybe where the most important difference lies.

Edited November 24, 2008 by John L

[AllenLowe]

"Is he horizontal or vertical while he's speaking?"

he's in the bucket -

[AllenLowe]

"I sometimes wonder to the degree that Armstrong's ministrelsy-type clowning was a conscious play at minstrelsy, as opposed to just natural clowning from somebody who grew up surrounded by the tradition of ministrelsy...Of course, Armstrong's routines were more consciously designed for mixed race or white audiences, which is maybe where the most important difference lies"

that last part is very, very, wrong - race had nothing to do with it - in my opinion it was a very hip appropriation of a persona that was part put on, part insider reference/humor, ingenious in that it worked for both "insiders" and for general audiences of both races, a very brilliant adaptation of the BLACK minstrel/medicine show/vaudeville personality - not unlike Dizzy Gillespie, if in a much different way.

but it is a grave mistake to assume that Armstrong was dumbing down for white audiences; the truth is, after everything else, he was a real mensch who, in addition to having these deep theatrical roots, was a nice guy who did not want to leave anyone behind, who wanted to reach as broad an audience as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

Edited November 24, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Christiern]

Louis was the consummate performer. What he did with his face in front of an audience or camera was Chaplin's derby, Groucho's bopping eyebrows, Jack Benny's tilted head stance, etc. In short: show business. It was also, to some degree, a part of his personality. I don't at all liken it to Mantan Morland's fright face, which was decidedly a race-based device, but it made him a very rich man.

[John L]

"I sometimes wonder to the degree that Armstrong's ministrelsy-type clowning was a conscious play at minstrelsy, as opposed to just natural clowning from somebody who grew up surrounded by the tradition of ministrelsy...Of course, Armstrong's routines were more consciously designed for mixed race or white audiences, which is maybe where the most important difference lies"

that last part is very, very, wrong - race had nothing to do with it - in my opinion it was a very hip appropriation of a persona that was part put on, part insider reference/humor, ingenious in that it worked for both "insiders" and for general audiences of both races, a very brilliant adaptation of the BLACK minstrel/medicine show/vaudeville personality - not unlike Dizzy Gillespie, if in a much different way.

but it is a grave mistake to assume that Armstrong was dumbing down for white audiences; the truth is, after everything else, he was a real mensch who, in addition to having these deep theatrical roots, was a nice guy who did not want to leave anyone behind, who wanted to reach as broad an audience as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

Yes, Armstrong did try to reach as broad an audience as possible, including the greater white audience, and I do think that he made adjustments in his routine with that goal. That is what I had in mind, and that was in response to possible differences in the clowning routines of Armstrong and (maybe) somebody like Charlie Patton. I didn't mean to imply that it was a dumbing down, although I do personally wish that Armstrong from the early 30s on would have devoted more energy and concentration to making great art relative to what he spent every night on the world ambassador entertainment routines. I think that he could have achieved even more.

[Christiern]

Yes, Armstrong did try to reach as broad an audience as possible, including the greater white audience, and I do think that he made adjustments in his routine with that goal.

If you are saying that Louis' demeanor was different when the audience was non-white, you are very wrong. I also don't for a minute believe that he worked on a "routine". Louis was just being Louis.

That is what I had in mind, and that was in response to possible differences in the clowning routines of Armstrong and (maybe) somebody like Charlie Patton.

The difference is easily explained: Armstrong ad Patton were two different people, each with his own personality.

I didn't mean to imply that it was a dumbing down, although I do personally wish that Armstrong from the early 30s on would have devoted more energy and concentration to making great art relative to what he spent every night on the world ambassador entertainment routines. I think that he could have achieved even more.

Louis did not expend energy nor did he concentrate on working up "routines". Like I said, Louis was Louis, a man of great talent—as a musician and entertainer—one might argue that he wasted some of it on inferior (but popular) material, and wish that he had concentrated more on jazz, but I think that is selfish. Artists aim to please audiences and when they can do so while at the same time creating as much great music as Louis did, we should be thankful for the legacy.

[JSngry]

Why don't we all catch Pops' next gig and decide for ourselves?

[paul secor]

Think I'll stop reading this thread and listen to some Louis.

[AllenLowe]

Louis who?

but seriously, if I may, I would like to post something from my upcoming (2010) history of rock and roll:(please pardon some of the formatting quirks as I transfer it from a word file)

ELVIS AND ARMSTRONG

By now it’s a given that Louis Armstrong created something of a revolution in American popular music, changing the way we, as a musical country, hear rhythm in its very direct relationship to both composed and extemporized melody. Less well understood, by not just pop people but by the jazz world itself, is how closely connected Armstrong was to the spirit of not just rock and roll but to one of rock’s founders, the late, lamented King of rock and roll, Elvis Presley.

The unfortunate truth is that, in the mainstream, post-modern jazz world, there is general agreement on two things: 1) Louis Armstrong is a God, an icon of icons who stands (or, maybe, sits) at the summit overlooking the kingdom of music; and 2) Elvis Presley is (was) a peanut butter and banana sandwich eating gag, a hip-swiveling - but not hip - ephemeral teen fad, a running joke, really, among those who value quality in music. To jazz people he’s also much more, and much worse, because he almost single-handedly brought down the House of Good Music, he brought, to carry the metaphor just a little further, the money lenders into the temple of jazz and forever contaminated the commercially inter-active world of music. After his arrival, according to this line of reasoning, immaturity was popular music’s continual frame of reference, pandering to the lowest or simplest common denominator.

If we are to believe the jazz press from the 1950s to the present, Elvis Presley’s greatest crime was to ensure the growing and continued commercial hegemony of rock and roll, a music that has, particularly since his recorded debut in 1954, been the dominant strain of American pop. Before Elvis there was Swing and bop and there was pop balladry, not to mention rhythm and blues, a respectable African American form if, to the jazz way of thinking, sometimes a bit repetitious and frivolous. There was also, and most important of all, Louis Armstrong, who represented the golden age of American jazz and American popular music, with the shining beauty of his golden horn and the great transformative power of his singing voice. After Elvis there was only, essentially and unfortunately, Elvis, and than, later, the Beatles; and though Louis carried on past the fall of the House of Good Music, jazz after Elvis was never the same, its audience share fatally reduced to permanent marginality. (And if Elvis was jazz’s 1950s whipping boy, the Beatles served this purpose for the 1960s. Read, for example, the jazz drummer Arthur Taylor’s book of interviews with other jazz musicians, Notes and Tones. One of its most important and recurring themes is how the Beatles, with their masturbatory three chord abominations, completed the youth-dominated ruination of the business.)

Now it’s true that not everyone in jazz feels this way; many of today’s young retro modernists (thinking of the likes of Bill Frisell, Don Byron, Brandon Ross, Marc Ribot, Wayne Horvitz, and John Zorn), are of the generation that grew up with rock and roll as their main point of reference, and they understand and respect not only rock but country music. But someone like Wynton Marsalis has made sure to re-enforce at every turn, among his followers, the point that nearly anything short of jazz is just that, short of jazz, historically transient and shallow, fun to listen to, perhaps, but just the kind of passing fancy that a mature person outgrows. Pop, rock, and country music, in this view, instead of being part of a great continuum which does, indeed, also encompass jazz, are historical aberrations, unfortunate musical digressions and cultural dead ends. They are the illegitimate, misguided children of the American vernacular, worth a quick historical glance, perhaps, and even, on occasion, some sociological consideration, but never a real or serious listen. Louis Armstrong is the source of all virtue, we are told, because he is not just jazz, he is American music, hillbillies, big-haired rockabillies, and makeout-obsessed teenyboppers be damned.

Now just what is wrong with this worldview?

A lot of things are wrong, and they’re not all the fault of jazz critics and musicians. The world of rock and roll has its share of blind spots as well, many of its writers afflicted with historical tunnel vision. There is a pervasive sense in the literature of rock that every musical expression in the world is merely a function of rock and roll history, not to mention a belief (in academic circles) that convoluted notions of sociology will rescue the music, as though, lacking certain credentials, it desperately needs rescuing. Rock and roll music is rarely allowed to stand on its own in any purely musical sense; rock and roll journals load it up with glib and hopefully hip tie ins to lifestyles and trends, and academics, in need of peer justification, tend to weigh it down with jargon and incomprehensible phraseology, interminable tomes for which the operative buzz word is “contextualize.”

But it’s not only academics who fail to see the big picture in real-life terms. Most popular approaches to jazz history depict the deeply American character of that music. They tell us, with great accuracy, that the music called jazz could only have happened here, in a land of great ethnic and cultural convergence, of cataclysmic social stratification and bizarrely juxtaposed racial conflict. They fail to note, however, that not just jazz but things like country music and rock and roll are also distinctive creatures of the great socio-historic conflagration of modern times. And rising from the ashes we see not just Louis Armstrong but Elvis Presley who, in his way, was every bit as revolutionary.

The truth is, in the overall professional and musical picture, Louis Armstrong and Elvis Presley had much more in common than not. Both men emerged, in their earliest years, with musical styles that were inseparable from their socially undesirable and underground, working-class origins, and both worked hard, later on, having achieved great initial success, to find a middle ground reconciling their own personal, roots-laden instincts with real-world commercial considerations. And both came, not coincidentally, from the South, a region which has mid-wifed nearly all, if not all, of our popular music. And it is the South (not just New Orleans) that is the common denominator of not just early jazz but most other offshoots of the peculiar African-American genius for musical transformation, like ragtime, the blues, white hillbilly music, and rock and roll.

Our problem, however, if that we have difficulty reconciling our image of Southern social backwardness with the ingenious creations of its citizens, particularly the white ones. If Elvis was forever a hillbilly greenhorn, a country bumpkin in the minds of people who had a particular distaste for his music, well, than, Armstrong was regarded in much the same way when he first came to New York in the 1920s to play with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. Neither man, through professional thick and thin or the prerogatives of international fame, ever lost his basic country innocence or humility, though Presley was, of course, much more the tragically flawed hero. And there is no doubt that Presley, with his intuitive acceptance of a broad universe of music, and ability to absorb and integrate all kinds of musical styles from Tin Pan Alley to the blues to country music, grew and shed as many musical skins as Armstrong, who spent the 1950s in constant search of new musical sources and fresh musical angles (and who found them in ways surprisingly similar to Elvis). Each wanted to find as large an audience as possible, and neither felt, contrary to some critical speculation, that, in doing so, he had abandoned his musical principals in any way. As a matter of fact, just the opposite was true, the careers of each representing a fierce and unrelenting dedication to musically populist principles of the first order.

Both have been criticized in similar ways, for veering, musically, from the paths which first established their great reputations. Armstrong went from what seemed like purely jazz settings to a cushioned seat in front of ever-larger bands, singing songs that seemed more and more frivolous to some his more dedicated followers, in settings contaminated, to their way of thinking, by background choruses and a middle-of-the-road pop repertoire and sensibility. Little did they understand that all of this was less, for Armstrong, a matter of commercial concession than of self image; in his own eyes he was jazz’s ultimate everyman, the embodiment of the music’s deepest popular potential. There was no one he couldn’t reach with a song.

And so it was with Presley who, leaving the relative quiet of Memphis, Tennessee, where he made his first recordings, found himself in a much larger musical universe. Instead of running away from it he reached out to it, because it matched his own musical fantasies, of a world in which he was a rock singer, country musician, and pop crooner, all in one. With the assistance of assorted record producers and latter-day song pluggers, publishers who fervently wished to have a song associated with the new King of rock and roll, it was a fantasy he was allowed to live out.

In truth, both men were allowed, though the oddball courage of their own musical convictions, to live out a particular fantasy of American (and world) mega-stardom. They were able to do so because when it came to song both were simply fearless. Elvis sang country, gospel, rock and roll, soul music, inspirational ditties, pop ballads, and more. One of Armstrong’s most effecting post-1960s recorded performances was his rendition of the country staple Almost Persuaded, and it was no accident that he had recorded, in the 1950s, two Hank Williams songs, Cold Cold Heart and Your Cheatin’ Heart. Those are two things you are unlikely to hear Wynton Marsalis play in any Armstrong tributes, but they are beautifully done by Louis, who, ultimately, was even more adventurous than Presley. Which means that, maybe, those in the jazz world who have made such a fetish of Armstrong and his legacy are really right, if for some of the wrong reasons: he was, indeed, American music, but an American music that encompassed not just jazz and classic pop balladry, but the deep and broad, and sometimes dark, underbelly of American song.

Edited November 24, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Fer Urbina]

And to think that Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson recorded their album together in "The Allen Room"

I generally agree with your approach, Allen, but boy, are you a troublemaker!

F

[Hot Ptah]

I really love "Swing That Music," "Lyin' To Myself," "Jubilee," "Even'tide," "The Skeleton in the Closet," "My Sweet Hunk of Trash"--just off of the top of my head. There are more great songs from this era on Decca.

No opinion on whether they constitute great blues. I just know what I like. I like 'em.

[AllenLowe]

those are some of the best - when that stuff came out on a Decca LP, Dan Morgenstern's notes almost singlehandedly rehabilited that era of Armstrong's work -

[J.A.W.]

Beat me to it by a few hours! I spent time with Dan Morgenstern at Birdland last night and he told about the Mosaic set as "breaking news." He's doing the notes and told me that he just heard that he's going to have them done sooner than originally anticipated. Apparently, something (I don't know what) on Mosaic's future projects list fell through and now the Armstrong set is being moved up to possibly sometime next year.

I hope it wasn't the 1930s Ellington big-band set that fell through.

I've heard from good authority (JETman) that it was the Jamal that was NOT nixed but significantly delayed that freed up the spot for the Armstrong.

Scott Wenzel told me they hope to release the Jamal set by the end of 2009, but nothing's certain yet.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Louis who?

but seriously, if I may, I would like to post something from my upcoming (2010) history of rock and roll:(please pardon some of the formatting quirks as I transfer it from a word file)

ELVIS AND ARMSTRONG

By now it’s a given that Louis Armstrong created something of a revolution in American popular music, changing the way we, as a musical country, hear rhythm in its very direct relationship to both composed and extemporized melody. Less well understood, by not just pop people but by the jazz world itself, is how closely connected Armstrong was to the spirit of not just rock and roll but to one of rock’s founders, the late, lamented King of rock and roll, Elvis Presley.

The unfortunate truth is that, in the mainstream, post-modern jazz world, there is general agreement on two things: 1) Louis Armstrong is a God, an icon of icons who stands (or, maybe, sits) at the summit overlooking the kingdom of music; and 2) Elvis Presley is (was) a peanut butter and banana sandwich eating gag, a hip-swiveling - but not hip - ephemeral teen fad, a running joke, really, among those who value quality in music. To jazz people he’s also much more, and much worse, because he almost single-handedly brought down the House of Good Music, he brought, to carry the metaphor just a little further, the money lenders into the temple of jazz and forever contaminated the commercially inter-active world of music. After his arrival, according to this line of reasoning, immaturity was popular music’s continual frame of reference, pandering to the lowest or simplest common denominator.

If we are to believe the jazz press from the 1950s to the present, Elvis Presley’s greatest crime was to ensure the growing and continued commercial hegemony of rock and roll, a music that has, particularly since his recorded debut in 1954, been the dominant strain of American pop. Before Elvis there was Swing and bop and there was pop balladry, not to mention rhythm and blues, a respectable African American form if, to the jazz way of thinking, sometimes a bit repetitious and frivolous. There was also, and most important of all, Louis Armstrong, who represented the golden age of American jazz and American popular music, with the shining beauty of his golden horn and the great transformative power of his singing voice. After Elvis there was only, essentially and unfortunately, Elvis, and than, later, the Beatles; and though Louis carried on past the fall of the House of Good Music, jazz after Elvis was never the same, its audience share fatally reduced to permanent marginality. (And if Elvis was jazz’s 1950s whipping boy, the Beatles served this purpose for the 1960s. Read, for example, the jazz drummer Arthur Taylor’s book of interviews with other jazz musicians, Notes and Tones. One of its most important and recurring themes is how the Beatles, with their masturbatory three chord abominations, completed the youth-dominated ruination of the business.)

Now it’s true that not everyone in jazz feels this way; many of today’s young retro modernists (thinking of the likes of Bill Frisell, Don Byron, Brandon Ross, Marc Ribot, Wayne Horvitz, and John Zorn), are of the generation that grew up with rock and roll as their main point of reference, and they understand and respect not only rock but country music. But someone like Wynton Marsalis has made sure to re-enforce at every turn, among his followers, the point that nearly anything short of jazz is just that, short of jazz, historically transient and shallow, fun to listen to, perhaps, but just the kind of passing fancy that a mature person outgrows. Pop, rock, and country music, in this view, instead of being part of a great continuum which does, indeed, also encompass jazz, are historical aberrations, unfortunate musical digressions and cultural dead ends. They are the illegitimate, misguided children of the American vernacular, worth a quick historical glance, perhaps, and even, on occasion, some sociological consideration, but never a real or serious listen. Louis Armstrong is the source of all virtue, we are told, because he is not just jazz, he is American music, hillbillies, big-haired rockabillies, and makeout-obsessed teenyboppers be damned.

Now just what is wrong with this worldview?

A lot of things are wrong, and they’re not all the fault of jazz critics and musicians. The world of rock and roll has its share of blind spots as well, many of its writers afflicted with historical tunnel vision. There is a pervasive sense in the literature of rock that every musical expression in the world is merely a function of rock and roll history, not to mention a belief (in academic circles) that convoluted notions of sociology will rescue the music, as though, lacking certain credentials, it desperately needs rescuing. Rock and roll music is rarely allowed to stand on its own in any purely musical sense; rock and roll journals load it up with glib and hopefully hip tie ins to lifestyles and trends, and academics, in need of peer justification, tend to weigh it down with jargon and incomprehensible phraseology, interminable tomes for which the operative buzz word is “contextualize.”

But it’s not only academics who fail to see the big picture in real-life terms. Most popular approaches to jazz history depict the deeply American character of that music. They tell us, with great accuracy, that the music called jazz could only have happened here, in a land of great ethnic and cultural convergence, of cataclysmic social stratification and bizarrely juxtaposed racial conflict. They fail to note, however, that not just jazz but things like country music and rock and roll are also distinctive creatures of the great socio-historic conflagration of modern times. And rising from the ashes we see not just Louis Armstrong but Elvis Presley who, in his way, was every bit as revolutionary.

The truth is, in the overall professional and musical picture, Louis Armstrong and Elvis Presley had much more in common than not. Both men emerged, in their earliest years, with musical styles that were inseparable from their socially undesirable and underground, working-class origins, and both worked hard, later on, having achieved great initial success, to find a middle ground reconciling their own personal, roots-laden instincts with real-world commercial considerations. And both came, not coincidentally, from the South, a region which has mid-wifed nearly all, if not all, of our popular music. And it is the South (not just New Orleans) that is the common denominator of not just early jazz but most other offshoots of the peculiar African-American genius for musical transformation, like ragtime, the blues, white hillbilly music, and rock and roll.

Our problem, however, if that we have difficulty reconciling our image of Southern social backwardness with the ingenious creations of its citizens, particularly the white ones. If Elvis was forever a hillbilly greenhorn, a country bumpkin in the minds of people who had a particular distaste for his music, well, than, Armstrong was regarded in much the same way when he first came to New York in the 1920s to play with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. Neither man, through professional thick and thin or the prerogatives of international fame, ever lost his basic country innocence or humility, though Presley was, of course, much more the tragically flawed hero. And there is no doubt that Presley, with his intuitive acceptance of a broad universe of music, and ability to absorb and integrate all kinds of musical styles from Tin Pan Alley to the blues to country music, grew and shed as many musical skins as Armstrong, who spent the 1950s in constant search of new musical sources and fresh musical angles (and who found them in ways surprisingly similar to Elvis). Each wanted to find as large an audience as possible, and neither felt, contrary to some critical speculation, that, in doing so, he had abandoned his musical principals in any way. As a matter of fact, just the opposite was true, the careers of each representing a fierce and unrelenting dedication to musically populist principles of the first order.

Both have been criticized in similar ways, for veering, musically, from the paths which first established their great reputations. Armstrong went from what seemed like purely jazz settings to a cushioned seat in front of ever-larger bands, singing songs that seemed more and more frivolous to some his more dedicated followers, in settings contaminated, to their way of thinking, by background choruses and a middle-of-the-road pop repertoire and sensibility. Little did they understand that all of this was less, for Armstrong, a matter of commercial concession than of self image; in his own eyes he was jazz’s ultimate everyman, the embodiment of the music’s deepest popular potential. There was no one he couldn’t reach with a song.

And so it was with Presley who, leaving the relative quiet of Memphis, Tennessee, where he made his first recordings, found himself in a much larger musical universe. Instead of running away from it he reached out to it, because it matched his own musical fantasies, of a world in which he was a rock singer, country musician, and pop crooner, all in one. With the assistance of assorted record producers and latter-day song pluggers, publishers who fervently wished to have a song associated with the new King of rock and roll, it was a fantasy he was allowed to live out.

In truth, both men were allowed, though the oddball courage of their own musical convictions, to live out a particular fantasy of American (and world) mega-stardom. They were able to do so because when it came to song both were simply fearless. Elvis sang country, gospel, rock and roll, soul music, inspirational ditties, pop ballads, and more. One of Armstrong’s most effecting post-1960s recorded performances was his rendition of the country staple Almost Persuaded, and it was no accident that he had recorded, in the 1950s, two Hank Williams songs, Cold Cold Heart and Your Cheatin’ Heart. Those are two things you are unlikely to hear Wynton Marsalis play in any Armstrong tributes, but they are beautifully done by Louis, who, ultimately, was even more adventurous than Presley. Which means that, maybe, those in the jazz world who have made such a fetish of Armstrong and his legacy are really right, if for some of the wrong reasons: he was, indeed, American music, but an American music that encompassed not just jazz and classic pop balladry, but the deep and broad, and sometimes dark, underbelly of American song.

Interesting piece. When I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Ray Charles, Ray Charles".

MG

[John L]

Yes, Armstrong did try to reach as broad an audience as possible, including the greater white audience, and I do think that he made adjustments in his routine with that goal.

If you are saying that Louis' demeanor was different when the audience was non-white, you are very wrong. I also don't for a minute believe that he worked on a "routine". Louis was just being Louis.

I guess that what I am conjecturing is the following: if Louis' audiences had consisted primarily of people deeply interested and involved in black jazz, I think that he would have designed his show and much of his later career quite differently. It seems to me that Amstrong worked quite deliberately on reaching a very broad audience, including many people who had no real interest in jazz per se, or no awareness that jazz was something more than just casual entertainment. I am not saying that race was the key issue here, although I don't think that it can be ignored either.

I didn't mean to imply that it was a dumbing down, although I do personally wish that Armstrong from the early 30s on would have devoted more energy and concentration to making great art relative to what he spent every night on the world ambassador entertainment routines. I think that he could have achieved even more.

Louis did not expend energy nor did he concentrate on working up "routines". Like I said, Louis was Louis, a man of great talent—as a musician and entertainer—one might argue that he wasted some of it on inferior (but popular) material, and wish that he had concentrated more on jazz, but I think that is selfish. Artists aim to please audiences and when they can do so while at the same time creating as much great music as Louis did, we should be thankful for the legacy.

I certainly feel grateful every day for Amstrong's enormous contributions and legacy. High art and entertainment for broad audiences are not necessarily contradictory, and Armstrong himself is very good proof of that conjecture. Yet the latter can still sometimes lead to compromises in the former. Armstrong took the importance of his roll as an entertainer for broad audiences so seriously that (IMO) he was willing to make those kind of compromises. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. That is the choice that he made, and he was able to reach more people because he made it. It is only as a jazz fan that I feel a bit of regret that he could have spent his later years more productively in terms of creating art. I love a lot of his later recordings, but I can't help but feel that there could have been even better and more diverse ones. A genius like that of Armstrong's is extremely rare.

Edited November 25, 2008 by John L

[AllenLowe]

I certainly agree in many respects - I cited, in another thread, the story of Gil Evans being kicked out of Joe Glaser's office because there were, definitely, some intersting areas that were never explored. At that later point Armstrong could have done just about anything he wanted to do, and a Gil Evans collaboration might have been quite good - on the other hand, Armstrong DID make late recordings with Ellington. There are about 2 albums worth, one of which is as good as anything Louis did in the last 20 years of his life.

[Ricko]

[AllenLowe]

Rick - read my essay a few pages back - I know you're a busy guy, but I've said pretty much the same thing - I would also add that just because most of what he did may have been his own choice, doesn't mean it was the right choice - the All Star Bands are, I agree, much better than touted, but personally I can't listen to more than one recording of that stuff every few months, as it drags - much better were the band things on the musical autobiography.

Also, I'm willing to bet that one of the prime reasons he was on the road all the time wasn''t just love of audiences but that, in those days, well paid as he was, musicians' earning did not compare to current day, even adjusted for inflation -

Edited November 25, 2008 by AllenLowe

[John L]

Rick - read my essay a few pages back - I know you're a busy guy, but I've said pretty much the same thing - I would also add that just because most of what he did may have been his own choice, doesn't mean it was the right choice - the All Star Bands are, I agree, much better than touted, but personally I can't listen to more than one recording of that stuff every few months, as it drags - much better were the band things on the musical autobiography.

Also, I'm willing to bet that one of the prime reasons he was on the road all the time wasn''t just love of audiences but that, in those days, well paid as he was, musicians' earning did not compare to current day, even adjusted for inflation -

I agree. I think that the tremendous orchestral recordings that Armstrong made with Russ Garcia, along with the Autobiography, Ellington session, and duets with Ella, show just what tremendous heights Armstrong could still reach at that point in his career. The W.C. Handy and Fats Waller tributes are also top notch, of course. The recordings that the All Stars made for Decca were also good, but not as good (IMO) as other recordings that Armstrong could have been making at the time. The All Stars made consistently good music, but it did get to be a bit formulaic.

As for the notable "diversity" of Armstrong's recordings from this period, much of that seems to me to be haphazard casual encounters that Louis did between shows without much thought, as opposed to carefully-planned ambitious projects. I believe that it was Gary Giddins in his biography who noted that Armstrong would generally not even rest his chops before a recording session, as they were so much lower priority than the shows.