The “later years” of Louis Armstrong lasted almost a quarter century, from the first performance of his new small group at Town Hall in New York on May 17, 1947, until his death in his modest house in Queens on July 6, 1971. In the life of this extraordinary man, it is a period that has long been marked by controversy. As Ricky Riccardi writes, “The myth of the ‘two Armstrongs’ continues: the young serious artist and the old entertainer.” The myth was spread largely by a handful of critics, principally the musically astute but humor-challenged Gunther Schuller, who argued that Armstrong peaked in the 1920s with his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens and subsequently was little more than what Schuller called “a good-natured buffoon, singing ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘What a Wonderful World’ night after night.”
By now the myth has been quite thoroughly punctured, first by Gary Giddins in his slender but authoritative “Satchmo” (1988) and then by Terry Teachout in his definitive biography, “Pops” (2009). Both writers understand that Armstrong was a natural entertainer whose clownish on-stage antics were expressions of his ebullient personality, and both insist that the level of his musicianship during this period was far higher than his detractors are willing to concede. Now comes Riccardi, a younger student of Armstrong’s career, to make the case once more:
“In many ways, these were the most important years of Armstrong’s life. With a bruised lip and an almost inhuman, punishing schedule, Armstrong worked harder than ever before to attain new heights of popularity, staying relevant and in demand at an age when most performers start to fade. With each passing year, the popularity of jazz in America diminished while, simultaneously, the popularity of Louis Armstrong around the world only grew. Because many jazz critics can’t embrace popular acts — and because ‘new’ is so often equated with ‘better’ — a lot of Armstrong’s most lasting works of those years were repudiated.”
The “new” that supposedly was “better” included bebop and the other forms of “modern” jazz that subsequently evolved from it. The decade and a half after World War II was a pivotal moment in jazz history. On the one hand, almost all the great founders of jazz and swing were very much alive and performing — Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday et al. — while on the other hand, the next generation was aggressively asserting itself: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker (until his death in 1955), Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis et al. To all intents and purposes the big-band era was dead, and with it jazz’s standing as a genuinely popular musical form. The younger generation was less interested in pleasing audiences than in pleasing itself, and its hostility toward its more outgoing elders was palpable.
Many older musicians felt this antagonism, but none more persistently or strongly than Armstrong. Not only did he clown unashamedly in the course of his act — and having seen that act many times during these years, I can testify that he was often flat-out hilarious — but there was a widespread feeling among African Americans, especially among musicians, that at times he descended into offensive black stereotypes. Because of this, and because by the 1950s his audiences were predominantly white, he was regarded in some quarters as “good ol’ Uncle Tom Satchmo, the smiling, grinning Negro.” Never mind that he repeatedly refuted this both in words (most famously, his attack on President Eisenhower during the Little Rock school crisis of 1957 as “two-faced” and having “no guts”) and in deeds (his refusal to perform in his beloved hometown of New Orleans until it would receive him “without racial distinction”). The calumny had remarkable staying power, and he never fully got out from under it.
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