Blue Skies

Let in a little sunshine
Everything is in balance

Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong has received much praise from those who have reviewed it, and I really have little to add to the insightful reviews that have been written. The two clips above are inspired by one of the anecdotes near the end of the book. "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.'" Funny how I listened to primarily the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong the few weeks before my big exam. I'm glad that I didn't have to reach such life threatening circumstances in order to see the profundity of these two bodies of music.

Pops, however, remains a very clear, precisely written, and seemingly unbiased account of Armstrong and his career as one of the most influential jazz musicians. While much has been written about Louis Armstrong's early career in the slums of New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pops does an excellent job of filling in the rest of the narrative. Louis Armstrong's first big break with the recordings of the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens was not the only big event for his career. Those recordings arguably changed the face of Jazz in the 1920's, propelling it to high popularity, Louis with them, but Louis also had a remarkable break in the 1950's with the inception of Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, a recording of which is posted.

One of the key aspects that Pops brings out about Louis Armstrong is his unfaltering dedication to the music he played. Until the last years of his life, Louis was almost continuously on the road moving from performance to performance. Near the end of his career, Louis was told by the doctors to take eight weeks off to rest and recover. After three weeks, Louis called the rest of his band in to go back on the road. He simply could not stand to take so long off.

In all ways, he personifies the career path laid out by Caleb in Middlemarch: "'That depends,' said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. 'You must be sure of two things; you must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying There's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. no matter what a man is - I wouldn't give two pence for him' - here Caleb's mouth looked better, and he snapped his fingers - ' whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'"

We should all strive to be as dedicated to our work as that.

In contrast, I went to a lecture this evening on "The Electric Louis Armstrong" This was supposed to be a lecture about how advances in recording technology played a significant role in Armstrong's career. Unfortunately, Loren Schoenberg only made passing reference to the intended topic of the lecture. Fortunately, he and a few other musicians played a few numbers to ease the bitter pill of the lecture itself. In essence, Loren spend the entire time relating Abe Lincoln to B. Obama, with a passing reference to how Louis is kind of like them too. The lecture was full of cliche phrases about the importance of jazz and how, at a jazz performance, "Something is Created." Oh, he also asked the bass player and drummer accompanying him to improvise while he read the Gettysburg Address, which, by the way, is on the same level of importance as Senator Obama's speech on race relations in the US. Hungadunga and a colon.