Louis Armstrong
(March 2014)
Louis Armstrong. What a man!
While it is hard to predict who is talking to whom regarding the Taliban, Pakistan government and the Pakistan Army or whether they are indeed talking at all or talking at cross purposes, news comes that the Prime Minister’s pet peacock has been the victim of a foul and hellish plot that has sent the peacock to wherever they go when they shed their earthly plumage. The attacker, a serial killer cat, in the good and hallowed traditions of Pakistani crime, has made good his escape. However, 12 police officials have been suspended. Dereliction of duty is not something the Pakistan nation approves of.
So much for news from Pakistan but what I want to share is something rather far removed from marauding cats and sleepy policemen. It is to talk a bit about a man who stands higher than the highest amongst the great jazz musicians the world has ever known. His name – Louis Armstrong, a man who in his lifetime changed the direction of jazz and produced with his trumpet playing and unique vocals, a sound that millions adore and aspire to copy. Sadly, Pakistanis have no clue about jazz, happy to feed on ditties and ‘Billo.’ Consigned to the back waters and cut off from the vibrant world where things like jazz flourish, we are hopelessly locked with endless and pointless political chatter, all things mundane and all things cheap and transitory. In paying tribute to Louis Armstrong, Satchmo or Pops as he was affectionately referred to, one has read what has been written so beautifully by people who know and understand jazz.
But what is jazz after all? “It’s our art,” the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis calls it—the only art form created by Americans, an enduring and indelible expression of our genius and promise, a painless way of understanding ourselves.” Jazz critic Ken Burns says, “But jazz is also the story of two world wars and a devastating depression, the sound track that helped Americans get through the worst of times. Jazz is about sex the way men and women talk to each other and conduct the complicated rituals of courtship – a sophisticated and elegant mating call that has all but disappeared from popular music in recent times. It is about drugs and the terrible cost of addiction and the high price of creativity. It is about the growth and explosion of radio and the soul of great American cities – New Orleans, where the music was born, and Chicago, Kansas City, and New York, where it grew up. It is about immigration and assimilation and feeling dispossessed – and the music that came to the rescue. It is about movement and dance and showing your behind. It’s about entertainment, the frequently dismissed but sacred communion between artist and audience. It’s about solitude and loneliness and the nearly unbearable burden of consciousness. It's about suffering and celebration – it’s greatly about celebration – and tapping your feet.”
Jazz is the story of the dozens of extraordinary human beings - protean geniuses – black and white, male and female, addicts and orphans, prostitutes and pimps, sons of privilege and of despair – who, much like the political figures charged with inventing America, who took enormous risks, shouldered unimaginable responsibility, and were able to do what the rest of us can only dream of: create art on the spot.
Ken Burns, jazz critic said that “Armstrong was important to the history of this music, but he had mostly seemed to me a guy with a smile and a handkerchief, a singer of popular songs like ‘Hello Dolly!’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful World.’ “I had no inkling of the truth,” he adds. “Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music, He is to twentieth-century music what Einstein is to physics. Freud is to psychiatry and the Wright Brothers are to travel,” says Burns. He goes on. “First, Armstrong transformed instrumental playing, liberating jazz, cutting it loose from nearly all constraints, essentially inventing what we call swinging; then he brought an equally great revolution to singing. And he did it all with a heart and a humanity so spiritually encompassing that my own contemplation of mortality is now tempered by the hope that I will get to hear him playing with Gabriel someday (and, as he would say blowing Gabriel out of the clouds). To make this discovery was startling—and exhilarating.”
Most who knew or had interacted with Armstrong, including would in the end shake their heads and say that Louis Armstrong was a ‘gift from God’ or ‘an angel.’ Burns wrote, “ I was on the road and happened upon a woman who for lack of a better word was a psychic, a medium familiar with things not of this world. When I told her of the interviews and how each person had called Armstrong an angel, she closed her eyes and smiled and said softly, “Biggest wings I’ve ever seen.”
As a music art form, said Wynton Marsalis, “Jazz celebrates life – human life. The range of it. The absurdity of it. The ignorance of it. The greatness of it. The intelligence of it. The sexuality of it. The profundity of it. And it deals with it in all of its myriad details.” Jazz in one critic’s words. is America’s music – born out of a million American negotiations: between having and not having; between happy and sad, country and city; between black and white and men and women; between the Old Africa and the Old Europe – which could only have happened in an entirely new world. It is an improvisational art, making itself up as it goes along – just like the country that gave it birth. It rewards individual expression but demands selfless collaboration. It is forever changing but nearly always rooted in the blues. “Jazz,” the drummer Art Blakey liked to say, “washes away the dust of everyday life. Above all, it swings”.
Burns put it so well. “Genius,” he wrote is ultimately untraceable. “No amount of historical or psychological sleuthing can ever fully explain the emergence of artists like Bach or Picasso or Louis Armstrong, who appear as if from nowhere and through the power of their own individual imaginations transform an art. The origins of the kind of music Armstrong played remain elusive, too. Jazz music belongs to all Americans, has come to be seen by the rest of the world as the symbol of all that is best about the US, but it was created by people routinely denied the basic benefits of being American. It grew up in a thousand places but it could only have been born in Now Orleans, Louis Armstrong’s hometown.”
“My whole life has been happiness,” Pops wrote towards the end of it. “Through all the misfortunes … I did not plan anything. Life was there for me, and I accepted it.” Burns says, “raised mostly on turbulent, streets and surrounded from birth by enough vice and violence to tilt a sociologist’s file cabinet.” Pops took part in some of it, observed all of it, made no easy judgments about any of it, and managed miraculously to incorporate it all into his art – the good and the bad, the ugly as well as the beautiful. In the process, his unrivaled genius, his ‘gift,’ he called it, helped turn jazz into a soloist’s art – influenced every singer, every instrumentalist, every artist, who came after him. For more than five decades, he would make everyone who heard him feel that no matter how bad things got, everything was bound to turn out all right, after all.
This would remain Armstrong’s attitude all his life. “I say, never worry what the other fellas have, as long as you’re having a nice time in your way,” he would tell an interviewer when his was one of the most famous faces on earth. “Things ain’t never going to get that bad where I can’t enjoy a good meal at least once a day and if I have to take a bath in that tin tub again, I’m still gonna wash my ass.”
Listen to this man’s music. It proves there is God after all!