Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism - Softcover

Brothers, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393350800 ISBN 13: 9780393350807

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

Synopsis

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

"Profoundly evocative and altogether admirable...The writing and detail are so brilliant that I found the volume revelatory." ―Tim Page, Washington Post

Nearly 100 years after bursting onto Chicago’s music scene under the tutelage of Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. A trumpet virtuoso, seductive crooner, and consummate entertainer, Armstrong laid the foundation for the future of jazz with his stylistic innovations, but his story would be incomplete without examining how he struggled in a society seething with brutally racist ideologies, laws, and practices.

Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields his own tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone as Armstrong shucks and jives across the page. Through Brothers's expert ears and eyes we meet an Armstrong whose quickness and sureness, so evident in his performances, served him well in his encounters with racism while his music soared across the airwaves into homes all over America.

Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism blends cultural history, musical scholarship, and personal accounts from Armstrong's contemporaries to reveal his enduring contributions to jazz and popular music at a time when he and his bandmates couldn’t count on food or even a friendly face on their travels across the country. Thomas Brothers combines an intimate knowledge of Armstrong's life with the boldness to examine his place in such a racially charged landscape. In vivid prose and with vibrant photographs, Brothers illuminates the life and work of the man many consider to be the greatest American musician of the twentieth century.

65 illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Brothers is the author of Help! The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration; Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans; and Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of music at Duke University, he lives with his family in Durham, North Carolina.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Jazz fans have been blessed in 2013 with two exceptional biographies, Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning (the first volume in his life of Charlie Parker) and Terry Teachout’s Duke. That pair is now joined by Brothers’ monumental follow-up to Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006). The focus here is on Armstrong’s most fertile period as an instrumental and vocal innovator—in Brothers’ convincing argument, a modernist—from his youthful arrival in Chicago in 1922 to join Joe “King” Oliver through the years of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (culminating, sadly, with the degrading movies of the early 1930s). The strong emphasis, properly, is on the music, with Armstrong’s personal life (his marriage, his eccentricities, his marijuana use) handled only superficially. This is an enormously rich, if sometimes difficult, biography, and it delivers a remarkably clear and knowing discussion of a new musical form rooted in African music and the blues. Although his book is not for those unfamiliar with jazz, Brothers does note, after a particularly dense explication, that “the listener does not need this all spelled out . . . for the ear will recognize it effortlessly and unconsciously.” True, but this biography provides an illuminating accompaniment. There has been much written on Armstrong, but Brothers’ work, covering an astonishingly creative decade, is comprehensive and firmly grounded in musicology and in the racial and cultural climate of the 1920s. It is voluminously researched, compellingly written, and supported by a valuable discography and bibliography. A bravura accomplishment, soon to be followed, one hopes, by a third volume covering Armstrong’s role in midcentury popular music. --Mark Levine

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0393350800
• ISBN 13: 9780393350807
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 608