Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life - Hardcover

Laurence Bergreen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553067680 ISBN 13: 9780553067682

Publisher: Broadway, 1997

Synopsis

Louis Armstrong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures.  His musical innovation and exuberance made him a household name, yet the full story of his extravagant life has never been told.  Now, drawing on a vast, previously unexplored archive of Armstrong's writings and recordings, acclaimed biographer Laurence Bergreen presents an intimate, provocative, and definitive portrait of the legendary Pied Piper of American music.

The musical talents of Satchmo--as Armstrong became universally known--were prodigious and groundbreaking.  After learning to blow his horn in the bordellos and honky-tonks of Storyville, New Orleans's bustling red-light district, he honed his sound on a Mississippi riverboat and later became a featured solo trumpeter in the nightclub bands of Chicago and New York, where his stunning musicianship, gravelly voice, and irrepressible personality captivated audiences and critics alike.  Countless recordings, nonstop touring of America and Europe, a radio show--the first ever hosted by a black man--and film appearances catapulted him to international stardom, yet he always remained true to himself and loyal to his roots.  Despite his successes, Armstrong's career was also marked by intense struggle--against the Depression, against the Chicago gangsters of the 1930s, and, above all, against racial prejudice.

A revolutionary musician and entertainer, Louis Armstrong was also a character of epic proportions.  Born in 1901 to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a slave, he came of age, joyfully, among the prostitutes, pimps, and rag-and-bone merchants of New Orleans.  He married four times and enjoyed countless romantic involvements in and around his marriages.  Throughout his rich and varied life, he was a believer in marijuana for the head and laxatives for the bowels; a prolific diarist and correspondent; a devoted friend to celebrities from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald; a perceptive social observer; and, in his later years, an international goodwill ambassador.  Even as segments of the black community scorned him as a sellout to the white establishment, Armstrong broke color barriers wherever he went and helped other blacks to find equality and identity in modern America.  "You see that horn?" he would ask his adversaries.  "That horn ain't prejudiced.  A note's a note in any language."

Filled with insights and information gleaned from Armstrong's voluminous reminiscences and featuring a superb collection of photographs, this remarkable book brings to life as never before the charismatic figure who forever changed the face of music.  In vivid detail and with warmth, wit, and breathtaking sweep, Laurence Bergreen's Louis Armstrong reveals a man of passion, courage, humor, and genius.

About this title

About the Author

Laurence Bergreen was born in New York City and educated at Harvard University.  He is the author of As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (winner of the Ralph J.  Gleason Music Book Award); James Agee: A Life; and Capone: The Man and the Era.  A frequent contributor to Esquire, Newsweek, the New York Times, and other publications, he lives in New York City with his family.

From the Inside Flap

ong was the founding father of jazz and one of this century's towering cultural figures. His musical innovation and exuberance made him a household name, yet the full story of his extravagant life has never been told. Now, drawing on a vast, previously unexplored archive of Armstrong's writings and recordings, acclaimed biographer Laurence Bergreen presents an intimate, provocative, and definitive portrait of the legendary Pied Piper of American music.

The musical talents of Satchmo--as Armstrong became universally known--were prodigious and groundbreaking. After learning to blow his horn in the bordellos and honky-tonks of Storyville, New Orleans's bustling red-light district, he honed his sound on a Mississippi riverboat and later became a featured solo trumpeter in the nightclub bands of Chicago and New York, where his stunning musicianship, gravelly voice, and irrepressible personality captivated audiences and critics alike. Countless record

Reviews

This look at the life of one of this century's great personalities eschews meticulousness in its musical analysis in favor of a complete look at the man himself. Biographer Bergreen (As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, 1990, etc.) follows New Orleans's greatest from cradle to grave, as he travels to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Hollywood promoting jazz--the music he helped create. Along the way, we get colorful depictions of Armstrong's introduction to horn playing (he was the bugler at a reform school), the hard-drinking mother who taught him to hold his liquor, and the ``cutting contests''- -horn-playing competitions--in which he competed his entire life. Armstrong's career spanned many decades, and for much of that time he was a tireless performer and a frequent collaborator with other jazz greats, among them Charles Mingus, Earl ``Fatha'' Hines, and late in life, Ella Fitzgerald. As New Orleans jazz gave way first to swing and then to bebop, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, among other musicians, dismissed Armstrong as old hat. Armstrong outlasted their dismissal, and many later came to value his distinctive, resilient, subtle style. Armstrong knew some shady figures, including his manager Joe Glaser, who fleeced the trumpeter for millions, and gangster Dutch Schultz, whose feud with Al Capone over ``rights'' to Louis forced the musician into exile for fear of his life. The most vivid element here is Armstrong's own words. Despite only a fifth-grade education, Louis was a prolific and talented writer with a flair for metaphor (``In less than two hours I would be broker than the Ten Commandments'') and an almost alarmingly confessional style regarding his sex life and heavy but apparently never abusive use of marijuana. The presence of Armstrong's unique voice turns what might have otherwise been a routine biography into a grand success. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Louis Armstrong was a musical genius who left indelible marks on jazz and a legend so potent that it has taken a slew of biographers years to render harmless and formless. Bergreen, the author of As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (1990) and Capone: The Man and the Era (1994), brings a great deal of insight to Armstrong's "extravagant" life, because he does not so much try to denounce or confirm the myths (he was born on 4 July_ 1900, he bought his first coronet with money he earned performing in the streets of New Orleans, his mother was a prostitute, and on and on) as establish that Armstrong was a musical genius who embraced his origins and brought the past into the formidable body of music he produced. Bergreen, an empathetic soul, seeks understanding. For instance, it may appear that Armstrong's managers took advantage of him (he worked close to 15 years without a break until he split his chops in London in 1934 and was forced to stop blowing, yet his then-manager sued him for breach of contract). Bergreen suggests that Armstrong may knowingly have paid for what the "ofays" gave him, which was the freedom to devote himself to his music while they took care of life's details. A deeply moving biography that fascinates from beginning to end. Bonnie Smothers

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the beginning, he was a sound, and only a sound: a strange blend of happy cacophony and tormented caterwauling.  Nothing like it had ever been heard before, not in New Orleans, where he was born in 1901, or Chicago or St. Louis, where he played as an emerging virtuoso cornetist, and certainly not in New York, where Duke Ellington said of his first exposure to that sound, "Nobody had ever heard anything like it, and his impact cannot be put into words." Nor had it ever been heard in Europe, or South America, or Africa, but everywhere it would be known as the sound of America.

With this sound, he established more popular songs than any other musician.  The sound had two components.  There was, initially, a cornet--and later a trumpet--that was more expressive than a mere instrument: sweet, stinging, lilting, cajoling, teasing, ebullient.  And then there was his voice, the unforgettable voice that behaved like a huge instrument: growling, laughing, demented, soothing, fierce.  The combination of the voice that sounded like an instrument and the instrument that sounded like a voice created the universally recognized persona of Satchmo.  He looked and felt like a glowing lump of coal, hot and alive and capable of igniting everything around him.  For him, music was a heightened form of existence, and he sang and he played as if it could never be loud enough, or last long enough, or go deep enough, or reach high enough.  He believed there could never be enough music in the world, and he did his damnedest to fill the silence with all the stomping, roaring, screeching, sighing polyphony he could muster.

He was not just America's greatest musical performer, he was also a character of epic proportions: married four times, with countless romantic involvements in and around his marriages ("Take your shoes off, Lucy, and let's get juicy," he growls in "Baby, It's Cold Outside"); a lifelong believer in marijuana for the head and laxatives for the bowels; an accomplished storyteller who tossed off letters and memoirs with the same abandon he tossed off riffs; and an enthusiastic correspondent who as a young man turned to his typewriter to record his experiences and his glorious hard times, the record of a black man trying to make his way in twentieth-century America.

It would be pleasant to memorialize Louis this way, as a happy innocent, his life an unbroken arc from the streets, dance halls, and brothels of New Orleans to the nightclubs, vaudeville theaters, and concert halls of Chicago, and New York, and then on to the sound stages of Hollywood and all the other venues and cradles of popular culture from Scandinavia to Africa, where he is revered.  It would be heartwarming to envision him effortlessly breaking "color barriers" everywhere he went, with audiences screaming, "Satchmo, Satchmo," as he smiled and blew his horn and wiped his perspiring brow with his spotless white handkerchief and sang "Ain't Misbehavin'" and growled a few words of filthy comic asides to the band, and then smiled again and eagerly pumped the valves on his gleaming trumpet, and raised it to his scarred yet indestructible chops, and blew his horn some more.

It would be convenient if his life were that simple, but of course it wasn't, not at all.


It was, in all externals, a wretched childhood, yet Louis was obsessed with it and returned to it throughout his maturity as the wellspring of his identity, of his music, of jazz itself.  From the time he purchased his first typewriter in 1922, Louis tapped out his reminiscences, observations, dirty stories, bawdy puns and limericks, and most anything else that popped into his superheated mind.  Sometimes he wrote in his hotel rooms, and sometimes he wrote between sets, in the dressing room of whatever nightclub or theater he happened to be performing in.  He spent almost as much time pounding the keys of his typewriter as he did pumping the valves of his trumpet.  And he told the same tales with each instrument, which only made sense, because in his mind, he was jazz; to prove his point, he titled the first chapter of his autobiography, "Jazz and I Get Born Together." He was driven to review and renew the sources of his inspiration whenever he could.  The further his ambitions, accomplishments, and fame took him from his childhood, the more avidly he sought to return to it--to re-create it onstage night after night, to reminisce compulsively about it with friends, and to recapture it in an outpouring of letters and memoirs both published and unpublished, that spare nothing and relish every amusing, odd, or gruesome detail of his boyhood.  His cherished memories preserve a vanished, and, to many, unknown way of life--that of poor black people in New Orleans in the early decades of this century.[fcmps]

Louis wrote as he spoke, in torrents of phrases linked by ellipses, as if he were writing an endless gossip column, the gossip of his life.  He preferred to write on his stationery, in green ink on yellow paper, and when that was not available, on hotel stationery, even on the back of an envelope containing a letter inside.  He distributed his confessional letters across the world to his correspondents, and some of them later appeared in popular magazines such as True, Esquire, and Ebony, which were willing to run his raw tales of his youth and sexual adventures pretty much as he wrote them.  Many others have found their way into libraries and archives, and countless others languish in private hands.  Eventually, in his early fifties, he summoned the confidence to write his autobiography, published under the title Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.  He wrote it by himself, without the aid of a ghostwriter, secretary, or amanuensis, and the book became a summation of all the letters he had ever written and stories he had ever told about the good old, bad old days in New Orleans.

The outcome of all this ceaseless literary activity, which neatly complemented his musical outpouring, was a kind of self-analysis, for his writing always returned to the same cluster of themes: how I became who I am; how my experiences, especially as a boy, have left indelible marks on me; and, implicitly, how I learned to turn adversity into happiness most of the time, and music all the time.  Though confessional, his writing was never intended to be private.  Except when he was intent on saving his energy for a performance, Louis was exceptionally gregarious--too gregarious to confine his writing to a diary, and too much of an exhibitionist not to tell everybody, if only for sheer shock value.  Writing was for him a transactional process, a conversation with another person, and his conversation always came back to the same point: how the grim circumstances into which he had been born and raised in fact constituted a charmed life, the ideal childhood for a jazz musician.

Louis's consciousness was unique and all-encompassing.  He held nothing back.  People who knew him well invariably use the same word to describe him: "natural." He always said exactly what was on his mind, usually a mixture of music, sex, food, laxatives, and childhood memories.  Even at the age of seventy, he boasted of his sexual prowess, and throughout his life he happily described who he had just gone to bed with, whether it was his wife or a girlfriend, and what they had done, and how he felt about it--usually delighted.  He also reveled in his bowel movements.  These were occasions for rejoicing, and he was not shy about sharing his enthusiasm for them with the world.  His stationery, for instance, showed him sitting on a toilet, pants down around his ankles, grinning, glimpsed as if through a keyhole, with the legend underneath: SATCHMO SAYS: LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND YA! He urged his friends to take the strong laxative he used, Swiss Kriss, a herbal remedy sold by the physical culturist Gayelord Hauser, and he distributed small cellophane packages of it to everyone he met, enthusiastically explaining its benefits.

He loved marijuana, too.  He smoked it in vast quantities from his early twenties until the end of his life; wrote songs in praise of it; and persuaded his musician friends to smoke it when they played.  He planned to call an unpublished sequel to his autobiography Gage, his pet name for marijuana, but once his manager found out about the title and the subject of the work, he suppressed the manuscript, trying to protect Louis's reputation.  Sections of the work that survived the censorship show that he regarded it as an essential element in his life and beneficial to his health.


Louis had many nicknames throughout his life.  They were part of the legacy of New Orleans, where, he said, "it was a pleasure to nickname someone and be named yourself.  Fellers would greet each other, "Hello, Gate,' or 'Face' or whatever it was.  Characters were called Nicodemus, Slippers, Sweet Child, Bo' Hog, so many more names.  They'd be calling me Dipper, Gatemouth, Satchelmouth, all kinds of things, you know, Shadowmouth, any kind of name for a laugh....I had a million of 'em.  Then I got Satchmo and I'm stuck with it.  I like it." After journalists dubbed him "Satchmo," a corruption of "Satchelmouth," in the 1930s, it became his more or less official nickname, and it was the one he printed on his canary yellow stationery.  Record companies called him Satchmo, too, because they recognized that it was good marketing.  Who could resist a name like Satchmo? It was almost a trademark.  In private, around friends, he referred to himself as Gate or Dipper, and he called them Daddy and ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553067680
• ISBN 13: 9780553067682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576