{Public Domain, Louis Armstrong]
At the height of his powers, Satchmo never rose to the heights of purely technical competence of, say, Wynton Marsalis, yet when it comes to the legends of Jazz, it is Louis who will remembered as "the greatest!"
In random rotation this morning, Armstrong's "Indiana" surfaced on my IPOD being routed through the BOSE speakers in my car. I couldn't help it... the volume had to come up. As the sheer joy of the music shakes away the morning blah's, that weary ennui that ordinarily requires a caffeine high to finally sever its bonds, it was impossible to keep back a smile and a tear.
Nostalgia can be a near fatal disease in men of advancing age and I am certainly not exempt from its infection, but it is hard not to slip into a bitter sweet longing for a time when a young man of dubious roots could rise out of the raging cauldron of Old New Orleans and become a legend in his own time.
I don't think Armstrong's appeal and popularity are hard to explain. It certainly isn't rooted in his exemplary personal life. He was a black jazz musician in an age of Jim Crow. He had money and a musical place in the Depression. He lived in a constant tension of competing desires and was, as was necessary, a man of passions. His world was entirely different than that of Glenn Miller and he lived entirely differently. That is not where his greatness lies.
What sums up Armstrong, in my mind, is the title of this piece: raw exuberance. The message of his music is a commentary on his own world view: life is to be lived, gulped in great quantities, and without too many backward glances at "what might have been." Perhaps Satchmo was truly most alive on the stage for it was there that he read his audience like a well worn novel. He played the talents of his musicians on stage with him the same way he wheezed his vocals or strained his trumpet. He freely gave them their head and the lead, adding his own trumpet as a commentary and conclusion. In execution, lyrics were something that went along with the melodies and were never allowed to get in the way. Mixing up verses or simply resorting to vocalizing the jazz riffs kept attention where he wanted it, on the energy of the music itself and the life of living that it proclaimed. Louis was Jazz...
With all its failures and hypocrisy, still it is hard not to be nostalgic for a time when men clung to joy in the face of a world that proclaimed the ultimacy of sorrow and despair. Armstrong never let go of joy and firmly believed that though hidden, yet it would not remain so forever. Only pure simplicity can hold that for long, and in Armstrong's raw exuberance, pure simplicty is always dominant. There is something to be said for that... and though falling far short of Christian fullness, as a worldly philosophy it has more to commend it than many others.
As I listen my heart responds... "Thanks Louis. May you rest in peace."
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