A Snatch of Satch
2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2014.0070
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Music Technology and Sound Studies
ResumoA Snatch of Satch Michael Anderson (bio) Sixteen years after he died, Louis Armstrong had a best-selling record. “What a Wonderful World,” from the soundtrack to the film Good Morning, Vietnam, hit number 33 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1987. At the time, I thought this posthumous success was but the coda to the outstanding performing career of the American Century. Who knew it was the first sign that not even death could silence Satchmo? In the quarter-century since, Armstrong’s performances have graced more than six dozen movies (most recently last year’s Blue Jasmine and The Great Gatsby) and at least half as many episodes of television programs. “If the people ain’t sick of it, I ain’t,” Armstrong told an interviewer. “The main thing is to live for that audience, live for the public.” In his time on earth, Armstrong’s international celebrity was rivaled only by that of Charlie Chaplin, and, as the jazz critic Dan Morgenstern once put it, “Chaplin did not perform in person.” His European tours in the mid-Fifties drew such rapturous receptions—in Helsinki he broke an attendance record established by Sibelius—that The New York Times declared jazz to be America’s “secret weapon” and Armstrong “its most effective ambassador.” (A cartoon in The New Yorker depicted a conference at Foggy Bottom with the caption: “This is a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy. The question is, who’s the best man for it—John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?”) Hardly an exaggeration: during a 1961 engagement in Berlin, when the Cold War was freezing, Armstrong and his bandmates repeatedly breezed back and forth through the Berlin Wall’s Checkpoint Charlie, with guards on both sides—East German and Russian, American—asking for autographs [End Page 322] rather than authorization. “How’d he do that?” the flabbergasted American ambassador asked. “I can’t do that!” (“Perhaps Satch might get somewhere havin’ a basement conference,” Armstrong commented. “Those cats don’t seem to get anywhere with their summit conferences.”) Armstrong’s continuing vitality in mass entertainment is, of course, a testament to talent, both to his vocalism and as a trumpeter. His unmistakably distinctive voice—like “a wheelbarrow crunching up a gravel driveway,” as one reporter called it—is almost as ubiquitous a presence in today’s mass media as it was during the last two decades of his life. “The greatest pop singer in the world that ever was and ever will be forever and ever is Louis Armstrong,” Bing Crosby, himself no slouch as a warbler, declared. “When he sings a sad song you feel like crying, when he sings a happy song you feel like laughing. What the hell else is there with pop singing?” And of his horn playing: “I’d rather hear Louis Armstrong play ‘Tiger Rag’ than wander into Westminster Abbey and find the lost chord,” Edward, Duke of Windsor once proclaimed, showing far better taste in jazzmen than in wives; and during her three-year run in the 1948 Broadway revival of Private Lives, Tallulah Bankhead insisted that Armstrong’s 1927 recording of “Potato Head Blues” be played onstage. “While it may seem incongruous to put such a record in a Noel Coward drawing room comedy,” she said, “I just had to have a snatch of Satch to alleviate the tedium of playing the same part for so long.” (Her opinion that it is “one of the greatest things in life” is echoed in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, where the record is cited as one of the reasons “why life is worth living.”) “The beginning and the end of music in America,” Crosby called him, and for once hyperbole might be understatement. For all its antecedents, jazz can fairly be said to begin with Armstrong’s legendary Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late Twenties; just as philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, jazz musicianship can said to be a succession of riffs on Armstrong. His influence was decisive not only on his own instrument—”You can’t play nothing on trumpet [End Page 323] that doesn’t come from him, not even modern,” according to...
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