Playing from the Heart

...The Hot Fives simply wiped away the old New Orleans style: Either you attempted to play like Armstrong or you almost did not play at all...

...Then came the turning point...

...Large portions of the middle-class black community rejected him simply because he played jazz...

...Take away the sweaty, fawning darky singing "Hello Dolly" for the 15,000th time and you probably take away as well the astonishingly inventive musician who gave us the Hot Five recordings...

...Settling onl898 as the correct year, Collier writes: "There is a strong possibility that Armstrong lowered his age in order to escape the draft during World War I." He then proceeds to perform a similar exercise with regard to the musician's precise place of birth...

...Others may have come to think of him as an artist, at least through the early years...

...Q one issue Collier steps outside of his biographer's role to wax combative...

...He is excellent in explaining exactly what it was that made Armstrong so outstanding--scrupulously sorting out, for example, the different rhythmic components that constituted Armstrong's ability to swing, and instructively analyzing individual performances...

...The point is a valid, indeed a healthy one, and worth making, but in his zeal to identify jazz as a mainstream American product, Collier surely overstates his case...

...Collier is forced to deduce what early New Orleans jazz sounded like, who its creators were, which musicians influenced Armstrong, at what point he turned professional, what he learned from his mentor King Oliver, when he began to be noticed as someone special, how he played in the years before he was recorded, when he started to sing on stage...

...Certainly it is the most important set of recordings of 20th-century improvised music...

...A more complete list can be found in Neil Leonard's Jazz and the White Americans, a book Collier makes no effort to come to grips with...

...Collier is hardly blind to this argument, acknowledging that Armstrong's "commercial bent" contributed to his artistry...

...after 1946, Armstrong became an unofficial U.S...

...When Armstrong died in 1971 he was praised by everyone from President Richard M. Nixon to the editors of Izvestia...

...And, to be honest, anyone who has listened to Armstrong's 45-second close to "West End Blues" may feel exactly the same way...

...The toming led Armstrong and his music away from the triumphs of the '20s to the gimmickry and sentimentality of the later years...

...Jazz, Collier insists, was not a music made by poor blacks for poor blacks...

...A year later he was back in Chicago and at the height of his powers...

...He always needed to be associated with a strong personality whom he could depend on...

...It was unabashedly commercial, created for anyone who would listen, and whites took to it immediately...

...By 1924, Armstrong was in New York as the featured soloist with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, the first real swing band--and everyone agrees that it was the newcomer from Chicago who taught the New Yorkers how to swing...

...Collier's labors notwithstanding, popularity by itself proves nothing...

...And the music was far enough from what was then the American mainstream to number among its opponents Thomas Edison, William Allen White, Jerome Kern, and John Philip Sousa...

...Once jazz was recognized as a part of America's heritage following World War II, however, his position was never again challenged...

...Surveying the last two-thirds of the career, Collier sadly concludes: "I cannot think of another American artist who so failed his own talent...

...Armstrong's public reputation fell off slightly in the late'30s when big bands were dominating the airwaves and bebop was being developed by avant-gardists in small New York clubs...

...In those years, he notes, many people lacking birth certificates took July 4 as their birthday...

...Collier calls them "one of the most significant bodies of American recorded music...

...One could enjoy the music without appreciating it...

...From the 1930s on, as his fame increased and he rose to international celebrity, the quality of his work declined...

...With the exception of a few spots known to jazz fanatics, the places whites frequented to hear black musicians were carefully segregated...

...The nation's music establishment understood the conflict...

...Born in New Orleans in the most desperate of circumstances ?it is difficult," Collier declares, "to overstate the extent to which Louis Armstrong was deprived as a boy"--the future jazz pioneer picked up a cornet for the first time as an adolescent while serving time at a reformatory...

...When customers walked into a jazz club, most of them left their responsibilities, their values and their minds at the door, as they would upon entering a brothel or, in modern times, a disco...

...During this time he cut the 60 Hot Five and Hot Seven discs, perhaps the greatest jazz records ever made...

...Apparently, every jazz musician in Chicago was waiting at the station to greet the unknown Armstrong when he got off the train from Louisiana...

...treasure, practically an institution...

...Residents of Harlem in the '20s could not enter the local Cotton Club where Duke Ellington was the featured attraction...

...Armstrong's co-musicians, including his second wife Lil, also estimated that he was born prior to the turn of the century, and an early registration indicates this, too...

...militant young beboppers disdained him as an anachronistic embarrassment...

...Not that Armstrong himself cared...

...Collier reports that he never even referred to himself as a jazz musician...

...While whites may have been willing to pay to dance to the captivating new sounds, their money did not necessarily translate into respect for or acknowledgment of the performers on stage...

...It was to call into question the validity of the Western musical tradition, or at least that portion of it whose feeble tendrils had slithered into the 20th century...

...This is a rich and suggestive work, and Collier is a thoughtful and lucid writer, wholly comfortable with his material as well as thoroughly immersed in the music...

...He was happy just making the crowds happy--clowning, mugging, cavorting and shuffling on stage...

...Undeniably, jazz was popular among whites from the start, yet that does not tell the whole story...

...There are almost no written documents to draw on and the eyewitnesses, including the subject himself, all wanted to contribute to the mythology...

...But apparently the biographer is greedy for more than we already possess...

...He even goes so far as to blame a conspiracy of the '30s and '40s Left-wing press for distorting musical history to preserve its image of the downtrodden black...

...Tracing his career, especially through the early years, requires a detective knowledgeable enough to reach intelligent conclusions from scant evidence...

...Collier reasonably contends that Armstrong's determination to best rival musicians and his desire to please audiences were compensations for his passivity outside of a musical context...

...Armstrong worked unselfconsciously throughout his life, always moving along the path he wanted...

...Nor was it just blacks who were playing it...

...One could dance to jazz without admiring it...

...The genius, the naivete, the showmanship, the talent, and the toming all seem to have been so intertwined that no single strand can be unraveled...

...In the early '20s, he followed other black jazzmen to Chicago, joining Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and, shortly after, making his initial recordings as the group's second cornetist...

...These years were filled with concert dates, European tours, hit records, adulation, yet nothing to match the creativity of the '20s...

...In the early part of his career his wife Lil performed this function, and later it was his manager, the near-gangster Joe Glaser...

...There was never a moment, really, when jazz lacked an audience in America...

...There was no thought given to taking the music seriously...

...To which a reader might respond: "Yeah, but...

...In 1952 Down Beat magazine ran a poll to name "the most important musical figure of all time...

...He had no such self-image...

...Still, Billie Holiday may have found the right stance when she conceded Armstrong's step'n fetchit manner, then added: "Yeah, but Pops toms from the heart...

...In addition, Collier provides some enlightening and unobtrusive psychology: Armstrong was, by nature and circumstance, shy and insecure...

...The audience, for the most part, was merely out for a night on the town, a little entertainment...

...Entertainer" was the only concept he knew...

...He is eager to overturn the notion that jazz was unappreciated by racist white Americans and had first to gain recognition in Europe before it was accepted here...

...In Armstrong's case, nothing less will do...

...Japan designates certain artists as "national treasures...

...Collier fleshes out this skeleton with a wealth of information, not only on Armstrong but on jazz rhythms, black vaudeville, Chicago in the '20s, the rise of swing music, anything relevant to his subject's life...

...Every Armstrong fan knows that July 4, 1900, is the commonly accepted date, but Collier has cogent reasons for rejecting so resonant and symbolic a birthday...

...Armstrong finished first, beating out Duke Ellington...

...Even so straightforward a matter as Armstrong's birth date is open to question...

...Since this was an image that comported too easily with racist stereotypes, Armstrong's persona made many blacks (and, one should note, many whites) uncomfortable...

...He developed his musicianship playing honky tonks in the city's red-light district and on Mississippi riverboats...

...Men like Walter Damrosch and Fritz Kreisler were anti-jazz...

...For the truth is that to take jazz seriously in the '20s and '30s was to behave subversively...

...Writers & Writing PLAYING FROM THE HEART BY BARRY GEWEN James Lincoln Collier's Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (Oxford, 383 pp., $19.95) is certain to establish itself as the definitive study of the man his biographer calls "the preeminent musical genius of his era...

...Bach came in seventh...

...The basic outlines of Armstrong's life, though, are clear...