Louis Armstrong - 10 July 1971

A few years ago – maybe five, ten – anyway it was in the summer of 1931, I ordered a record from the local gramophone shop and it took an awful long time to be delievered.

When at last it did arrive, I hustled it on to the turntable. My mother was intrigued by its title, which she thought odd, not to say gruesome. It was called the St James Infirmary. It began with a shattering chord and a trumpet taking off, like a supersonic jet.

Long before it was over I took it off the machine, because I saw that my mother was sitting there, in tears. She was not moved by the beauty of the piece or the artistry of the mad trumpeter. She was frightened by it, and aghast that her son could listen to this jungle band without a blush. To her it was, in those remote days, as if today a mother had seen her son nonchalantly take out a needle and give himself a shot of heroin.

I don’t suppose there is a generation left now that hates jazz simply as such. Even the flappers of the 1920s, who doted on the new fad of jazz, are now in their 70s. But in my youth it was the normal thing for people over 50 to be either frightened of jazz or contemptuous of it. Old soldiers, doctors, schoolmasters and other Establishment figures made a point of equating the word "jazz" with the adjectives "negroid" and "decadant". And English magistrates rarely missed an opportunity to ascribe petty thievery and illegitimate births to the fearful influence of the saxophone.

Now my mother was too simple, too unpretentious, a person, to be contemptuous of jazz – it simply scared the wits out of her. Well, I was young and callow, but also, I like to think, responsive to all sorts of mnusic from Mozart to Sullivan. Both Sir Arthur and Joe, not to mention Maxine. And I was frankly exhilarated by this record and mesmerised by its solo trumpet. I took the record back to college and never again bootlegged it into our house.

Even so, I should never have expected that when that solo trumpeter died, the New York Times would bow to him editorially as "an authentic American folk hero, a legend in his time". Or that the austere Guardian of Manchester – which is now, as you know, the Guardian of all England –would salute him as a great and noble artist, who served the world, and his people well.

Louis Armstrong died last Tuesday, two days after his 71st birthday. On Friday they buried him, and among the pallbearers were the governor of New York State, Mayor Lyndsay, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basey, Bobby Hackett, Pearl Bailey and Frank Sinatra.

There is no point in trying now to solve the insoluble problem of taste and fashion, though it is a problem that faces every generation, and every true artist, and every fake. After all, Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, when it was first peformed, produced a riot in Paris. And at one time the musical world was torn apart by the question of whether Wagner was a genius or a barbarian.

Forty years ago, the death of Louis Armstrong would have received about the same notice in the daily press as – in that year of 1931 – the death of Bix Beiderbecke did receive, which is to say, no mention at all. Yet, Beiderbecke was the first white jazz musician whom Armstrong, a man of well-developed ego, embraced as a brother genius. It seems incredible now that anybody whose taste in music takes in say, Ravel and Delius, should not recognise in the lovely melancholy cornet of Beiderbecke one of the unique and enduring sounds in jazz.

I have collected Armstrong since he did a series of improvisations in, I think, 1927, with the father of jazz piano, Earl Hines, who happily still lives and is still the incomparable master. But when I got the news of Armstrong’s death – maybe it was the memory of that rare first compliment to a white jazz man which moved me to get out an old Whiteman record, one of the precious batch recorded over a single winter and spring which redeemed Whiteman’s lush commercialism by giving rein to the sad, firm arrangements of Bill Challis and to a marvellous strutting trio of true jazzmen – Beiderbecke, Trumbauer and Bill Rank. And I played Bix’s lovely solo of Lonely Melody and somehow felt that Beiderbecke had transcended and refined Armstrong’s original inventions. But Beiderbecke died forty years ago, and never achieved the New York Times.

Armstrong was more than a music man, he was an American folk original and he epitomises and files away once for all a kind of black man’s life in the south, that will not, I think, happen again. One of the fine things about him is that unlike many a poor and shifty boy, he neither glossed over his squalid origins, nor, which is harder, did he in the years of his success, boast about them.

He was born to a father who stoked furnaces in a turpentine facory, and who left his wife when Armstrong was an infant. From the age of six on, Armstrong lived with his mother in a ratty, coloured section of New Orleans given over to gamblers, pimps and prostitutes' cribs. "Whether." Armstrong once said, "whether my mother did any hustling, I can’t say – if she did, she kept it out of sight". But he did recall that "until she got religion and gave up men, 1915, I couldn’t keep track of the step-daddies".

Young Louis was out on the streets by day delivering coal to prostitutes' cribs, picking up his meals from garbage cans, and by night, hanging around the early honky tonks. He used to say that "the greatest thing that ever happened to me was being arrested and sent off to a waifs' home on New Year's Day, 1914". He had celebrated the new year by stealing a 38-calibre pistol from one of the "step-daddies" and running out on the street, and firing it.

In the waifs' home there was a poor teacher, a coloured man, who taught him to play a bugle and a cornet. He got to play with the home's band at funerals. And when he came out he sold some more coal to make money to lose by night in the gambling houses. "In two hours, man," he said, "I was a broke cat, broker than the ten commandments".

He tried pimping for a while. He got a stab wound in the shoulder. And when he was eighteen he married a prostitute. It didn’t last, he explained a couple of years ago, for a simple reason – she wouldn't give up her line of work. A year later, he joined a ragtime band, and then graduated to a river boat band and he began to blast himself to fame among the early black musicians, so that he was sent for by the great King Oliver. He went to Chicago, and the rest is history.

The rest being the simple, crucial, fact that he moved in on the kind of music which was improvised ensemble work and he cut through it like a knife through butter by creating the jazz soloist in his own person. For the next 45 years, jazz developed, and waned and grew again, simple and complicated, but always along the path that Armstrong blazed, with his remarkable lungs and his even more remarkable musical imagination.

Recently, as with all black men of any sort of talent, Armstrong has come to be judged not so much by his music as by his social attitudes, as a successful negro. A fierce moral test, to which, by the way, we don’t equally subject sucessful whites. Was he or was he not, an Uncle Tom? Well, in his early film appearances he was a standard variation of Uncle Tom – cousin Tom, if you like – the stereotype of the jolly roguish city Negro, as Stepin Fetchit was the more disreputable stereotype of the shiftless, witless country Negro.

I don’t know whether Armstrong fretted over this. He was, I suspect, much too independent, too blithe, to change his character at 65. He knew he had been lucky, he was adored by all by the most politically-conscious blacks and whites. He could have moved to one of the expensive-end places in Harlem or, like many a black basketball or baseball player of late, he could have bought some acres in very leafy suburbia, and built a small mansion. But through all his fame and wealth he stayed in the comfortable, humdrum house in a lower middle-class section of a New York borough. And he died there.

In 1965 though, he recoiled in public from the police beatings in Selma, Alabama. He summed up his attitude quite crisply. "They’d beat Jesus if he was black and marched, I am not in the front line but I support them with my donations, my life is music, they would beat me on the mouth, if I marched. And without my mouth I wouldn’t be able to blow my horn".

He certainly was never blind to the strict mores of his home town, New Orleans, which today wallows in its true reputation as the cradle of jazz, but does not in the publicity mention how only very lately Negros have played in public there.

The blacks brewed jazz in the whorehouses on sour pianos, 50 or 60 years ago. And when jazz broke loose from its smelly origins, the boys with talent broke out of the south too and wound up in the glory days in Chicago and New York. Armstrong refused ever to play in New Orleans until the civil rights act was passed. And in 1965 he went back and he led an integrated band in the new jazz museum down there. It is a wry touch that this hallowed hall – which today tourists visit as they might patter into the Louvre – was built around the crumbling timber of a wretched shack in which, on 4July 1900, Armstrong was born.

Even the Soviets have changed their mind about him. When he made the first of several triumphant tours of Africa, Moscow officially dubbed him a lackey helping in a capitalist distraction. He had a reply for that, "I am African descended down to the bone, from my grandmammy on my mammy's side, and from my grandpappy on my pappy's side".

Last Wednesday Moscow gave us permission to think of Armstrong as an OK figure. "A symbol,"said Izvestia "of the best traditions of negro classical jazz. The huge talent of this muscician, his love of work and loyalty to his people, enabled him to penetrate the impregnable barrier of racism in the USA and to achieve worldwide recognition." So now, it's official.

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