Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers (review)

Armstrong studies continues to be a growth industry. Despite the presence of more than two dozen biographies, at least three autobiographies, and numerous specialized scholarly studies, it remains a truism that the more we learn about Louis Armstrong, the more we want to dig deeper to fully understand him. Recently, Ricky Riccardi’s excellent What a Wonderful World: the Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (2011) rehabilitated a period that had been largely written off by critics and historians. Terry Teachout’s valuable synthesis, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009), offered a refreshingly balanced view of Armstrong as a musical artist and entertainer, while also using his previously unavailable taped musings housed at the Armstrong Archives to reveal new aspects of his personality and professional relationships. Teachout’s book was very successful and achieved its second printing within weeks of release. Yet to my mind, no writer has done more to assuage our hunger for deeper insight into the world of Louis Armstrong by filling gaps and redefining parameters than Thomas Brothers, whose Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words (1999) and Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006) reoriented Armstrong studies away from the interpretive squabbles attending James Lincoln Collier’s presumptuous Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (1983) and Laurence Bergreen’s capricious Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (1997) toward exploration of Afrocentric vernacular practice as the proper context for assessing Armstrong’s life and music. This new book surpasses his earlier efforts and confirms that impression.

Brothers’s approach verges on the holistic, combining musicology, criticism, and cultural history into a thoughtful and gripping narrative that encompasses the personal and the professional aspects of Armstrong’s story, couched in a research apparatus that is amazingly deep and varied. In Master of Modernism he applies two distinct unifying concepts (the “fixed and variable” model and “ragging the tune”) to succinctly describe the scope and magnitude of Armstrong’s growth and influence in the 1920s and early 1930s: as a daring jazz instrumentalist refining modernism for the black community and as a vocalist capturing the approbation of whites through “radical paraphrasing” of familiar pop tunes. His close examination and explication of Armstrong’s recordings as a prism for examining the totality of that influence beyond the studio provide a detailed account of the continuous development that occurred throughout this period (even as musical associations and contexts shifted dramatically). Brothers explains Armstrong’s new musical syntax and vocabulary cogently, while also tracking stylistic shifts. Contained therein is a steady stream of innovative and compelling revelations on the coherence of Armstrong’s musical oeuvre and its affinity with African tradition. It is a remarkable achievement.

Through a painstaking documentary reconstruction of Armstrong’s itinerary set against a survey of African American accomplishment and resistance to racial injustice that illuminates its significance, Brothers animates Armstrong’s black vernacular world moment by moment in a profound way. His depiction of the South Side of Chicago in the years before the Great Depression as a thriving, self-contained black metropolis makes it easy to understand how that environment could be conducive to Armstrong’s artistic and spiritual development; after his experiences in the Deep South and on the riverboats, he felt liberated there. Even so, there were times when Armstrong felt unequal to the opportunities that were afforded him in Chicago, as when he was invited to join Erskine Tate’s Orchestra at the Vendome Theater in 1925. The section on how this association with Tate became a transformative source of power and confidence for Armstrong—the vehicle for his amazing rise to celebrity on the South Side—is skillfully rendered, illustrating how a combination of ingenious performance tropes ranging among vocal and instrumental improvisations, high-note pyrotechnics, and mock pulpit oratory could expand and reconstitute Armstrong’s persona in Chicago without diminishing his New Orleans essence, while also redirecting jazz appreciation toward concert formats (174-204). Correlating Armstrong’s chronological...