Louis Armstrong

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There has not been a biography of Louis Armstrong that comprehensively surveys his life without leaving controversy in its wake. Bergreen covers Armstrong's awful exposure in Hollywood movies and Armstrong as a world celebrity. The first part of the book, dealing with his early struggles and most potent musical development, is engrossing. Armstrong's story is peppered with incidents of white men threatening him and other white men shielding him. The most notorious bad man in Armstrong's life was Dutch Schultz, with whom he played cat-and-mouse games after he came north. Armstrong's affection for weed probably taints Bergreen's empathetic judgment.

Sarah Vowell

One of the most symbolic, beguiling moments in Laurence Bergreen's elegant new biography of Louis Armstrong catches the trumpeter on his first day with Harlem's Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Fresh from wild Chicago, raised in wilder New Orleans, Armstrong's brand of jazz was a fierce, chartless impulse; Henderson's high-tone players, on the other hand, worked from sheet music that was detailed down to dynamic markings. And when Armstrong took off blaring, instead of playing pianissimo as demanded by the chart in front of him, Henderson stopped the band to ask, "Louis, how about that pp?" The great Satchmo joked, "Oh, I thought that meant 'pound plenty.'"

Bergreen's book reads like that set-up must have sounded -- a loud, hilarious Armstrong solo thrusting out of a suave Henderson narrative structure. Bergreen is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and it shows. The entire biography feels like a particularly long, particularly good Times article, so much so that you almost wish the subject were referred to as "Mr. Armstrong," in that paper's quaint manner, instead of just plain "Louis." Bergreen is genteel, but he's no prude. He rather relishes the story of Armstrong's romantic childhood among the prostitutes of New Orleans' red-light district, Storyville. Bergreen rails against the way "historians and scholars have made a determined effort to place a fig leaf over the origins of jazz" and traces the form's -- and Armstrong's -- development in local whorehouses staffed by tough women with names like "Mary Jack the Bear."

While ponying up Armstrong's debts to his mentors like Joe "King" Oliver, Bergreen is particularly sharp in getting at what was new about Louis Armstrong: his place as the first great jazz soloist, his early recognition of the importance of recordings, his veritable invention of swing, his introduction of scat into jazz, and his jive-talking linguistic contributions to pop culture with slang like "cats" (which has informed bad Beat parodies ever since). He reinvented himself several times, moving from big bands to the small combo the Hot Five to his final stop as "traditional" grand old man. "Every note he blew was amplified by history," Bergreen writes of a legendary Armstrong performance at Town Hall in 1947.

Establishing Armstrong's musical legacy -- "the voice that sounded like an instrument and the instrument that sounded like a voice" -- isn't a hard job. What might be Bergreen's noblest task is setting the record straight about Armstrong as a black man in America. His clownish side, his affability, his downright gaiety, not to mention his insistence on singing the dopey "When It's Sleepy Time Down outh," might have made Armstrong appear deferential and apolitical to some. But Bergreen points out crucial Armstrong stands, most notably his public statement, while the National Guard was preventing Little Rock school desegregation in 1957, that "the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell." With outbursts like that (he also accused President Eisenhower of having "no guts"), Armstrong rated an FBI file. Oddly, it's J. Edgar Hoover himself who gave the musician one of his most acute reviews: "Armstrong's life is a good argument against the theory that Negroes are inferior." -- Salon

Louis Armstrong

"Louis's consciousness was unique and all-encompassing. He held nothing back. He loved to amuse, to startle, to entertain, but as Duke Ellington point out, he 'never hurt anyone' along the way. Most everyone liked him, or loved him, or forgave his addiction to crude clowning, or gradually succumbed to it, because Louis Armstrong was a genius as well as jester, and part of his genius was his exuberant temperament. He was the pursuit of happiness personified."

Publishers Weekly

Bergreen, who has published studies of James Agee, Irving Berlin and Al Capone, comments here, "This is the first biography I have written in which my opinion of my subject kept improving as I worked." This strong admiration for the great jazz pioneer 1900-1971 is apparent throughout his meticulously researched, vibrant biography; and though there is no shortage of books on Armstrong, this biography has the potential to become the definitive word on his life and remarkable career. Bergreen, working with Armstrong's own memories in his taped reminiscences, letters and diaries as well as secondary sources, presents a vivid picture of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, where the musician was born in direst poverty. We see young Louis struggling to keep himself afloat among gangsters and prostitutes, teaching himself the cornet as a way of calling attention to the coal cart he drove for a Jewish family who adopted him, turning himself, by innate musical genius and enormous force of will, into the trumpet virtuoso he became when barely out of his teens. In the 1920s, his small groups set a standard for imaginative, free-wheeling jazz with a power, humor and intensity that has seldom been matched. Though in later years Armstrong relaxed into schticks, especially in his gravelly-voiced singing and clowning, his instrumental mastery remained awesome. Incorrigibly optimistic and good-hearted, he spent as freely as he earned though unfortunately filling the pockets of a boorish manager far more than his own; and throughout the darkest days of American racism he served as a beacon of possibility for all races. It's an epic American story, told with great warmth, skill and understanding. Photos not seen by PW. July

Kirkus Reviews

This look at the life of one of this century's great personalities eschews meticulousness in its musical analysis in favor of a complete look at the man himself.

Biographer Bergreen (As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, 1990, etc.) follows New Orleans's greatest from cradle to grave, as he travels to St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Hollywood promoting jazz—the music he helped create. Along the way, we get colorful depictions of Armstrong's introduction to horn playing (he was the bugler at a reform school), the hard-drinking mother who taught him to hold his liquor, and the "cutting contests"—horn-playing competitions—in which he competed his entire life. Armstrong's career spanned many decades, and for much of that time he was a tireless performer and a frequent collaborator with other jazz greats, among them Charles Mingus, Earl "Fatha" Hines, and late in life, Ella Fitzgerald. As New Orleans jazz gave way first to swing and then to bebop, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, among other musicians, dismissed Armstrong as old hat. Armstrong outlasted their dismissal, and many later came to value his distinctive, resilient, subtle style. Armstrong knew some shady figures, including his manager Joe Glaser, who fleeced the trumpeter for millions, and gangster Dutch Schultz, whose feud with Al Capone over "rights" to Louis forced the musician into exile for fear of his life. The most vivid element here is Armstrong's own words. Despite only a fifth-grade education, Louis was a prolific and talented writer with a flair for metaphor ("In less than two hours I would be broker than the Ten Commandments") and an almost alarmingly confessional style regarding his sex life and heavy but apparently never abusive use of marijuana.

The presence of Armstrong's unique voice turns what might have otherwise been a routine biography into a grand success.