pops

Louis Armstrong is widely known as the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth centruy. A phenomenally gifted and imaginative artist, he also wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies--without a collaborator--and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Jean Renoir and Le Corbusier ("He is mathematics, equilibrium on a tightrope. He is Shakespearean!"). Virgil Thomson called him "a master of musical art." Stuart Davis, whose abstract paintings were full of jazz-inspired imagery, cited him as a "Model of greatness."

Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout, author of previous biographies of George Balanchine and H.L. Mencken, has drawn on a cache of sources previously unavailable, including hundreds of reels of recordings of backstage and after-hour conversations that Armstrong made throughout his career, newly uncovered material about Armstrong's early life, and Armstrong's own writings, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure. This is going to be the last word on Armstrong in our lifetime--it's a portrait of the man, his world, and his music that will stand alongside Gary Giddins' Bing Crosby and Peter Guralnick's works on Elvis Presley as a classic biography of a major American musician. ^[1] 

A Note on the Text

Prologue: "The Cause of Happiness"

1. "Bastards from the Start"Apprenticeship in New Orleans,i901-1919

2. "All Those Tall Buildings"Leaving Home, i919-i924

3. "A Flying Cat"Harlem and Chicago, z924-i927

4. "It's Got to Be Art"With Earl Hines, 1928

5. "The Way a Trumpet Should Play"On the Move, i929-i930

6. "Don't Let 'Em Cool Off, Boys"On the Run, 193o-1932

7. "1 Didn't Blow the Horn"Crisis, 1932-1935

8. "Always Have a White Man"With Joe Olaser, x935-i938

9. "The People Who Criticize"Losing Touch, i938-i947

10. "Keep the Horn Percolating"Renewal, i947-i954

11. "The Nice Taste We Leave"Ambassador Satch, i954-I963

12. "1 Don't Sigh for Nothing"At the Top, 1963-1971

Aflerword

Appendix: Thirty Key Recordings by Louis Armstrong

Source Notes

Select Bibliography

Photo Credits