Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Glaser

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

One of the many what-might-have-been moments from Jazz history that has always fascinated me was what it might have been like to see the pairing of Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck in the latter’s The Real Ambassadors staged as a Broadway musical.

Regrettably, Dave’s music and Iola Brubeck’s librettos and lyrics for what Pops’ claimed at the time to be “an opera that the Brubecks wrote for me” was performed by the original cast which included the Armstrong Sextet, the Brubeck Quartet, vocalist Carmen McRae and the vocal group of Lambert Hendricks and Bavan only once at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival.

Since both Pops and Dave were managed by the powerful and influential Joe Glaser of the Associated Booking Company, the Brubecks had hoped that he would use his clout and resources to bring The Real Ambassadors to the Broadway stage as a continuously running musical.

Instead, Glaser took a very dim view of this idea mainly because he thought that the fees from concert and club appearances by Armstrong and Brubeck would far exceed anything generated by a Jazz-themed Broadway play with political and diplomatic overtones. To add insult to injury, Glaser even barred TV crews from filming it!

For this reason along with many other real and perceived injustices perpetrated by Joe Glaser, President, Associated Booking Corporation, I have never had a high opinion of the man and could never for the life of me figure out what Pops saw in him. That is, until I read the following in Gary Giddins’ SATCHMO [1988].

© -  Gary Giddins, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

“Louis Armstrong's professional and private lives were at ebb tide when he returned to the United States in 1935. His lip had become infected in Paris and a doctor told him not to play for six months. [His agent Johnny] Collins was suing him for breach of contract. Lil was pressing for divorce, and Alpha, for marriage.  He returned to Chicago and renewed his friendship with Joe Glaser, the tough-talking erstwhile manager of the old Sunset Cafe, who was also down on his luck. They formed a partnership that became the most important professional relationship in both of their lives. They didn't socialize much, but they talked on the phone incessantly, and a kind of love developed between them.

Armstrong's devotion to Glaser galled many of his admirers, who were put off by Glaser's crude manners and strong-arm business tactics. He was apparently connected to the mob, at least in his early years, and was rumored to have been involved in a murder. He made himself a millionaire through Armstrong, but then he made Armstrong a millionaire too. The most frequent criticism of him is that he worked Armstrong and his band too hard, though it's difficult to imagine Louis not wanting to work. Even when he was dying, he made notes to himself about returning to the road. It's certainly true, however, that as late as the "Hello Dolly" years, Armstrong was playing zigzag one-nighters, traveling in a bus that had no heat (the stylish pianist Billy Kyle is said to have died from pneumonia because of one of those tours). Sallie Young, Trummy Young's widow, recalls that since Louis never complained, the younger musicians didn't feel they had the right to, either. 

On the other hand, Glaser was probably the only man who could have extricated Armstrong from his managerial war and pushed him to the unprecedented prominence he would soon enjoy. Glaser was notorious for signing potential Armstrong rivals and putting a freeze on their careers. Louis always came first. Jack Bradley recalls that the one time he made a disparaging remark about Glaser in Louis's presence, he was brought to tears by Armstrong's non stop barrage of curses. He later explained to Bradley, "First there's music, then there's Mr. Glaser, tben Lucille."

There is much speculation about how much of Armstrong's earnings Glaser took. Lucille said it was 50 percent, but pointed out that Louis wanted for nothing. Glaser provided the ideal kind of management for him, leaving him free to concentrate on music. He didn't have to worry about taxes, bank accounts, checkbooks, contracts, the hiring or firing of musicians, or anything else but playing. In collusion with Lucille, Glaser once prepared to surprise Louis with an estate on Long Island, but he refused to move from Corona. He said he liked the neighborhood and the people. He insisted on having two wads of paper money in his pocket every night after the show. One was his, and the other was to dole out to people who lined up for handouts. At an engagement in Los Angeles, an old connection from the Cotton Club days told him he was working as a driver but his car was in the shop and he couldn't pay the bill. Armstrong bought him a limousine. Glaser hit the roof, but he paid for it. It has been argued that Armstrong's insistence on calling him Mr. Glaser when a third party was present indicated some sort of servility. No one says that of Duke Snider, who throughout his autobiography refers to Mr. Rickey. Armstrong was proud of his association with Glaser. When the two disagreed and Louis was adamant, Glaser backed off. A running argument between them concerned pot. According to Jack Bradley, "Glaser would scream and Louis would say, ‘Fuck you.' ''

Glaser may have reminded Armstrong of the no-nonsense bosses he had known and admired in his honky-tonk days, not to mention the Karnofsky family [Look at any picture of Louis Armstrong relaxing with an open shirt collar and you are very likely to see a Star of David hanging around his neck. Where did that come from? It’s an expression of his lifelong gratitude and devotion to the kindnesses shown him by the Karnofsky family when he was a seven-year-old boy in New Orleans.]

Pianist Barbara Carroll, whose husband, Burt Block, worked for Glaser for fifteen years, describes him as "very opinionated, very quick to anger, very amusing, though he didn't know he was amusing, and very generous in certain ways. He had tremendous affection for Louis and did whatever he thought would further his career, and from Louis's point of view, what could have been better? He took care of whatever made Louis happy, he was there for him." Something of an eccentric, he kept salamis hanging on the walls of his apartment, drying out, and if he liked you he'd give you one. He was famously crude: He'd order a bowl of peanuts in a posh club and flick the shells on the floor. He employed few men, but his Associated Booking Corp. handled everyone, including Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, and Billie Holiday. "He was very concerned about Billie," Carroll recalls, "but Louis was his baby." The publicity books he prepared for Louis were fifty-page "manuals" that advise how and in what size typeface he should be billed. The 1949 edition suggests: "Louis 'Satchmo' Armstrong, world's highest paid colored musician, trumpet player extraordinary and now acclaimed as the international Trumpet King of Swing.' "

In a letter to attorney William Hassan, in 1961, Glaser boasts — in a record-breaking run-on — of having brought Louis to Chicago from New Orleans, "when King Oliver was working for me in one of my places and told me to bring up this sensational young trumpet player who he said was even better than King Oliver and of course history shows that Louis Armstrong did prove to be greater and attained greater stardom than King Oliver within a few years." Glaser had little to do with Armstrong's career before 1935, but — according to Armstrong's account —he did put his name in lights for the first time, at the Sunset in 1926. "He watched over Louis like the treasure he was," Duke Ellington wrote. There can be no doubt that however ambivalent anyone else was, Armstrong had very strong feelings about Glaser. On March 31, 1969, lying in bed in Beth Israel Medical Center, Armstrong interrupted a rewrite of his account of the Karmofsky family to write the dedication page of his autobiography:

I dedicate this book

to my manager and pal

Mr. Joe Glaser

The best friend

That I've ever had,

May the Lord Bless him

Watch over him always

His boy and disciple who loved him

dearly. 

Louis Satchmo Armstrong

Glaser died five weeks later, on June 4. On July 29, in a letter to blues singer Little Brother Montgomery, Armstrong wrote, "I was a sick ass, yea. My manager + my God Joe Glaser was sick at the same time and it was a toss-up between us who would cut out first. Man it broke my heart that it was him. I love that man, which the world already knows. I prayed, as sick as I was, that he would make it. God bless his soul. He was the greatest for me + all the spades that he handled."

From the time they shook hands in 1935 (Armstrong told friends that there was never a written agreement with Glaser), Louis's star soared. That fall he signed a contract with Jack Kapp's Decca Records that lasted seven years — until the recording ban of 1942 — and produced some of his best and certainly his most diverse work. After the ban, Armstrong emerged as one of the industry's few free agents, recording for RCA, Decca, Columbia, and anyone else who could afford Glaser's asking price. In 1936, he was featured in a major Paramount film, Pennies from Heaven, opposite Bing Crosby. In 1937, he appeared in two more movies (there would be twenty-eight others during the next thirty-two years), and became the first black performer with a network radio series, sponsored by Fleischmann's Yeast. During the next ten years he became a fixture of the entertainment world. He played the best theaters, dance halls, and nightclubs; kibitzed with Crosby on radio; recorded a series of unique and inimitable trumpet concertos. Still, he pushed himself, trying to impress other musicians, playing outrageous strings of high notes that would result in a bloodied lip and bring cheers from the crowd and accusations of vulgarity from the critics. He was mesmerized by the spotlight but never unnerved by it. Jean Bach recalls the night at the Apollo when he was emcee and was supposed to introduce a white adagio team, whose name he could never remember. "So he was announcing the band members, the various acts, and now it came time to announce the adagio number and he said, 'And now folks,' and you can see he's troubled and stalling and he's thinking what the hell are their names, 'cause he knew all the other acts personally. Finally he looks out in desperation and says, 'The two ofays!'  [''a term for a white person, used by black people.”]