"My favorite Louis Armstrong anecdote concerns his audience with Pope Paul VI. The Pope, so the story goes, asked Armstrong if he and his wife had children. ''No, Daddy,'' the trumpeter cheerfully replied, ''but we're still wailing.'' Though the chances Armstrong actually said this, or anything like it, are close to nil, it is the sort of thing one would have wanted him to say, and the two men did in fact meet at the Vatican in 1968 -- which is, of course, the real point of the story. They were photographed together, and an unmistakable glint of pleasure can be seen on the Pope's tired, worn face; as for Armstrong, he looks blissful. Perhaps he was thinking about how far he had come from New Orleans, where he was born in direst poverty in 1901, the bastard child of a 15-year-old girl who had no idea that her son would change the face of Western music and in so doing become the most celebrated American musician of the 20th century." Terry Teachout
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Armstrong's celebrity cannot be separated from his artistry; it is central to his place in the history of jazz, which is harder to explain than is commonly understood. He did not invent jazz, nor was he its first important figure, and it is not even quite right to call him the first great jazz soloist (Sidney Bechet preceded him, and Bix Beiderbecke emerged as a major soloist at the same time as Armstrong, almost to the month). Instead, he became the first great influence in jazz -- the player other players copied -- and one reason he cast so long a shadow is that he was as great a personality as he was a musician. He really did perform with everyone from Bessie Smith to Leonard Bernstein; he really did smoke marijuana virtually every day of his adult life; he really did write the finest of all jazz memoirs, unassisted by a ghostwriter; he really did end his concerts (some of them, anyway) by playing 250 or more high C's, capped with a high F; he really was adored (no lesser word is strong enough) by all who knew him. Is it any wonder so many of his contemporaries longed to play the way he played and sing the way he sang?
Such a man among men is a natural subject for biographers, the latest of whom has given us what is, incredibly, the first full-length, fully annotated study of Armstrong to be based on his private papers, now on deposit in Queens College's Louis Armstrong Archives. But Laurence Bergreen is a professional biographer, not a jazz scholar (his previous books were about Al Capone, Irving Berlin and James Agee, an oddly assorted trio), and the very first sentence of ''Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life'' -- ''In the beginning, he was a sound, and only a sound: a strange blend of happy cacophony and tormented caterwauling'' -- points to trouble ahead. No self-respecting jazz writer would have allowed a fruit-filled sentence like that to get into print, and Bergreen, though clearly an assiduous researcher, writes as if jazz were a foreign language he had studied late in life for the sole purpose of writing Armstrong's biography.
Here, for instance, is what he has to say about the epoch-making introduction to Armstrong's 1928 recording of ''West End Blues'': ''He starts off with what would become the most famous horn solo in jazz, a nine-measure opening cadenza of such dizzying difficulty that for decades aspiring horn players would struggle to imitate. It is a summons to the soul, dignified and daring.'' Well, yes, but it is also a precisely balanced, rhythmically subtle musical statement, one that deserves better than the table-pounding to which Bergreen is quickly reduced whenever he attempts to discuss specific examples of Armstrong's art. (More often, he simply does not bother: ''Weather Bird,'' arguably the greatest of the records Armstrong made with Earl Hines, is disposed of in one perfunctory sentence.) Revealingly, neither ''West End Blues'' nor any other Armstrong solo is reproduced in musical notation. Imagine a biography of Mark Twain that contained no excerpts from his writings!
Numerous other passages suggest, to put it as gently as possible, that Bergreen came late to the party. ''Few jazz enthusiasts would point'' to Armstrong's work ''with the Luis Russell Orchestra or his Decca recordings as highlights of his career,'' he writes, though more than a few jazz enthusiasts have been doing just that for a half-century and more. Indeed, some critics (and many trumpeters) regard Armstrong's recordings of the 1930's and 40's -- particularly his near-operatic big-band remakes of such classic small-group performances from the 20's as ''West End Blues'' and ''Struttin' With Some Barbecue'' -- as the high-water mark of his output, while others cite them as proof that he had succumbed at last to the malign forces of commercialism. As for Bergreen, he skates heedlessly over the whole matter, apparently unaware of the very existence of one of the most viciously contested battles in jazz scholarship, much less its implications for his own work.
The fact that Bergreen has nothing useful to say about Armstrong the musician necessarily throws his book badly out of balance, but this does not mean ''Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life'' is devoid of merit. By far the best thing about it is the large amount of space devoted to excerpts from Armstrong's autobiographical writings -- including various unpublished manuscripts -- and his vast and vivid correspondence. (Gary Giddins drew on much of the same material for his 1988 coffee-table book, ''Satchmo,'' still the best short treatment of Armstrong's life.) As readers of ''Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans'' (1954) know well, Armstrong was a marvelous writer, and while a well-edited Louis Armstrong reader and a volume of selected letters would be hugely important contributions to the literature of jazz, Bergreen's book will serve as a stopgap until some smart publisher, noticing that Armstrong's centenary is around the bend, finally gets the idea and starts to quarry his papers in earnest.
By letting Armstrong speak for himself, Bergreen succeeds in shedding light on a little-understood aspect of his artistic achievement: his moral development. This phrase may sound a bit creaky when applied to a man whose appetite for marijuana was rivaled only by his interest in sex (Armstrong, Bergreen reveals, wrote pornographic short stories in his spare time in addition to cheating enthusiastically on all four of his wives). But when it came to his lifework, Armstrong was positively Victorian. ''Louis's autobiographical writings, shorn of their bawdy jokes and reflections on jazz, can be seen as a series of moral lessons,'' Bergreen observes, and he is exactly right: the American dream has had no more loyal exemplar. Deserted at birth by his natural father, sentenced at the age of 11 to Colored Waif's Home in New Orleans, Armstrong did not repine; instead, he returned love for hatred and sought salvation through work. ''I think I had a beautiful life,'' he told a reporter a year before his death in 1971. ''I didn't wish for anything I couldn't get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it.''
Armstrong's moral wholeness was caught in the words his mother spoke to him on her deathbed in 1927: ''Son, carry on. You're a good boy. You treat everybody right, and everybody white and colored loves you. You have a good heart. You can't miss.'' Thirty-seven years later, I saw him for the first time, singing ''Hello, Dolly'' on ''The Ed Sullivan Show.'' I didn't know who the old man with the ear-to-ear smile was, but I can remember my mother calling me into the living room and saying: ''This man won't be around forever. Someday you'll be glad you saw him.'' That was in 1964, back when the public schools in my hometown were still segregated, two decades after a black man was dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had once been wrought, white people came to love Louis Armstrong -- and, just as important, to respect him -- not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the self-evident goodness of the man who made it. In this not-so-simple fact is to be found the ultimate meaning of Armstrong's epic journey from squalor to immortality: his great and generous art spoke to all men in all conditions, and helped make them whole.
Terry Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, writes the Front Row Center column for Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress.
