This year is, sort of, the centennial year of Louis Daniel Armstrong. The doubt concerns the long held belief that Satchmo was born on the Fourth of July, 1900 - a date now widely thought to have been cooked up between himself and his manager, Joe Glaser. The actual date of birth, it seems, was August 4th, 1901, which suggests, with some justification, that the Armstrong centennial celebrations might conceivably last into 2001.
Assorted Armstrong events kicked off at New York's Lincoln Center in July and will continue for the foreseeable future, with concerts, films, lectures and a genuine attempt to present the celebrated, but misunderstood, Armstrong as something less of an awkward mystery. And it's necessary, too, because that's precisely what Satchel-Mouth is to many jazz musicians and fans - an uncomfortable conundrum from a very uncomfortable time.
The problem with Louis is, of course, more to do with perception than fact, but for many he remains no more than a mugging entertainer who played up to white America's notions of "the happy negro". As writer Stanley Crouch put it so well in the New York Times, "He appeared to be too genial, too willing to accept film roles and tell jokes that many thought came too close to the gutter of burnt cork, red lips and imbecilic behaviour. His innovations as a trumpet player and singer, once they had been absorbed, were ignored as his inferiors began to talk as if he were no more than the most famous Uncle Tom in the world."
These criticisms, once they were made, were bound to stick. No self-respecting cool young jazzer was going to grin like Louis. Nobody wanted to be anybody's Uncle Tom and musicians reacted - Miles Davis by playing with his back to the audience, as anti-vaudeville an approach as possible. In fact, when Dizzy Gillespie finally played with Louis it was seen as a something of major event - as if Armstrong had needed the benediction of the younger player. What they were all forgetting, however, was that Armstrong was a born entertainer and that his connection with the minstrel tradition, whether they liked it or not, was a cultural fact.
More importantly, however, was that to dismiss Louis Armstrong, for whatever reason, was to ignore the very source of the music they were all playing. He had been, after all, probably the most individual musician of the century and by far the most significant in jazz. In terms of interpretation he was by far the most radical and easily the most influential. So complete were the effects of Armstrong's playing that just about everybody copied him, even people who didn't know they were doing it. And so Satchmo's approach made its way into every corner of American music, from show tunes to country and western, from singing techniques to tap-dancing and, in terms of jazz itself, into every single development in the years to come.
Born in New Orleans in 1901 (1900 if you're a romantic), Louis Armstrong's slave ancestry, according to biographer Tad Jones, went back to 1818. His earliest musical appearances saw him covered in flour and winning an amateur contest in "whiteface". At 13 years old, he fired off a blank pistol and ended up in The Colored Waifs' Home for Boys - a year-and-a-half sentence for disturbing the peace. On his release he set about being a serious musician and within a few years he was the hottest thing in the Crescent City, playing at joints on South Rampart Street with Kid Ory, Freddie Keppard and Joe (King) Oliver. In 1921 (again, confusion suggests 1922) he joined Oliver's band in Chicago and, although he was there to play second trumpet, he seriously put the wind up the locals, all fine musicians, including Bix Biederbecke. Nobody had heard anything like him before and, in 1924, he was off to New York as part of The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. Astonishingly, all of this was before he made the seminal Hot Five and Seven recordings! After those landmark dates, while Potato Head Blues and S.O.L. Blues began to set the standard for jazz musicians, Armstrong was suddenly the most imitated musician in America. It was also a point where the business side of his career took something of a turn, thanks to a meeting with Joe Glaser - who would manage him for the next 35 years.
Hooking up with the Luis Russell Orchestra, Armstrong made a string of classic records and began to make his many movie appearances - all of it confirming him as one of the top stars in America. As the big swing bands of the 1940s began to die out, Armstrong, in 1947, made his famous Town Hall appearance with a small band. He would then lead an All-Star Band based on that particular set-up for the next 24 years.
It was the movies, however, which presented the smiling Louis to the wider world, and which, for some, did the most damage to his image.
The acting career began in 1936 with Pennies from Heaven with Bing Crosby. Many movies later, High Society in 1956 saw him alongside Crosby and Sinatra. The Five Pennies, with Danny Kaye, came out in 1959 and 10 years later he appeared with Barbara Streisand in Hello Dolly. It all helped to mark him in the public consciousness as the great American entertainer - something Satchmo himself would certainly have welcomed. He was an old-school entertainer and, genius or not, it was all showbusiness.
If Louis Armstrong had been a football player, his fans would have chanted, "There's only two Louis Armstrongs!" The first was the jazz genius - the innovator, the inventor and the technical superman. The second was that inveterate mugger who took on the pop charts, with considerable success, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. And this, of course, is the material for which non-jazzers now know him best - songs like What A Wonderful World and Hello Dolly - the latter knocking The Beatles off their 14-week stint at number one and making him the oldest person ever to have a number one in the US. Those hits, which were to continue to score posthumously, were Armstrong's biggest commercial successes by far but, in some ways, they served only to mask what had gone before - his pivotal role as the most important single figure in US popular music since the beginning of the century.
In recent years, Armstrong's place in jazz has been properly acknowledged by younger musicians, notably Wynton Marsalis, who never tires of talking about and re-presenting the music. In fairness, Dizzy and Miles also came around to seeing past all that "walking the bar" showmanship and to acknowledge what was already evident in their playing - that Armstrong was the man. Whatever some people felt about his presentation at times, everybody eventually had to take their berets off to the man who was in at the very start of jazz, helped invent it, changed music and song completely, and was, without question, the greatest instrumentalist of them all. Every single one of them played like Louis Armstrong and yet none of them really could.