I can remember one day on Facebook being castigated by this white jazz vocalist as not being a serious student of jazz because I didnt like Louis Armstrong.
I also remember wanting to rip out this white jazz trumpet teacher’s tongue when he said John Coltrane was the same as Louis Armstrong because “its all music”.
Both of these instances highlight how a jazz music can be taken out of its cultural context.
See I first heard John Coltrane’s “Alabama” in the movie “Malcolm X”. For me John Coltrane & that whole 60’s era repesented bold defiance & black rebellion. All the representations of Louis Armstrong I had seen was a smiley-face jigaboo Uncle Tom who had once sang “I am white inside”.
Even my hero Miles Davis who acknowledged that while Louis Armstrong was a great trumpeter, also had a great discuss for Louis house negro mentality.
Thankfully, one day at a Master Class during the DC Jazz Fest, Cyrus Chestnut made Louis Armstrong more palatable for my black revolutionary taste. Cryus explained find something in his music that speaks to me. Go past the smiling face and dig deeper.
I took Cryus’ advice and even found an article about how Louis Armstrong inspired one of the lawyers who was apart of the Brown V Board of Education case.
Someone once said a sign of maturity is the ability to embrace ambiguity. The black experience is a very heterogenous heritage shaped and colored by geography, economics, skin tone and time.
I realize now that the many of the more outspoken revolutionaries where often light skinned, middle class or northerners. Racism hit people very differently based on their skin tone, class & location.
Louis Armstrong was a dark skinned man, brought up in the Deep South, the son of a prostitute. For him to smile while being adored by many whites was indeed a revolutionary act.