Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971

Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900- 1971, by Max Jones and John Chilton (Little, Brown, 256 pp., $9.50). A revisionist biography by two British critics whose discernment and scholarship put their American fellows to shame. The first contributors to the Armstrong critical canon built in a bias in favor of his classic, pre- 1930 period that is only now being redressed. By 1930 Louis had taken the folk roots of jazz, stamped them with his creative genius, and fashioned a more sophisticated music that would never again be without his accent: the most avant-garde jazz of all time, as Victor Schonfield observed. But Louis couldn’t stop there, and the authors seem to acknowledge the early 1930s as the golden age—the same period former critics had scorned as commercial. This book even does an overdue salvage job on Louis’ 1935-1945 big-band days; though a similar effort for the Ambassador Satch period comes more from the heart than the ears. The book is brightened with nearly two hundred photos, most of them fresh, and with pages and pages of Louis’ puckish letters. The Bach of jazz now has the book he deserves.

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N. McCaffrey

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Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900- 1971, by Max Jones and John Chilton (Little, Brown, 256 pp., $9.50). A revisionist biography by two British critics whose discernment and scholarship put their American fellows to shame. The first contributors to the Armstrong critical canon built in a bias in favor of his classic, pre- 1930 period that is only now being redressed. By 1930 Louis had taken the folk roots of jazz, stamped them with his creative genius, and fashioned a more sophisticated music that would never again be without his accent: the most avant-garde jazz of all time, as Victor Schonfield observed. But Louis couldn’t stop there, and the authors seem to acknowledge the early 1930s as the golden age—the same period former critics had scorned as commercial. This book even does an overdue salvage job on Louis’ 1935-1945 big-band days; though a similar effort for the Ambassador Satch period comes more from the heart than the ears. The book is brightened with nearly two hundred photos, most of them fresh, and with pages and pages of Louis’ puckish letters. The Bach of jazz now has the book he deserves.