Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) is best known for his legendary, ground-breaking jazz sides in the late-1920s. By the late-1960s, though, jazz had undergone a metamorphosis, from popular largely apolitical dance music to an avant-garde politicized Black art movement. Musicians were experimenting with modal, atonal, spiritual, free and fusion sounds led by Davis, Mingus, Coleman, Coltrane, and a generation of performers who saw Armstrong as a forefather at best and corny sellout at worst. After the 1930s Armstrong could barely play the trumpet; he had little formal training, and the individual style he’d developed damaged his upper lip so badly he sometimes had to cut the scars off with a razor blade.
Yet, even though the zeitgeist had moved on, and despite health issues, Armstrong remained, on the evidence of the newly-released 1968 BBC set Louis in London, what he’d always been—the greatest American musician ever.
Coming off his surprise hit “What A Wonderful World,” and backed by a solid, albeit not particularly storied small band, Armstrong on Louis in London runs through a range of familiar material: W.C. Handy’s “Ole Miss”, sometimes cited as the first tune Armstrong played in public; New Orleans favorite “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In”; and Broadway staples like “Hello, Dolly.”
Armstrong, as was typical for this point in his career, does a lot more singing than trumpet-playing, which allows him to remind listeners that his raspy, gargled vocals were every bit as influential as his instrumental solos. He uses his voice like an instrument, singing behind the beat so that songs like “Blueberry Hill” have a sublimely lazy roll and swing. His phrasing and articulation are deliberately idiosyncratic and mannered, drawing out “onnnbluuuuberryhill” so it sounds like one single long swallowed glottal, and then breaking into the scat nonsense syllables that he invented, riffing and bopping with his voice like it’s the horn he can no longer play without pain. His style, in its various aspects, has had many brilliant imitators, from Sarah Vaughan to Tom Waits, but Armstrong remains the master.
Armstrong grew up an orphan in Jim Crow New Orleans; he suffered poverty and oppression, and was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement. He called the segregationist governor of Arkansas Orville Faubus a “motherfucker,” (reporters changed it to “an ignorant plowboy”) and said Eisenhower was “two-faced” for not doing more to defend court ordered integration. Nonetheless, he was often criticized in the 1960s for his perceived lack of militancy.
And it’s true his public persona wasn’t confrontational, especially by the standards of the music released that year by Aretha Franklin (“Think”) or James Brown (“Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.”) The political gestures on Louis in London are carefully bland and inoffensive: Armstrong dedicates the gospel tune “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to mothers who have sons in Vietnam—an apolitical statement of support for the troops. His one reference to race is during a duet with trombonist Tyree Glenn on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair”—Glenn playfully warns that he’ll tan Armstrong’s hide, to which Louis replies, “My hide’s already tan.” “What a Wonderful World” is a statement of sweeping optimism that’s difficult to square with the war, political violence, and racist inequity of 1968.
“What a Wonderful World,” though, as sung by Armstrong, has an acknowledgement of bitterness. Like Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” from four years earlier, its dreamy vision of babies growing up and people shaking hands, is alluring in part because the slow wah-wah trombone and Armstrong’s strolling, floating vocals are suffused with a soul and a knowledge that the lyrics can’t and won’t acknowledge.
Armstrong’s music was so powerful because his decision to make joyful music always felt like a decision; you can’t get to that kind of beauty without knowing and understanding ugliness. Louis In London was Armstrong’s last stand before his health failed him, and like his whole career, its ease is a virtuoso triumph—not least in the moments where he does play the trumpet, and takes a solo into the stratosphere.