Gary Giddins: And with Ellington, I think one of the things that works against people giving Ellington his due in some respects is that the output is so immense, you could devote your life to it and not hear everything. And so putting him into perspective is a difficult thing to do. It's-- you know, it's not just that he wrote 1,500 to 3,000 different pieces, it's that frequently he arranged them in three or four different versions and made, in some cases, dozens of different recordings that have great variations between them.

Jo Reed: That was the award-winning jazz critic Gary Giddins talking about the incomparable Duke Ellington.

Welcome to Art Works that program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works. I'm your host, Josephine Reed.

Today, we're introducing an occasional series that will appear from time-to-time in our podcast. It's a celebration and exploration of some of the country's most influential artists through an examination of their work with noted critics, writers, or other artists.

We kick the series off with a conversation with the great jazz writer, Gary Giddins about  American composer, pianist and band leader, Edward Kennedy Duke Ellington. Ellington was born on April 29, 112 years ago in Washington DC.  He moved to New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.  Fronting his own band, Ellington made his name through radio broadcasts, recordings, and film appearances and his national reputation was insured when his orchestra became the house band at Harlem's Cotton Club  in 1932 where it remained for a decade. Many members of his orchestra are considered jazz greats in their own right, but they did their best work with Ellington who melded them into one of the outstanding orchestras in jazz history. And that was only one of his talents, as Gary Giddins mentioned at the top of the show, Ellington composed some 3,000 pieces of music;  Many of his tunes are mainstays of the American Songbook, songs like "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing" and "Sophisticated Lady." By the early 1940s, Ellington also began experimenting with long-form musical pieces;    premiering his work "Black, Brown, and Beige"  in 1943 at  what would be the first of a series of annual concerts at Carnegie Hall.  His passion for longer compositions grew and Ellington continued to compose innovative work as he led his orchestra in national and international tours, playing and recording his music until his death in 1974.

When it comes to talking about jazz in general and Ellington in particular, you just can't beat Gary Giddins. He is a long-time columnist for the Village Voice, an author, essayist, producer and educator who has won a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Visions of Jazz,  a Peabody Award for broadcasting, an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and was given  Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association.  His many books include biographies of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Bing Crosby; his latest book, co-written with Scott DeVeaux is called Jazz.  Gary is second to none in his admiration of Ellington, whom he writes about frequently.

Giddins believes that Duke Ellington is certainly the most important jazz composer of the 20th century and possibly the most important American composer. When I spoke with Gary Giddins, I asked him to say more about this.

Gary Giddins: I don't know who you'd really compare with him, because American music, just as European classical music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a popular component, it used popular tunes, beer-drinking songs and so forth, and opera in particular had a public following even if you couldn't afford to go to performances, the material got into the society. That's true of very few classical composers in American music, some of Copland's ballets. But for the most part, there's been a pretty strict line drawn between concert music and popular music. And Ellington straddles that line better –only Gershwin even approaches, and if Gershwin had lived longer, might have achieved something of, you know, the sure immensity of Ellington's output. But Ellington wrote about America, he wrote about every aspect of America, he spent his entire life on trains and in cars going from town to town. He probably saw more of the country than any other American composer.

Jo Reed:  And we should point out, this was a segregated country he was seeing for most of that time.

Gary Giddins:  And usually there were black homes that were open to him because he couldn't stay in the hotels, this is true of most of the black bands, they knew in advance that there were people in the community who would put up the musicians and the members of the orchestra. Yeah, he had to put up with a lot in that respect. But he never-- there's no sense ever in Ellington's music of, you know, second-class citizenship or self-consciousness about that. He just knows he's better than that and, you know, plows right through, he's completely dedicated to the orchestra.

Jo Reed:  But as you point out, he comments on it, and I'm thinking about "Black and Tan Fantasy," which has a great backstory.

Gary Giddins:  Yes, he comments on black culture in particular all the time, I mean, his whole series of portraits of great black entertainers and black artists, the number of times the word "Black" is used in his music is, you know, extraordinary. And as you mentioned, "Black and Tan Fantasy" is a piece that really is a satirical look at the so-called black and tan clubs that you found in Harlem in the 1920s, which were considered the sort of liberal answer to the problems of segregation in that whites and blacks could hang out together. But the place where Ellington himself was working, The Cotton Club, blacks could not enter except for the servant's entrance and never get past the stage. So the irony is pretty heavy.

Jo Reed:  You said that he wasn't a Broadway composer who borrowed from jazz like Gershwin for example, but he was a jazz composer. Talk about that distinction.

Gary Giddins:  Ellington did not have a formal education in music. A number of early jazz figures did, Fletcher Henderson, for example, and Don Redman. But Ellington pretty much learned by doing. So one of the things that is exciting about his music from the very beginning, or at least from the period of late 1926 right as he's about to go into The Cotton Club and has a band that really reflects his style, is that he doesn't go by the rules of how you voice the different instruments in a section, let's say in the brasses or in the saxophone section. And he doesn't go by the prevailing style that Redman and Henderson helped to invent, which is to use a kind of a church-like call and response between the different sections so that the brasses and the reeds are constantly sort of answering each other, calling and answering. Ellington, first of all, he writes across the orchestra so he creates sonatas that nobody had ever heard before. And it's funny, I was teaching Ellington recently and we were talking about chords and whole passages in his music that are very difficult, almost impossible to transcribe. One of them that is apparently impossible, I don't think anyone has ever done it, is a piece from 1933 called "A Daybreak Express." When Ellington died and his son Mercer took over the orchestra, they were doing Daybreak for a concert, and Mercer told me that he had every kind of transcriber and they could not figure out how Ellington got the reeds to simulate the sound of a train whistle. And so finally they had to bring in a slide whistle, which Ellington would never have done. But then on top of that, Ellington, you'd be at a recording session, for example, and all the musicians have their music on the music stands for a piece. And after the first run-through Ellington will tell the trombone, the second tromboners "Over here I want you to voice with the saxophones. And over here I want this guy to lay out and I want this guy to, you know, put a B flat there instead of a B natural." And nobody is copying all these things down and making a final score. So by the time the piece is ready to record, each musician knows what his job is, but it is gone so far from what's on the paper that when the papers finally made their way to The Smithsonian, frequently the scores just don't sound like the recordings, because Ellington was constantly fooling around with it, trying to get sounds. The basic sound of his instrument is heavy bass. The saxophone section was led by the baritone saxophone instead of the alto, right away that gives it a certain weight and modernity that you don't hear in the other orchestras of that period. And then no musician made the bass a more integrated and significant instrument. You know, he hired Jimmy Bland who revolutionized the bass, but even before that sometimes he would use two bass players. And so he was constantly looking at all the possibilities of the instrument, whereas most band leaders said "Well, this is what the bass does, he just plays time, four-four, <makes bass sounds> and that's what they do." Or "the drummer's just going to keep time here" or "The guitarist is to show us what the changes are." Ellington never just settled for what an instrument….there was no rule there of what an instrument could do. So his trumpet players played higher notes than anybody else has ever played. He wrote concertos, he wrote concertos centered around the personality of each musician. He didn't write a trumpet concerto, he wrote a concerto for Cootie Williams that is, you know, based entirely on the whole concept that Cootie Williams individually brings to the trumpet, which is like nobody else's.

Jo Reed:  Well, he was really known for that, the way the musicians were just inseparable from the music that Ellington would write for them, because as you point out, it was for them.

Gary Giddins:  Written for them. There's two things that come to mind here. One, one of the reasons that Ellington was able to create some of the sounds he did, is that musicians stayed with him for decades and sometimes their entire lives, like Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges took five years off, but other than that he was, you know, with Ellington from the time he was 20 or 21 until his death. This is true of many, many musicians. So they really became part of his orchestra, this is an unusual thing. But also if you look at a lot of the careers there, now some of the musicians in Ellington's band became major, major jazz stars. Johnny Hodges is one of the great figures in jazz history all by himself, and yet one of the reasons is because Ellington recognizing his genius and Billy Strayhorn, his co-composer also, they wrote pieces that brought out all of the strengths of Hodges. Now when Hodges did leave the band for five years, he did have a hit record, one hit record, a rhythm and blues thing that he doesn't solo on. He gives the solo to a sort of a honky-tonk tenor player. But he didn't do very important work for those five years, and this is true of many musicians. They went outside, they became so famous because of their work with the Ellington band. Paul Gonsalves would get a record session here, and Ray Nance would get a record session there, but the music that makes them enduring, is the music they did with Ellington.

Jo Reed:  I think it's in your book "Jazz", where you talk about a composing session with Ellington, you know, it was quite social. All the musicians would be getting together, and it was almost like a tennis ball going back and forth.

Gary Giddins:  That's right. He's not somebody who needed solitude or who went to some mountain airy, he composed in hotel rooms, on trains. He wrote down ideas when he got them sometimes on his shirt cuff. I remember going to hear the band in the late sixties and they had just hired a bass player, young man named Jeff Castleman, and he showed me the bass book, which he inherited, which had gone from bass player to bass player, you know, over decades. And as he was showing me some of the scores, which were, you know, four bars on this one and, you know, a page here, a cocktail napkin drifted out of the folder. And I picked it up, and he said "Yeah, that's the entire music for—-" I forget what the piece was now, it was a minor piece, but Ellington had just written down a bass idea for him, and that was all he had to know, everything else he would create on the bandstand. And then he loved-- he collaborated, I mean, a lot of his most celebrated ideas he took from guys in the band, and it was quite, you know, above board about that for the most part. "Mood Indigo" was based in part on a melody that his clarinetist Barney Bigard had heard in New Orleans. But what makes "Mood Indigo" a legendary piece of music, first of all, the bridge or the counter-melody, the second melody, which is pure Ellington and the voicing, which, you know, the three musicians who play the theme of "Mood Indigo," a clarinet, trumpet and a trombone and he creates out of those three a very eerie, unforgettable exquisite sound that, you know, you just sit there and wonder "How does he do that?"

Jo Reed:  As a composer he had the laboratory of that band to play with. And it was so important to him that even when big bands were over and he wasn't making money with them, he would pay them out of his own pocket just to be able to write something and hear it.

Gary Giddins: Well, fortunately one of Ellington's talents, especially in the 1930s and I'd say into the middle ‘40s was for writing popular tunes. A lot of the pieces that began as instrumental numbers like "Sophisticated Lady" or "Solitude", when enhanced with lyrics, became very popular songs, and he had an extraordinarily high ASCAP rating. And those personal royalties, which, you know, most songwriters, goes right into their pocket, he did funnel them back into keeping the orchestra alive. The last really big pop song was one that Strayhorn wrote for the band in the early fifties, "Satin Doll." But "Satin Doll" was recorded by everybody, and that just kept generating funds. Also Ellington's records sold very well, not all of them, but cumulatively they sold extremely well. Most of his classic pieces never went out of print, have never been out of print. And so there was all kinds of money coming in that way. But still the only way the orchestra survives is by being on the road almost every night of the year travelling every place. I mean, I saw, I went to college in Iowa and I saw them play for a 4H dance, I couldn't believe it. I mean, these were guys in overalls who came in, packed the place on a Saturday night to hear the Duke Ellington Orchestra. And what I thought was so funny and had never realized before was that frequently when people hired the band they would be paying for two sets. And they would want one set to be a concert set and one set to be a dance set. But Ellington used the same book for both, that's the first time I ever realized that. The only difference between the two sets was that one of them had chairs, you know, folding chairs, and for the second set they removed the <laughs> chairs. That was the difference between the concert and dance sets. Now there were of course concert pieces that you could only play in Carnegie or that kind of a setting, but those pieces were not often played, and when he did, you know, it was like a great gift. When he went to Paris in ‘62 and played "Harlem", "Harlem", that was a moment that nobody there will ever forget, and because we have the recording of it, we won't either. But the book was just huge. There were certain pieces he didn't revisit, there were other things that audiences loved that he played virtually every night. The medley of hits. You know, I remember as a kid I used to go to hear the band whenever I could and I thought I was superior to that. You know, "I've heard him play so many times, you know, I don't want to hear the medley of hits, I want to hear ‘Warm Valley.' I want to hear, you know, ‘Braggin' In Brass.'" When I think back now what I would not give to hear the band play <laughs> the medley of hits again, because it was a brilliant thing. And he understood his audience. He was a great showman, in addition to everything else. He was extremely charming and delightful on stage.

Jo Reed:  He hated, and hated, that's a big word, he disliked the term "Jazz," he didn't want to be known as a jazz composer, why do you think that is?

Gary Giddins:  Well, because from almost the very beginning jazz was used as a kind of prison to say "You know, you're in the jazz world, that means we don't have to take you that seriously, you're not a real composer. If we're only interested in real composers we don't have to give you any consideration." Also the term has a dubious origin, and he-- I think it was Fletcher Henderson that he said to "We should call this black music or African-American music." But ultimately nobody was going to stand for that, and many great white players came into the music. And he finally had to sort of accept the idea. But there are reviews, some of them were reprinted in a book called "The Ellington Reader" where he is attacked for going over his head for writing, you know, pieces that aren't blues, that aren't jazz. And I think one reviewer said, you know, "Someday jazz musicians will get beyond playing the blues", and Ellington said "I hope that will never happen." He was very proud of the language of this music. And his whole legacy is evidence that there's nothing, there's no emotion, there's no programmatic idea that jazz cannot encompass.

Jo Reed:  Well, let's talk about an extraordinary collaboration he had with Billy Stray horn, because before I came here, I was a little weepy-eyed listening to And His Mother Called Him Bill.

Gary Giddins:  Which is one of the most perfect Ellington LPs. They were together for 28 years. Ellington discovered him in Pittsburgh when he was a kid really, a very precocious young pianist/composer who was moving into classical music. And when he heard Ellington's band he just turned around and said "That's the music I want to write." He was gay, at a time when you didn't say <laughs> that actually. But he was not going to play any kind of game about it. So he knew he was never going to be in front of the microphone, he was not going to have any kind of pretense. Lena Horne who adored Billy Strayhorn, they were probably, was probably her closest friend and vice-versa, offered to marry him so that he could have the career he deserved. He turned down Lena Horne.

Jo Reed:  Who can say that? <laughs>

Gary Giddins:  Yeah, really, really. So Billy lived the life he wanted to lead. And he wrote a piece called "Lush Life", and Ellington always said it brought him to tears. Interestingly it's the only Strayhorn piece that Ellington never recorded, at least officially. He brought Strayhorn into the band in 1940 just as the ASCAP strike was taking over on radio, which meant that you couldn't play anything by an ASCAP composer because broadcast music was … created this strike. And a whole lot of songwriters who were connected to BMI were demanding to be heard, Ellington of course was an ASCAP composer. So he started assigning pieces to his son, Mercer, which, you know, lovely for Mercer to have his name on them, but you listen to "Blue Serge" and you know damn well who wrote it, and Billy Strayhorn. And Strayhorn brought in a piece called "Take the ‘A' Train," which really is Strayhorn. And the piece just knocked Ellington out, it knocked audiences out, and became his theme song. I mean, every night that Ellington ever performed from that point on he would begin with "‘A' Train" and then he would say "That of course is Billy Strayhorn's ‘Take the ‘A' Train.'" So they became very close, and when the strikes ended and everything got back to normal they began writing suites together, that was the-- you know, Strayhorn also wrote a lot of tunes that became classic parts of the Ellington, you know, repertoire like "Passion Flower" for Johnny Hodges and "Daydream" and "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing", these are classic pieces. But they also wrote a lot of pieces together, including these intricate suites like their adaptation of "The Nutcracker", Tchaikovsky, their "Suite Thursday", "Such Sweet Thunder", which they wrote for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Strayhorn was certainly involved in "Far East Suite" and most of the major long works, not all of them, not "Harlem" for example, that seems to have been solo Ellington. And when he was dying, the last piece he sent from the hospital was a piece I forget what the original title was, it later became "Blood Count" … 

Jo Reed:  "Blue Cloud."

Gary Giddins:  I'm sorry? "Blue Cloud." Thank you. And there is a recording of Ellington's first performance of it, I think it was at Carnegie. And then they recorded it for this magnificent tribute album called And His Mother Called Him Bill.

"Blood Count" up and hot…

And it was not only musically an extraordinary album, but RCA had developed engineering the Dynagroove system in the 1960s, which just sounded great also, I mean, you never heard Johnny Hodges sound quite that brilliant. It was superbly sequenced. People forget about how important sequencing was in the LP era. In a sense, every LP that consisted of new music was a de facto suite. Because that's the way you listened to it, you listened to six tracks on a side, you spent a lot of time figuring out how to sequence this so that you didn't have songs all in the same key running one after another and so that there were tempo shifts and, you know, emotional and dramatic contrasts and all that kind of thing. And Ellington was very much a part of that. And during one of the sessions for And His Mother Called Him Bill as the guys started packing up their instruments, Ellington sat at the piano and started playing a Billy Strayhorn melody that was not orchestrated for the album called "Lotus Blossom."

Lotus Blossom up and under.

And as he's playing, you can hear the musicians packing up at first and then they stop packing up and then there's quiet. And by the time Ellington finishes there's just complete silence, and it's hard not to have a tear in your eye, it just one of the most moving performances ever.  

Back up…

And I just remember being absolutely devastated the first time I heard that album. And then, you know, CDs come along, and some idiot decides, as they do with so many, so many classic albums, that they should be sequenced in the order that they were recorded. I mean, to me this would be like taking Beethoven quartets and rearranging them because we found out that he actually wrote the adagio before the allegro so we're going to-- it's insane. So they programmed And His Mother Called Him Bill with "Lotus Blossom" in the middle of the CD completely, you know, killing the whole feeling and the whole meaning that it had for the LP. But Ellington was—the LP was a great inspiration to him. He was one of the first composers, if not the first composers, to actually write a piece for the LP format, that was "The Liberian Suite" written for the 10-inch LP which proceeded the 12-inch. And most of the great recordings he did after that were not just collections of pieces that were sitting around, they were conceived as LPs, they have a great thematic unity to them. And that's the way they ought to be heard.

Jo Reed:  I'd just like to touch on that great Newport concert in 1956, it was another one of the times where Duke Ellington had been written off, he's like schlooshed to the end of the program.

Gary Giddins:  Well, that-- 

Jo Reed:  Set us up and tell us what happened there.

Gary Giddins:  That is a great moment. God, I wish I could have been there. Unfortunately I was very small. Ellington had lost some of his key musicians in 1951 including Hodges, Lawrence Brown. The drummer whom he loved, Louie Bellson, left to accompany his wife, Pearl Bailey, and that was a difficult blow. Now they were all coming back in ‘56 after five years, he had his guys back. And he's playing the Newport Jazz Festival, and he really has been written off. He was put on so late, everybody else was going over-time, and at one point Ellington screamed at George Wein "What are we the animal act?" And finally they get on, and they got out and they played a couple of pieces, and then they went into a piece that Ellington wrote in 1937 called "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue." And it was a two-sided 78 and it had a cadenza to connect them, an improvised cadenza. And during the fifties when Hodges and all those people are out of the band, frequently when they would perform it, because we have live recordings that have come down to us, Ellington would play the cadenza on piano, he'd play, you know, six, seven blues choruses and then they'd go into the second part. This night he had Paul Gonsalves, the tenor saxophone player, take it over. And it's just one of those magical moments where Gonsalves worked up such a pitch of energy and fury playing the solo, Joe Jones, the legendary Count Basie drummer, was standing at the lip of the stage and he had a rolled-up newspaper. And he started banging in time. And now the place is going crazy. Meanwhile while all this has started, the place has emptied out, because, you know, you want get back to the parking lot so you can get your car and not have to stand in line for two hours. So, hundreds of people are getting up and walking out, and then suddenly everybody starts realizing something's going on here, so they turn around and walk back to the field.

"Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" up and hot.

Well, by the time it was over it was just pandemonium, and fortunately for Ellington's band, there was a reporter from Time magazine who called the magazine and said, "I just saw something absolutely historic," and they had never put Ellington on the cover. And, actually, because he had been written off as a particularly good news idea, and that cover, the recording, brilliantly edited by George Avakian, and he brought Ellington into the studio to re-record mistakes to tighten it up. It was released as "Live at Newport," but again, Ellington believed in the technology and he made a perfect album. That album sold a million copies, many more than that by now, of course, and it just put him right back at the top. He was a Columbia artist for the next, I forget, six, seven years. Then he went to RCA, where he had another great contract, at least until Strayhorn's death, and then something else amazing happened. After Billy died in what was it, '67 or '68? I think it was '67. As if to prove that he wasn't finished by the loss of Billy Strayhorn, he went into one of his most prolific periods. This was the period of "The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse," "The New Orleans Suite." He just wrote "The Uwis Suite" about Australia. He just wrote piece after piece, and it's some of his most glorious music, and then one of the great punch lines in all of music history: After he dies, he allows Norman Granz at Pablo to release something that he had recorded in 1959 called "The Queen's Suite." He wrote it as a gift for Elizabeth. He pressed two copies. One was given directly to her. I don't think she knew that she was the only person alive who had a recording of this piece of music written for her. The other piece went into a vault and was never released until after he died and of course is now considered one of the supreme Ellington masterpieces.

Jo Reed: Gary Giddins, thank you so much.

Gary Giddins: My pleasure.

That was jazz writer Gary Giddins talking about jazz legend Duke Ellington.You've been listening to Art You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  Adam Kampe is the musical supervisor.  

Excerpts from "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Mood Indigo" and Take the A Train from the cd Ellington at Newport, 1956.

Excerpts from Blood Count" and "Lotus Blossom" from the cd And His Mother Called Him Bill.

Excerpts from Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" from the CD This is Jazz No. 7: Ellington.

Excerpts from Concerto for Cootie from the cd Sophisticated Lady.

All music was performed by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra.

The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. And now you subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U—just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page.

Next week, director Howard Shalwitz talks about directing the Pulitzer-prize-winning play, Clybourne Park.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter.  For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

ADDITIONAL MUSIC CREDIT:

Excerpts of "Black and Tan Fantasy," composed by Duke Ellington and Bert Miley, "Moon Indigo," composed by Duke Ellington, Irving Mills, and Barney Bigard, and "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" and "Concerto for Cootie," composed by Duke Ellington, all used by permission of EMI Music Publishing. [ASCAP]

"Take the A Train," "Blood Count," "Lotus Blossom," composed by Billy Strayhorn, used by permission of SONY ATV Music Publishing. [ASCAP]

All excerpts used courtesy of SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT.

Gary Giddins: There's a famous story Earl Hines used to tell about after he sang for the first time he said the guys would stick their heads out of the window when it rained, hoping to catch a cold so they would sound like Louis Armstrong. I mean, everything he did was imitated. He was the one who just showed you what this music could be. Before Louis Armstrong there was at least one great player in Sidney Bechet, but it was a music that came from a specific community at a specific time. What Armstrong shows is this is a way of playing music. This is not just a folk art. This can accomplish every kind of human emotion, and the trick, if you want to pay this music, is not to copy me or, if you're a white guy, to copy a black guy because you think he's more authentic. Is to find yourself. And when people understood that, jazz by the early 1930s became international. And once you understand that the music is that capacious, that huge that it can enfold every kind of musician, then it becomes a world achievement. It's no longer something from a specific time and place.

That was the award-winning jazz critic Gary Giddins talking about the one and only, Louis Armstrong. Welcome to Art Works, the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works. I'm your host, Josephine Reed. Today, Gary Giddins and I celebrate the legacy of the great Louis Armstrong whose birthday we mark today.

Born on August 4, 1901 in New Orleans; Louis Armstrong is one of America's great artists.  It is impossible to exaggerate his contributions to the development of jazz: both as an instrumentalist and as a singer.  He was a virtuoso trumpet player, whose improvisations opened the way for solo instrumental performances; he improvised as a singer too bending melody and lyric in a way that revealed new dimensions to songs. Louis Armstrong had hits in every decade beginning in the 1920s and going straight through to the 1960s. He was a charismatic performer who played an average of 300 concerts a year, traveling around the world, and touring Africa, Europe, and Asia under sponsorship of the US State Department. He was the force behind  The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation to create music programs in schools and libraries throughout his adopted city of New York.  Despite Armstrong's considerable fame and success, he lived in a modest house in Corona, Queens and would hang with kids on his stoop.  Armstrong died in his sleep there in 1971.  He never stopped playing music.

When it comes to talking about jazz in general and Armstrong in particular, it's hard to do better than Gary Giddins, a critic who perfectly balances his passion, intelligence, and knowledge.  He is a long-time columnist for the Village Voice, an author, essayist, producer and educator who has won National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Visions of Jazz, a Peabody Award for broadcasting, six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and was given Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association.  Gary Giddins has written many books, among them a biography of Louis Armstrong called Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong.  Giddins once wrote that Louis Armstrong is "the single most important person in the development of jazz."  But when I spoke with Gary at his NYC office, he wanted to amend that statement.

Gary Giddins: I would go further and say in American music, because he codified swing and because when Armstrong came along, a lot of the best black musicians thought that the blues was a fad, a fashion like ragtime that a lot of white people  had bought into because they liked watching these sexy black mamas with their boas around their necks singing, people like Bessie Smith. There were many Smiths in that period, and these were very sophisticated musicians and they thought that maybe the blues was just something that was going to go the way of ragtime and that they were going to be playing a music based on much more sophisticated harmonies and so forth. Armstrong proved that not to be the case, and when he came to New York in 1924, the first rehearsal he did with Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman-- the arranger who was writing non-blues pieces, which I would actually characterize as anti-blues pieces in some respects—said that as soon as he heard Armstrong stand up and play of course a trumpet on a piece called "Copenhagen," he knew that he would have to revise his entire approach to the orchestra. All these musicians in the band who thought of him as a rube, a Southerner, a guy who parted his hair funny. We're talking about people like Coleman Hawkins and Buster Bailey and guys who wore suits tailored around their bodies that look just cooler than could be, and it was so hip and sophisticated and knew classical music and were just so much a part of the New York elite, and Armstrong to them was like a country boy. And they all, all of them, changed the way they played. They all started bringing in the blues tonality. Now, the one that you could really see most dramatically was Duke Ellington, because Ellington had been writing kind of a fancy, polyphonic orchestrated music in the middle '20s. None of it is listened to anymore, and then after he hears Armstrong he goes out and hires Bubber Miley, interestingly a trumpet player who was formed in the crucible of the blues but is not an Armstrong imitator, which was not defined at that time. He had his own interesting style, and at that point when Ellington accepts that the blues is the basic scale on which jazz is composed…

Jo Reed: Let me interrupt you. Can you explain what you mean by the blues scale, by the blues tonality?

Gary Giddins: There are a lot of different ways to define the blues. The blues has a form; it's a 12-bar form, sometimes 16 bars, sometimes 8 but basically a 12-bar form with 3 chord changes. But the blues is also, of course, a feeling. People have always talked about feeling blue, and it's also a scale, a tonality, where notes are pitched just left of center, in the cracks between two adjacent white keys on the piano, and that sound, that tonality, is the harmonic and in some ways the melodic basis of the music, and when Ellington realized that, when Henderson realized that, that's when jazz really becomes very much alive.

Jo Reed: Armstrong, as you point out, is unique in the sense of his impact as an instrumentalist and his impact as a vocalist. His singing is astounding.

Gary Giddins: He's the only figure in Western musical history who is equally influential as an instrumentalist and as a vocalist, and you have to- this is a snobbish response, I suppose, but it always amazes me that so many singers in the '20s who we don't listen to anymore who were very corny singers, Rudy Vallée being the most conspicuous example, got it immediately when they heard him. They just knew. They knew that their style of singing was going to have to change. I mean, Rudy Vallée, who became a wonderfully adept comic-actor, you know, he created the role of Boss in "How to Succeed in Business." And he had quite a career, but as a singer, hardly anybody ever listens to him anymore. He sounded always like he, holding his nose, very nasal and very corny. And yet he wrote the introduction to Armstrong's first book, Swing That Music, in which he says- he's a little condescending. He says, "This may be difficult for you to understand that this man with this very gravelly voice has influenced every single singer in America," but he did. He influenced country singers. He influenced pop singers. Bing Crosby was the first guy to really take it into the mainstream, which is what Artie Shaw was referring to when he said, "Bing Crosby is the first hip white person born in the United States." He became friendly with Armstrong very early in the game and realized that that time, that paying attention to where "the one" was could transform you. It could indemnify you against any song you sang. I remember when I started writing my Bing Crosby biography and I was talking to a musician, very much a modernist, and he said, "Oh Crosby! I love Crosby." I said, "Really? I'm sort of surprised," and he said, "Well, where do you think we got the songs from?" He said, "In the 1940s and '50s, when we were coming up, he was the only guy on the radio, the white, mainstream pop singers, who had time." A lot of other singers who were very popular, like Perry Como, really had terrible time. He was a good ballad singer, but that was about it, but Crosby, no matter what he sang, you could always hear that "one." And this was one of the things he brought to music, but the main thing, the thing that revolutionized the industry, not just the style of the singers, was that it was no longer the music, the song, that was the main thing; it was the singer. Before Armstrong, the industry was run by music publishers, and all they cared about was pushing sheet music, and if you wanted to record, you sang the sheet music as it was written. Hopefully you had a decent voice, good pitch, all of that, pleasant timbre, whatever, but you supplemented, you surrendered to the song. When Armstrong came along, I mean, he sings songs like "Stardust" and "Body and Soul" that everyone in the world knows, and he completely recomposes them on the record. Now, he creates a standard for improvisation that very few singers would ever be able to match, but every singer understood suddenly that you can embellish. Frank Sinatra was not an improviser, per se, but he was a great embellisher. He knew how to change a note to make a phrase better, more powerful, and this became standard. Before Armstrong, the music-publishing hold was so great that you were not allowed to change pronouns in the lyrics, which is one of the reasons there were so few women recording in that period. So, Bing Crosby, for example, recorded a tune, "There Ain't No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears." Now, five years later, after Armstrong-- two years later, he would've sang "There Ain't No Sweet Gal," same one syllable, but, no, you listen to Bing's record and it's "There Ain't No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears," because you could not change the pronoun. After Armstrong, after Crosby, after that great changeover that came about in the early years of jazz, the '20s, when it became popular in the '30s, the power completely changed to the artist.

Jo Reed: Well, Armstrong certainly transcended a lot of the material, though in the case of "Stardust," I mean, he took that gem and, oh, God, what he does with "Stardust" I think is amazing.

Gary Giddins: It's amazing, isn't it?

Jo Reed: Absolutely, and I love that song. I love Hoagie Carmichael.

Gary Giddins: There were a number of songwriters who hated musicians doing that. Richard Rogers was notorious, where he actually attacked Ella Fitzgerald's magnificent "Rogers & Hart" album because, "If I wanted that note to be that note, I would've written it that way." Jerome Kern was similar. When he died, Kern's estate thought they were doing his ghost a favor by suing Dizzy Gillespie, who recorded four Kern tunes in bebop arrangements; too much liberties were taken. But there were other songwriters like Hoagie Carmichael or John Green, who wrote "Body and Soul." I met John Green in the, I guess, early '80s, late '70s, and I asked him rather nervously, "How did you feel about Coleman Hawkins' "Body and Soul"?" It's one of the supreme jazz improvisations, and hardly a note in it is from Johnny Green's actual song, even though it's called "Body and Soul" and he gets the mechanical royalty. And he said, "How do you think I felt? Do you know what it feels like to realize that something you wrote can inspire a genius like Coleman Hawkins?" That's a very rare attitude among those songwriters. They thought that what they wrote was-- they wanted it engraved in stone, and so jazz was troublesome. So Armstrong, his "Stardust," you know it's "Stardust." You know it's Hoagie Carmichael, but it's not like anybody else's.

Up and hot "Stardust"

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

Such lonely nights

oh baby lonely nights

dreaming of a song

The melody haunts my reverie

And I am once again with you

When our love was new, oh baby

And each kiss an inspiration

Now that baby you know was long ago

Oh beside a garden wall

When stars are bright

You are in my arms

The nightingale tells his fairy tale

A paradise where roses bloom

Though I dream in vain

In my heart it will remain baby

My stardust melody

Oh memory oh memory oh memory

I mean he actually depends the feeling of the song. He gives it an emotion that goes beyond what is already pretty much a perfect piece of songwriting, an inspired piece of songwriting.

Jo Reed: Louis Armstrong did a number called "Black and Blue." Talk about the significance of that song?

Gary Giddins: Well, "Black and Blue" was a song written for review by Fats Waller in the '20s, and the theme of the song was one that was very current then and was for many decades before and for many decades later, which was about the color lines within the African-American community. The song is sung by a dark-skinned woman, who has lost her man to a light-skinned woman, and she's saying, "What did I do to be so black and blue?" That's the context of the theatrical revue in which the song was initially created and known. And at the Cotton Club, they had what was I think called the "brown paper bag standard." You could not be in the chorus unless your color was no darker than a brown paper bag. They wanted all very light-skinned, tan women, not-- if you were black, you did not work in the Cotton Club, at least in the chorus line. And so Armstrong takes this song and he records it, and simply by the force of his interpretation it becomes the first genuine protest song in the history of the mainstream recording, I mean, there were folk tunes and things that were arcane and had sort of speaking in tongues references, but this was a popular tune by a popular artist, and suddenly it was about race in terms of white and black. Now, some of the lyrics, when we look at it now, are old-fashioned or even distasteful: "I'm white inside, but that don't help my case." You wouldn't write something like that now, but it didn't matter, because what mattered was Armstrong's performance, his just completely embracing this idea about the idiocy of segregation and of condescending to people because they have dark complexions. That's what the song is about. That's what the song means when Ralph Ellison turns it into the primary metaphor at the beginning and the end of "Invisible Man," his great novel. And it's what happens. It's what we see coming alive in the audience in Africa, in Ghana, when he sang it for Edward R. Murrow CBS cameras, and Prime Minister Nkrumah is in the audience with tears glistening in his eyes hearing Armstrong sing "Black and Blue" –one of the great performances of that piece.

Up and hot "Black and Blue"

How will it end...ain't got a friend

My only sin is in my skin

What did I do to be so black and blue

(instrumental break)

Jo Reed: Well, in your book, "Satchmo," you divide it basically into two parts. It's the entertainer as artist and then the artist as entertainer, and this division really has particular significance, I think, for Armstrong.

Gary Giddins: Yeah. At the time I wrote the book, it seems a case that had to be argued, because so many people- the approach to Armstrong was that he was this fantastic artist, this incomparable genius of the 1920s, and then he became popular and just became a kind of public, clownish performer on "Ed Sullivan." I mean, Gunther Schuler is himself a distinguished composer and has had a great deal of influence in jazz and third-stream music and so forth, wrote in his very important book, "Early Jazz," that Armstrong should've been given by the government some kind of a stipend so he didn't have to demean himself by singing "Hello, Dolly!" night after night, which of course <laughs> you'd have had to put a gun to Armstrong's head to get him off the road, and he loved doing that. He loved audiences and he loved- and to me it shows a complete misunderstanding of the man's genius, because "Hello, Dolly!" he transfigured just as mightily as he did "Black and Blue."

Jo Reed: I mean, is there anybody else we can stand to hear sing that song?

Gary Giddins: Nobody.

Jo Reed: No.

Gary Giddins: Nobody. Absolutely not. When Frank Sinatra recorded it, he sang "Hello, Louis!" No. He made it his own song, and, in fact, if we talk about that song for a second, when he recorded it in Chicago, David Merrick was about to mount the show on Broadway, and in those days they would sort of try to get an important performer to sing a song hoping that it would boost sales. And so they contracted for Armstrong to do it. He was not particularly excited when he saw the lead sheet. The producer and everybody involved seems to have thought the band guys all thought that the flipside was going to be the hit, which was "Got a Lot of Living to Do," from "Bye-Bye, Birdie." And the piece "Hello, Dolly!" when the show opened was performed as a dirge, without real tempo. It was, <sings> "Hello…" as Dolly makes her entrance down the grand staircase. And the show was in trouble; it was closing, and then suddenly this Armstrong record takes off and it becomes the number-one record in the country, the only record that year in '64 displacing the Beatles. Imagine being displaced by a guy who made his first hit in 1926. I mean, you're never going to see another guy who has hits that far away from each other.

Up and hot – "Hello, Dolly"

Hello, Dolly

This is Louis, Dolly

It's so nice to have you back where you belong

You're looking swell, Dolly

I can tell, Dolly

You're still glowin', you're still crowin'

You're still goin' strong

I feel the room swayin'

While the band's playin'

One of my our old favorite songs from way back when

So take a wrap, fellas

Find an empty lap, fellas

Dolly, never go away again

Anyway, but in tribute to Armstrong's recording, they rearranged it for the show. It became a hot number, a rhythmic number, and David Merrick's way of thanking Armstrong was to put him in the movie.

Jo Reed: The only watchable part of the movie.

Gary Giddins: The only watchable part of that dreadful movie, quite agree, and yet he's only in the movie for two and a half minutes and he's top billed, as he deserved to be, but that was a way of acknowledging the fact that he saved the show in addition to making something of the song.

Jo Reed: Why are people so offended by popularity?

Gary Giddins: Hell, I don't know. I just don't know. I was in high school when Decca put out an album called The Rare Louis Armstrong, something like that. It was all pieces from the '30s. Dan Morgenstern, great critic, mentor of mine, wrote the liner notes, in which he just said almost matter of fact, "These are one of the greatest recordings of Armstrong's career," and yet the album was called "Rare Louis Armstrong." This stuff from the '30s had been dismissed because it was a big band, because it was as much singing as trumpet player, because they were popular. And yet you listen to them and they're among the most mind-blowing performances in jazz history. Now, everybody can seize that, but then, after those were conceded, people put down the '40s band or they would put down the '50s band. The first edition of the Grove encyclopedia of jazz basically says his career ends in 1946 musically and everything after that he's just a showman. This is just absolute nonsense. Can I tell you an Armstrong story?

Jo Reed: Please.

Gary Giddins: So, something that I'll never forget: There was an event. I forget what this occasion was, but it had to do with opening the Armstrong Museum or the Armstrong House in Queens.

Jo Reed: In Corona…

Gary Giddins: in Corona. There was a cocktail party early on and everybody in the jazz world was there, I mean, a lot of musicians, lot of critics. It was just such great fun. You just knew everybody, and we were all drinking and eating canapés and having a grand old time, and during the whole time they're playing Armstrong recordings in the background. And they go into a record that is sort of a real cult item among Armstrong fanatics but that was also very popular. The public dug it, and that is his 1956 recording of "When You're Smiling." And I am standing with a group of people. I can still remember who they were, and as it starts, we just all stop talking, and you can hear around the room people are stopped talking when the trumpet solo gets under way, and somebody on the podium gets up there finally to introduce the program: And he says two words and somebody shouts at him, "Not yet!" And he just stood there and everybody stood there until that recording was finished. They did not whip it off the machine, and then somebody said, "Now!" It's that kind of performance. You can't interrupt it.

Up and hot……"When You're Smiling"

Gary Giddins: It's just something that's so overwhelmingly powerful and emotional it completely cuts the 1929 version, which-- that's a masterpiece, because 1929-- because only us very hip people knew about it. But the 1956 recording is unquestionably superior, and so many of the recordings he made in the '50s, his version of "Blue Turning Gray Over You." This is a recording that he did for-- also mid-'50s album of Fats Waller tunes, and it's just one of his great trumpet solos. And there's so many instances of this almost right up until the end.

Jo Reed: In 1947 one of my favorite songs, "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" and if you didn't know, you just have to listen to Louis Armstrong and you will.

Gary Giddins: Absolutely. This was a piece that he did in a movie, a really silly movie called New Orleans. It was the only film that Billie Holiday was contracted to be in, and when she got out there and realized she was playing a maid, she walked off the set after a couple days filming and never returned, which is why her part disappears so quickly. But there's the music.

Up and hot - "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?"

Do you know what is means

To miss New Orleans

And miss it each night and day

I know I'm not wrong

The feeling's getting stronger

The longer I stay away

Miss the moss covered vines

The tall sugar pines

Where mocking birds used to sing

And I'd like to see

the lazy Mississippi

A hurrying into spring …

Oh Mardi Gras….

The music is real, even when the script is foolishness. When you hear him sing it's always for real. It doesn't matter what he does. He made a record for the Disney Company in his very last years. I think it was called "Disney Songs the Satchmo Way," and he does "Chim-Chim-Cheree." I mean, the arrangement is as hip as the version John Coltrane made in the same decade, all one a very modal-styled vamp. And my favorite solo is on "The Ballad of Davey Crockett." I mean, he just sings that song as if he were having more fun than anybody in the world, and to dismiss that as some kind of buffoonery is to completely miss the fact of Armstrong's approach to music, which is that he is an extremely generous man. He's generous in every way and he's generous to the culture, and everything that he embraces he makes better, he makes part of himself. He is superior to nothing. That's part of his genius. He knows how great he is. I mean, we know that from his letters. We know it from his memoir. We know it from private interviews that were recorded. He never had any doubt, even when black bandleaders like Fletcher Henderson wouldn't let him sing because of the gravel in his voice, he said Henderson had a million dollars in the band and never even knew it. He knew how good he was, but he had his incredible humility in the way he approached material. He never approached it condescendingly. He looked at it and said, "What can I do with this?" and he almost always could do something.

Jo Reed: You met him. You brought him to your college, Grinnell.

Gary Giddins: Grinnell in Iowa, yeah.

Jo Reed: Tell us about that.

Gary Giddins: Oh, boy. The college was having a colloquium with about 50 of the most celebrated artists and intellectuals in the country. Ralph Ellison was there, Marshall McLuhan, Rauschenberg, S.I. Hayakawa. I mean, it was pretty amazing stuff, and it was just panels for two or three days of all these people. And the president of the school asked-- told the faculty person who was-- I was the Concert's Programmer and Film, and they asked me to get somebody really special, because this was going to be a special weekend. It was a Saturday-night dance. So my first choice was Armstrong. I never thought we had a chance, but one thing bookers hate is an empty night, so you always go on that chance. So, as it happens, Armstrong had almost every night in the week booked somewhere in the Midwest but that night happened to be free, so we got him at a very reasonable price. I was beside myself. I couldn't believe it. I was, what, 19? I was going to meet Louis Armstrong, bringing him to Grinnell. He showed up with the band. It was in the boys' gym. Actually, it was in the gym, but the band was in the boys' locker room. That was our green room in those days. All the musicians are back there and I walk over to Marty Napoli and the pianist, and he was like me. He was like a kid who couldn't believe his luck of playing with Armstrong. I mean, he'd been in the band for years – oh, it was amazing talking to these guys. They were just all still turned on, and he said, "Pops is going to love you," so we wait until the doctor finishes with him, and he walks over to him and he says, "Pops, this young man"-- he knew my name. I mean, I told it to him, but you don't expect him to remember. He says, "This young man, his name's Gary Giddins, and he loves you and would really like to meet you." And so he came over to me and we shook hands, and it was an awesome moment. I mean, a jolt went through my whole body and I remember feeling some disquiet, because, first of all, he had skin grafts on his upper lip when he was younger and used to play all those high C's. He tore it one too many times and they had to stitch up with skin taken from another part of his body. In pictures they would sort of clean it up a little bit, but seeing it in person, it was a pretty disquieting-looking scar, and also he had a sort of a gray pallor. He looked his age. He looked a little older than his age, and I thought, "Why is he still on the road? Why is he in Grinnell, Iowa?" And there was a series of steps that you walked up to mount the stage, and it was-- the stage was brightly lit, but the steps were in complete darkness, completely in shadow. And I stood back and I watched the guys, Armstrong being the last of them, climb the stairs, and by the time Armstrong headed for the stairs, I went out to the front, and when he came out of the dark, it was a different guy. His color was back. He had that smile. He had that energy. He was radiant. I mean, my friends and I, we were just-- I mean, we still talk about it. I remember somebody saying, "He's playing as though he were auditioning for a gig." He couldn't play every tune at that period. What he would do is he'd play a piece and then he'd say, "Now we're going to have the trombonist," and then he'd walk back where you could hardly see him in the shadow and he would rest up for four minutes while the trombonist did it and then he would come back. But when he played, he gave everything. It was unbelievable.

Jo Reed: Finally, Gary, three pieces for someone who's never heard Louis Armstrong, to give them a sense.

Gary Giddins: Well, you certainly want to hear "West-End Blues" from 1928. That's sort of the--jazz's Beethoven's Fifth. It just is a piece that you have to know. From the 1930s, I think I would choose "Swing That Music" from the big-band period, and then from the '50s I'd go with either "When You're Smiling," but you have to really hunt to find a Louis Armstrong record that's disappointing. There is a record of country tunes I don't much care for, and there is a few concert records that probably should never have been released or that were released after his death. But for the most part if you get a good collection of the so-called "hot five" and "hot seven" records, I mean, you can't really go wrong, but … Warning: Armstrong, like Ellington, is pretty much an addiction, and once you really fall into it, once you really begin to get it, you want to hear it all. You really do.

Jo Reed: Gary Giddins, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Gary Giddins: My pleasure.

Jo Reed: Thank you.

That was jazz writer Gary Giddins talking about the great American musician, singer and artist, Louis Armstrong.

You've been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  Adam Kampe is the musical supervisor.  

Excerpts from "Stardust," "Hello Dolly," and "What Did I Do to Be So (Black and Blue)," used courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.

Excerpts from "Do You What It Means to Miss New Orleans" and "When You're Smiling," used courtesy of Universal Music Enterprises.

The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. And now you subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U—just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page.

Next week, David Seidler talks about his inspiration for his academy award winning screenplay, The King's Speech.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter.  For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

ADDITIONAL MUSIC CREDITS – PUBLISHING.

Excerpt from "Stardust" written by Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish from Stardust, used by permission of EMI Mills Music and Peer Music, Ltd [ASCAP.]

Excerpt from "When You're Smiling…" written by Larry Shay, Mark Fisher, and Joe Goodwin from Louis Armstrong: The Definitive Collectionused by permission of EMI Music Publishing [66.6%] and Music By Shay o/b/o The Songwriters Guild of America[33.3%], ASCAP. 

Excerpt from "What Did I Do to Be So (Black and Blue)," written by Andy Razaf, Thomas Waller, and Harry Brooks, from Louis Armstrong: The Definitive Collection, used by permission from EMI Mills Music; ANNE RACHEL MUSIC CORP % WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC INC; and RAZAF MUSIC C/O RUMINATING MUSIC, C/O WIXEN MUSIC PUB, INC. [ASCAP.]

Excerpt from "Do You What It Means to Miss New Orleans" written by Louis Alter and Edgar DeLange from Louis Armstrong: The Definitive Collection, used by permission ofALTER LOUIS MUSIC PUBLICATIONS % THE SONGWRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA and DE LANGE MUSIC CO .C/O BUGHOUSE % BUG MUSIC INC.

Exerpt from "Hello Dolly," written by Jerry Sherman, taken from Louis Armstrong: The Definitive Collection used by permission of MPL Communications [ASCAP.]