Thoughtful ‘Satchmo’ transcends at the Alley
No jazz artist takes Louis Armstrong seriously. He is both the most famous jazz musician in history and the one whose music is examined the least.
Conservatory students begin their studies in the 1940s, with Charlie Parker as straight-ahead jazz’s founding father, and move on through bebop, cool jazz, hard bop and post-bop, stopping cold with John Coltrane’s death in 1967 — as if Armstrong was absent the whole time.
He’s an easy man to discount. Just look at Armstrong’s brightwhite teeth and eyes, listen to his voice that sounds like a cigarettesmoking Kermit the Frog. He has been called a sellout, an Uncle Tom and a crowd-pleasing populist who never evolved when bebop, then rhythm and blues, then rock ’n’ roll all seemed to render big-band music irrelevant.
Remember “Hello, Dolly”? “It’s a s--- song,” says an old, introspective and foul-mouthed Armstrong in Terry Teachout’s “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” a thoughtful one-person show at the Alley Theatre through March 18 that seeks to refute any simple or dismissive interpretation of Armstrong.
Focused on the racial, artistic and financial conflict that existed within Armstrong’s life and work, the show takes a hard second look at the man, raising all the questions about him that, over the years, we’ve forgotten to ask.
Notice not only what Armstrong, played by Jerome Preston Bates, says about the song that beat The Beatles in the Billboard charts but how he says it. The expletive is far from extraneous. Armstrong smiled and swooned onstage but sweated, coughed and swore like a sailor offstage. He praised his lifelong white manager, Joe Glaser, in the press yet harbored resentments for the man in private. He made a fortune off “Hello, Dolly,” but here he is, shirt unbuttoned, oxygen tank within arm’s reach, telling us it’s “s---.”
That’s because “Satchmo” doesn’t provide one interpretation of the man. Rather, it asks us to consider if Armstrong was a pioneer or a token — if he was an entertainer who overcame racial boundaries or one who merely played into what white audiences were willing to tolerate.
Teachout, who also directs the show, carefully navigates these conflicts by asking the performer to embody Glaser and rival trumpeter Miles Davis. Bates’ Glaser has a prototypical Chicago bite, the kind of accent that’s fast and masculine and unsentimental. The manager here is both hero and villain, symbolic of the strings-attached nature of Armstrong’s success.
Bates’ Davis, meanwhile, is wispy and bellicose. Davis is the Malcolm X to Armstrong’s Martin Luther King Jr., a true black artist, so to speak, who believed in preserving and upholding black art without accommodating white taste. He thinks Armstrong is Glaser’s puppet.
At times, the characters are hard to distinguish from one another because Bates doesn’t stretch his voice’s range enough. But as the audience learns the lighting cues that signal the switches in character, “Satchmo” begins to feature a multidimensionality that is rarely seen in one-person shows. Armstrong, hacking away after a show at the ritzy Waldorf Astoria, speaks to us in his dressing room. The room lights up or dims depending on the scene, offering a subtle complement to the nonlinear nature of the show’s storytelling.
“Satchmo,” in other words, doesn’t progress through Armstrong’s life in order. Dutiful chronology, Teachout recognizes, is the death of drama. Rather, the show is separated into themes — race, privilege, legacy — that dance and battle within Armstrong’s anecdotes.
Armstrong, as a character, doesn’t try to make any specific point about where he sits in musical history. But he’s highly self-aware, so much so that he asks the Alley Theatre to turn on the house lights to prove that, be it at the Waldorf or the Alley, the people who pay to see him are nearly all white. It’s a brilliant meta-theatrical conceit that, sadly, works perfectly.
Consider, though, Alley Theatre interim artistic director James Black’s claim in the program notes that Armstrong “transcended race.” Is that what a nearly all-white Alley audience at an Armstrong show suggests?
On the surface, the word “transcend” speaks to the kind of joy Armstrong’s music evokes — no matter who, what, when or where. This is proven when Armstrong sings the jubilant, virtuosic introduction to “West End Blues,” comparing his musical lines to Pavarotti-esque opera. It’s one of the play’s most effective moments, written clearly by Teachout, a former jazz bassist and Armstrong biographer. The scene shows us why Armstrong endures. His songs are transcendent.
The Armstrong, and certainly Davis, in “Satchmo,” however, would argue with the implication that to appeal to white people is to rise above some kind of pre-ordained racial boundary. To transcend means to surpass. Even Armstrong would think that’s a strange word to describe what a black artist does when white people listen to him. “Satchmo” works as drama because it dives right into this debate.
And, of course a biography of Armstrong must wrangle with race. All popular black entertainers — from Josephine Baker to Beyoncé — share the central question of “Satchmo,” which is whether mainstream appeal can ever be granted to a minority artist without also sacrificing something.
The play has a few retorts to Black’s idea of racial transcendence. In other words, “Satchmo,” as a piece of theater, doesn’t just talk. It talks back.