{"id":858,"date":"2016-09-15T14:02:01","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T14:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/parsons\/?p=858"},"modified":"2017-03-29T19:45:57","modified_gmt":"2017-03-29T19:45:57","slug":"spider-sounds-louis-armstrong-master-of-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/2016\/09\/spider-sounds-louis-armstrong-master-of-modernism\/","title":{"rendered":"Spider Sounds: “Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong> \u201cSpider Sounds\u201d invites members of the University of Richmond community to share their thoughts about items in the Parsons Music Library<\/a>\u2019s collection. The links included will take you to the library catalog record for the item in question<\/a>, or to additional relevant information.
\nToday\u2019s installment of \u201cSpider Sounds\u201d comes courtesy of UR Music Department<\/a> faculty member Dr. Gene Anderson<\/a>. Dr. Anderson is the author of a number of articles about early jazz and the analysis of wind music. He has been kind enough to share a review of a recent biography about Louis Armstrong’s early career entitled Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism<\/strong><\/a>. Thanks, Gene!<\/em><\/p>\n

Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism<\/a><\/strong>
\nby Thomas David Brothers<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Louis<\/p>\n

Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. By Thomas Brothers. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014.<\/a><\/p>\n

It is difficult to imagine what more there is to know about Louis Armstrong. WorldCat<\/a> lists over 9,000 works about the musician in over 17,000 publications scattered among libraries throughout the world. Besides two published autobiographies and dozens of unpublished autobiographical writings, Armstrong\u2019s life has been recounted in a host of personal interviews, recollections by contemporaries and published biographies. Of the latter, Thomas Brothers\u2019 Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism<\/a><\/em> is the most recent, winning the 2014 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music<\/a> and becoming a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Biograph<\/a>y. Master of Modernism<\/a><\/em> is the third Armstrong-related book by Brothers, a Professor of Musicology at Duke University<\/a>, preceded by an edited selection of Armstrong\u2019s unpublished writings, Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words<\/a><\/em> (1999), and Louis Armstrong\u2019s New Orleans<\/a><\/em> (2006), of which this volume<\/a> serves as a sequel.<\/p>\n

The main thesis of Master of Modernism<\/a><\/em>, which focuses on the period between Armstrong\u2019s departure from New Orleans to join King Oliver<\/a>\u2019s Creole Band in 1922 to his successful transition into the swing era in the early 1930s, is that the trumpeter\u2019s success \u201cdepended on his ability to skillfully negotiate the musical and social legacies of slavery,\u201d and whose career, \u201ccan be understood as a response to these interlocking trajectories.\u201d The fulfillment of such a thesis demands nothing short of a cultural history of the period, which Brothers eloquently and compellingly provides. Although the author contributes few new revelations to Armstrong\u2019s well-known life story, he furnishes the most coherent narrative of these years to date by adding details and filling in chronological gaps by means of little-known archival photographs, first-person recollections from contemporaries and primary sources like black newspapers and periodicals. <\/p>\n

Armstrong, armed with an exceptional ear, extraordinary memory and a nascent ability to read music, left his hometown with a thorough grounding in black vernacular music\u2014its blues<\/a>-infused aspects of collective improvisation<\/a>, freak and obbligato<\/a> playing (\u201cplaying second\u201d) having been fostered variously by plantation music<\/a>, the heterophonic<\/a> singing of the Sanctified Church, King Oliver<\/a>\u2019s \u201cmonkeyshines\u201d or \u201cragging the tune\u201d to Manuel Perez<\/a>\u2019 leads, and the hawking of wares by street vendors, Lorenzo and Santiago. Most importantly, he was immersed in what Brothers calls the \u201cfixed and variable model\u201d of performance which \u201cbecame the key ingredient in Armstrong\u2019s mature style.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brothers concludes his investigation by summarizing the characteristics that made Armstrong a great melodist. The author\u2019s stances on a few controversial issues have been addressed by others, but this exquisitely written and exhaustively researched work <\/a>stands as an invaluable addition to the literature and will very likely come to be regarded, with its companion, Louis Armstrong in New Orleans<\/em>, as the definitive study of Armstrong\u2019s early career.<\/p>\n

\"Spider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: \u201cSpider Sounds\u201d invites members of the University of Richmond community to share their thoughts about items in the Parsons Music Library\u2019s collection. The links included will take you to the library catalog record for the item in question, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61217,15223,15236,37977],"tags":[38100,15236,15232,38063,38097,38098,336,37977,38093],"class_list":["post-858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arachnophonia","category-collection","category-guest-post","category-spider-sounds","tag-book","tag-guest-post","tag-jazz","tag-louis-armstrong","tag-music-department","tag-music-faculty","tag-review","tag-spider-sounds","tag-trumpet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/parsons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}