I think what gets lost in the fog of time is the full picture of Louis Armstrong. Most people today know him as the old d00d that sang Hello, Dolly and Wonderful World, wiping his brow between the occasional toots on his horn. Matt Glaser nailed Armstrong and his contributions during a 1998 interview for Ken Burns' Jazz:
Why is it that we are still talking about Louis Armstrong, almost 100 years after his birth?
Oh, man. I think the true, profoundly intellectual contribution of Louis Armstrong has not been fully understood by the general public. Here's this wonderful, warm, avuncular guy who's known to the people around the world as the guy who sang, "Hello, Dolly," smiling and laughing. But it reminds of a story of a, Freeman Dyson said about the physicist Richard Fineman. He said when he first met him he thought he was half genius and half buffoon. But after knowing him for a long time he realized he was all genius and all buffoon. And people, people expect art to be serious and, and dry and something, whereas Louis' art is as deep and as profound as any art that's ever been on Earth. And yet it's, it's an art of joy and, human experience embodied. So, and yet I think at the same time Louis was just part of the intellectual trend that was going on in other, in the arts and in the sciences. He was the first person to embody abstraction musically. Other people used abstraction in music, but over time. Composers would sit down and take an idea and toy with it over time, but Louis could spontaneously take a melody and abstract it, that is remove all the unessentials from this melody and be left with just this pure vision of what the melody could be. And this is of course an idea that has been the grist for Jazz musicians since that, since that time. And it can all be traced back to Louis, this idea of abstracting a melody.
You had a quote about they say that all philosophy...
Oh, yeah. I think it was Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher, said that all of Western philosophy can be reduced to commentary on Plato. You can say that all of western philosophy is merely commentary on Plato. Well it's absolutely true that all of Jazz is commentary on Louie Armstrong. And you can show specific examples of this when you listen to the Miles Davis of the "Kind of Blue" album, the way he plays on "So What." Ba, ba, boo, boom, boo, boo, bee, bum, bee, bum, bum. Boo, boo... a simple melody that a, an initial motif is developed over time. That idea comes from Louis, and Miles himself said, "You cannot play anything on a trumpet that Louie Armstrong, Louie Armstrong did not play already." If you listen to his, the, the most profound advances that Louie Armstrong made were in the area of rhythm. Jazz is the ultimate temporal artform. Music is a temporal artform, but Jazz is ultimately the temporal artform. And it's about the human experience of time. How is time embodied? So you listen to Louis playing a quarter note, and suddenly your whole experience of that day has changed. You hear him playing this one quarter note, and time is not moving along in the way that it normally moves along. And if you listen to modern Jazz, it's taken sixty years for Louis' idea of sophisticated polyrhythm to meld down into the Jazz rhythm section, that is into the drums and the bass. When Louis was playing, he sounded like he came from Mars. He's playing the most sophisticated things imaginable and the other guys are playing very, what sounds now very dated. Louis' music never sounds dated, but the bands that he played with often did. But now sixty years later you have bands that are finally absorbed his messages, his ideas rhythmically. And that's still, this is still what Jazz musicians are working on, sixty years after his main recordings.
That's terrific. Can you imagine a moment in Denmark — what's this story?
Well, all of us have had these epochal moments where you, you see your, you see something or you hear some music and your life is changed forever. For me, it was seeing a film on television of Louie Armstrong playing in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1933, playing the tune "Dinah." He is absolutely on fire, unbelievable. And, and his solo on "Dinah" is a, is a perfect example of this abstraction. And it occurred to me that it was possible and no one will tell me otherwise, it's a fantasy that I treasure, that Werner Hizenberg could have been in the audience in Copenhagen in 1933. He lived in Copenhagen at that time, and in 1933 he won the Nobel prize for his work on quantum mechanics. And I've always had this fantasy that he and a couple of other scientists after a hard day of work on quantum mechanics went out that night, heard Louie Armstrong, and were completely blown away, and realized that in a completely different idiom, he embodied everything that they were working on. Profound new ideas about time, space and human, the human place in the cosmos. And they saw Louis playing and they thought, "Wow, that's it." In a language utterly different than their scientific language. And yet it's the same... a modern response, this is the story of modernism.
If you look at these paintings by Mondrian, when he started out painting a bridge when he was a young man, it looked like a bridge. You see it, it's a bridge. Then gradually over time, he would remove elements from that picture of the bridge, remove more elements, boil these elements down until,until there was just a gesture of a bridge, until the 1930's you would just see two lines in space. And, and Louis I'm sure was not thinking, "Oh, my God, I've got to do something just like Mondrian on the trumpet." But innately he was. Somehow these ideas were in the cosmos, and I personally would rather hear Louie communicate these ideas than anybody else, either Hizenberg or Mondrian or anybody. Because for him, these ideas are embodied, experienced and can be communicated in an embodied and experiential kind of way.
I wanna just talk a little bit about Einstein, because I really think the greatest parallel between Armstrong is with Louis, is, is with Albert Einstein. First of all, there are these obvious parallels that both of them were founders of new ways of looking at the world. Louis Armstrong founded Jazz phrasing, a new way of experiencing time. And, and Albert Einstein founded the theory of relativity. They were thought of by the general public in similar kinds of ways. They were avuncular, warm people who were known all over the world. I mean, Albert Einstein was known by everyone, even people who had no idea of what his theories were about. And they generally liked him, they liked his vibe. He was a warm, kind of strange-looking kind of guy who smiled alot. Louis Armstrong was known all over the world by people who had no real interest in Jazz, as this incredibly warm communicator of joy, even if they didn't know exactly why he should be so famous. So on, on that obvious level there's some relationship to them. But it occurred to me that there are a number of components that people commonly understand to be part of the theory of relativity. And one of those is that as you move closer to the speed of light, time slows down. So it occurred to me once while listening to a Louie Armstrong solo that he embodied this aspect of, of the theory of relativity. The faster the music would go, the more Louie sounded utterly at ease and utter, utterly relaxed. And you can actually do an experiment, what Einstein called "gedanken experiments," thought experiments. If you imagine all of the music removed except Louie's playing. And when you're left with just Louie's playing, what you have is freedom and eternity and rest. It's a paradox of music that music is both about being and becoming and music is the ultimate art of change and becoming. And yet at the same time, Louis' playing embodied being, just eternity, there is no time. And, and the faster the music went, the more Louis sounded relaxed.
He had slowed down time...
He had slowed, I think so. I really think so.
Somehow in his gut he was able to make time stop. And I think that's true for all great musicians, but no one more so than Louis Armstrong. That the faster the music went, the more it sounded like he was utterly at peace and utterly at ease. It's an extraordinary thing, really extraordinary.
Do you feel there's a connection between Einstein and Armstrong?
I've always felt that there's this connection between Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And there's a connection between them on a variety of levels. They both initiated radical changes in human thought in their particular fields. Armstrong in music and Einstein in physics. Also paradoxically enough, they both, although they started these revolutionary schools, they both were kind of left behind by the, by their progeny. That is, Einstein never really got on board with quantum mechanics. He would say to Nils Bohr, "I refuse to believe that God plays dice with the universe." And Nils Bohr would say, "Stop telling God what to do." And Louis Armstrong, who really gave birth to Bebop, essentially in his solo on "Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas," he plays da, da, doop, da, doop, da, dap, do, dat, salt peanuts, which became the theme of Dizzy Gillespie. But he never really dug Bebop, and the Beboppers never realized their incredible debt to Armstrong.
Was there another scientific thing you wanted to throw out?
Yeah, I read a book by James Gliche called Chaos, which is about complexity theory and the Mandlebrat set. And it proves that in a finite space you can have infinite detail. And when I was listening to Louis play, I thought, "This is it. One note of Louis Armstrong is a finite amount of time." It takes place in three seconds, but there's an infinite amount of detail in that one note, it's complexity embodied.
I think we needed Louis Armstrong to get through this century. Do we need him?
I, you know, I'm just very happy to be on Earth when there is Louis Armstrong. People try to imagine what it was like to be on Earth before Mozart. Mozart's music is so important to us. Try to imagine what it was like to be on Earth before Louis Armstrong. It has meant so much to so many people, his music. It is, he makes people happy. I can't imagine a higher calling in life than that, I can't imagine a higher calling than making people feel joy.
Here's some choice Louie cuts - take the time to *really* listen to 'em.
Louis Armstrong & His Hot Seven: Potato Head Blues
[purchase]
Louis Armstrong: Tiger Rag
[purchase]
Louis Armstrong: Swing That Music
[purchase]
