what we should say instead is 42,000 came out to vote. these are people who are not living a great life in exile so you still have 42,000 people who are invested in the country. i go back to a number. there are 230,000 refugees who are registered. that is the hardest number that we have got. and it doesn't represent everybody. those are the people interested in being settled. the rest of them, whatever the numbers are want to go home. so the fact we have 42,000 votes tells you at least march of 2010 there were that many people who are still invested in iraq. now if this government that is about -- if this government does not find a way to either support them or bring them back, then my guess is there won't be a single

one who votes next time. .. >> guest: mr. allawi who is now the head of, strangely the head of the sunni bloc has spoken about helping exiles. and the hashemi who was a

president and allied aligned himself with allawi also has been a proponent of doing something about the exiles, so let's see what they do when they come into government, if they do. here is what i think the refugees are going to be watching for. where are the cabinet post, who gets them and the reason i say that is, in an economy where the government is the major employer, you need to have a government job to have a future in iraq. there is just not enough of a private economy and to have a government job, it is pretty much done on a sectarian basis. this is not a system that works on merit. the best candidate does not always win. if let's say a kurd becomes the head of the foreign ministry, you can pretty much bet that most of the people who have

those jobs in that ministry are all kurds and i think what sunnis need to see is, where do we fit? how can we get jobs? how do we form support our families, so on a very basic level they want to know that. the second thing they want to know is who is going to fix all these houses that are in dispute? how are we going to get our houses back? is anybody going to talk about that? is that going to be discussed in parliament? is the army going to work harder on that? if they are going to be money that we actually get if we come back. the government had offered $800 but they ran out of money last year nobody got it and there were ngo's who were documenting how much people got in only 10% of the returnees got that money was meant the return he stopped coming back because you need a pot of money to get started again. so they do have specific issues, and both they and the internally displaced are watching for the specific kinds of policies

before they really make a decision, because for many of them they understand that once you go back you can't really get out again. >> host: and what are we going to see as this political jockeying unfold? we have talk about how the refugees are going to see in what they are going to look for. what will the surrounding countries look for and what kind of alliances can we expect? one of the things we saw right before this election was allawi being invited to saudi arabia and trying to strengthen his relationships with some of the arab powers. so, what will some of those neighbors, jordan, syria, saudi arabia, iran, what will they be looking for? >> guest: they will all be looking for something different and they all put a ton of money into the campaigns because they all had their candidates. this is a region where everybody watches everybody else and if

you are weak you can expect that your neighbors aren't going to devil which is what happened. i think they are, the neighbors are going to be watching for a coalition that emerges that makes the country more stable. and that will tell them where iraq is headed. if there is some power sharing in the region, what it means to iraq's sunni neighbors is that iraq is going to go it alone. there will be an iranian proxy and that will be important to saudi arabia, to egypt, to jordan and even to turkey in some ways. i think what the iranians are going to watch for is the baathist, what they consider the sunnis, aren't too strong. because they fought a long, long war with saddam's iran and they want to make sure that never happens again. that is an existential crisis for them and the balance will be what will be interesting. and that will be what everybody

is watching for. >> host: deborah amos, thank you very much. >> guest: thank you. >> terry teachout, drama critic and commentary magazine chief culture critic discusses his biography of jazz musician louis armstrong. politics and prose in washington d.c. hosted this long our event. >> good evening everyone. i am the music buyer here at politics and prose. very, very happy, delighted, thrilled that we got to do this event tonight. i finished the book just recently, loved every minute of it. there is a lot of wonderful testimony all throughout the book by musicians, who were transformed.

their lives were changed and by listening and hearing louis armstrong. and that is a running theme throughout the book. the book is just marvelous and expressing what louis was able to do in a radical way. and how his career was just suffused with this love that is palpable, that comes jumping out at you when you hear his music. every jazz fan comes into jazz via a song or an artist or an album. it is all different but sooner or later you do get back to louis. i came through miles, listening

to miles, don cherry, lester bowie but eventually i did get to louis. i was staying in france for a little while and i heard a show called let them. for an hour they played the same song, different versions in chronological order and you really got to see what jazz musicians did with a song. they always went in chronological order in the first song you heard was always the stiffest original cast recording from a broadway play that was probably in the french archives and nowhere else. and oftentimes louis armstrong would record one of the earliest versions of the song or go but when you heard the difference between that original kind of plodding version and the radical musicality, joy again,

inventiveness, lyricism, it really brought tears to your eyes and really made you understand what jazz is. terry teachout conveys this all throughout this book. i am going to just bring him on, and we are going to have to video clips. we have some audio. we are going to have some music afterwards during the signing. for the q&a, please come to the microphone over there so the c-span audiences can hear your question. and please, without further ado, please help me welcome terry teachout. [applause] >> thank you very much. this has been a big couple of days for me.

yesterday i found out-- point that right at me. yesterday i found out that someone had been nominated for an naacp image were bored and 10 minutes after that i found out it was going on to the "new york times" bestseller list next week or go. [applause] i had to brag about that. it is a wonderful thing to be here. i am delighted to be here and i am delighted to be talking about a man who was delightful. you can say a lot of things about louis armstrong which obviously is why i wrote the book about him but if you have the good fortune to speak to anyone who knew him personally, be it casually or intimately, you can bet that they will all tell you the same thing. he was a truly lovable man. now i have spent most of my life in the company of artists and one thing i can tell you is that the greatest ones tends not to be especially lovable.

likable, yes, sometimes. charismatic, yes, sometimes and not infrequently irresistible for its part of human nature for us ordinary people to want to warm our hands at the fire of the great creator. but those buyers are very hot indeed and i have known any number of people who got badly burned as a result of keeping company with greatness. louis armstrong was different. he was a great man who was also a good man, kind and generous and considerate and unlike many good men, he wasn't even slightly boring. he was utterly unpretentious. he didn't talk in pompous clichés. he loves to laugh and he knew how to make other people laugh, and on top of all that, he was the greatest jazz musician who ever lived. armstrong was one of the cultural giants of the 20th century. america has never produced a more significant artists. i rank him right alongside eric

copeland and robert frost and frank lloyd wright, but unlike those men, he was also a great entertainer whose music was and is loved by ordinary people all over the world. in 1964, he actually knocked the beatles off the top of the pop charts with his recording of hello dolly. aaron copland never did that. you can see why i was drawn to the idea of writing the biography of so singular a creature as satchmo or pops as his friends call them. needless to say i am not the first person to have done so. but i am the first biographer to have had access to 650 real to reel tapes that armstrong made during the last quarter-century of his life, many of which contain astonishingly candid recordings of his private after-hours conversations. armstrong switched on his tape recorder whenever the spirit moved him and so you could hear

him chatting with friends over dinner, getting high with an old pal and his dressing room after the show, even trying to coax his wife into bed at 5:00 in the morning for a little hanky-panky. not only did these tape shine a bright line on his personality which was far more complex than people realize that they also make it possible for us to know the full stories of such key moments in his life as his 1930 marijuana arrests. that is a big part of what made me want to write soap one. nowadays most folks know me as a drama critic. i am the drama critic for "the wall street journal" but i'm also a trained musician, the first one in fact ever to write a fully sourced armstrong biography. i started out as a professional jazz musician, a bass player before becoming a full-time writer. that experience i believe has helped me to understand the armstrong music in the world in which he lived and worked from the inside out.

in "pops" i have tried to translate that knowledge into plain english and we bit into the incredible story of armstrong's life. as duke ellington said, he was warned poor, died rich and never heard anyone on the way. but how did he work that miracle? in the course of writing the "pops" i came to the view that armstrong's triumph was as much a function of his personality as of this musical genius. if you don't understand the one, you won't understand the other and it is armstrong's personality to which i want to introduce you now. so let us start in the best possible way by watching him at work. what you are about to see if all goes well is an excerpt from the earliest surviving film of armstrong on stage. it was shot in copenhagen in 1933. he is singing and playing dina with a band of musicians from europe. would you play the video please?

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♪ [applause] speier now i've been playing that clip from coast to coast and every time i do, everybody claps. that is the louis armstrong who took the world by storm in the 20s and 30s. the public armstrong. in "pops" i take a backstage to meet the private armstrong for there is war to louis armstrong, much more, than most people know. though he was known the world over for his million old smile armstrong was a tough-minded, realistic and who always knew the score whether it was out and about race relations or the

music business or anything else. he loved to tell tales about his life and he told them very very well. for he was not just a gifted musician but a gifted writer. to lula bankhead, one of his biggest fans, said that he uses words like peace drinks strings notes together, artistic way and vividly. armstrong strung his words together very neatly indeed when he told the story of his encounter with big gun toting shall kabul gangster in 1931. he was working at a bot that nightclub called the showboat when what he described as a big, bad good named frankie foster came backstage after the show and told him that he would be playing in new york city the next night. armstrong said he already had a gig in chicago. foster pulled his pistol and caused it. here is how armstrong described what happened next. jesus, it looked like a canon and sounded like death come so i looked down at that steel instead well, maybe i do open in

new york tomorrow. i tried to get that side of "pops," of armstrong into "pops" because it is as much a part of his genius as anything else. joe blaser his manager once said that armstrong was a real, real man. he reminds me of something that my namesake, the roman way rd. 2000 years ago. i am a man and nothing is alien to me. louis armstrong was a real man and nothing was alien to him and he turned it all, good and bad, into music. i am going to read you part of the prologue to "pops" in which i try to convey armstrong's personality and words. now an excerpt from "pops", a life of louis armstrong. it goes without saying, or should that louis armstrong's music was the most important thing about him.

yet his personal story in addition to shedding light on the wellsprings of his art is important in its own right and no less in need of a historically aware interpretation. he was a child of his time, not ours and some of the things he did and said as an adult are barely intelligible to those who know little of the world of his youth. even in his own time he was my-- widely misunderstood often by people who should have known better. to understand him now, we must see him as he was, a black man born at the turn-of-the-century in the poorest quarter of new orleans who by the end of his life was known and loved in every corner of the earth. what manner of man succeeded in making so amazing a journey? how did he rise above the unforgiving circumstances of his birth to become a culture shaping giant and what marx did those circumstances levon him? everyone who knew armstrong

agreed that he was what he seemed to be. what he saw was what you got said joe maran he who played the clarinet and his band, the all-stars. jack radley, a photographer who armstrong befriended in the 60s, described him as down-to-earth, natural, completely unpretentious, simple and the best the best sense of the word. it was his genuineness as much as his genius to which his fans responded. he once reacted to a radio interviewer's pronouncement that he was a living american legend by dropping his pants and giggling. i don't care what company i am and, what infirmity and no, he said on another occasion. i just want to be there and enjoy it, just as good as the average cat. whether onstage or off he was the embodiment of johnny mercer's admonition and accentuate the positive. you have got to spread joy up to the maximum, keep bloom down to the minimum.

danny barker, the new orleans guitars,, saw him in his dressing room after a show and remembered the site ever after. he wrote, he would be sitting in his underwear with a towel around his lap and all won on the shoulders and a white handkerchief on his head and he put that grease around his lips. he looked like a minstrel man you know and laughing you know natural the way he is is an anagram he has seen maybe two nuns. you see a street walker dress all up in flaming clothes. you see maybe a guy come out of the penitentiary. you see maybe a blind man sitting there. you see a rabbi. you see a priest. liable to see two policemen are detected. you see a judgecome all up in different levels of society in the dressing room and he is talking to all of them and they would the kids there or go all the diverse people of different social levels and everybody is looking. got there i spit on him just like they was looking at a diamond.

he was of course the least average of cats though his place in history is harder to explain than his commonly understood. armstrong did not invent jazz nor was he a first significant figure and it is not even right to call in the first great jazz soloist as many critics and scholars have done. said dave shea the new orleans clarinetist who was four years as senior preceded him by a decade. he started winning national recognition at the same time as armstrong, almost to the month. what then made louis armstrong stand out and why is his name still known to those who know nothing else about jazz? the simplest explanation and up to a point the best one is that he was the first great influence in jazz. no sooner did he burst upon the scene than other musicians, trumpeters, sex-- saxophonists start to imitate him.

i try to walk like him, talk like him, sleep like him said recs stuart who placed armstrong and fletcher harrison span. henderson starves saxophonists hurt them for the first time in the 1924 and was stunned into speeches in this. he remembered, i stood silent feeling almost bashful asking myself if i would ever be able to attain a small part of louis armstrong's greatness. the trumpeter told of how the combination of louis' dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone so overwhelms me that i felt as if i had stared into the sons i. such imagery came easily to those who heard armstrong in his house. the poet, a part-time jazz critic and lifelong fan praised him in similar terms, calling him something inexhaustible and unchanging, like the sun. even miles davis, who loads

armstrong's clarity, knew the history of jazz radiated outward from the bell of his horn. he said, you can't play nothing on trumpet that doesn't come from him. i can't even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet, never. with spoke to these artists as it speaks to all those hearing armstrong for the first time is the combination of momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike. the force staccato quarter notes that he wraps out at the start of west and blues, his most celebrated recording proclaimed the coming of the new way of thinking about with him. though the passage looks innocuous on paper, it catapulted his fellow jazzman into a musical world in which even the simplest of phrases were charged with an irresistible forward thrust. to be sure, his internal metronome was exact enough to

impress the most fanatically with a medical of classical musicians. herbert for carreon told the members of the harp armonica that he was going to a concert. imagine he said, two hours of music and never once will it slow down or speed up by mistake but armstrong who also could play with time stretching it this way and that as he does in the serene trumpet solo that and his 1933 recording of harold arlen's i got a right to sing the blues, hovering miles above the clockwork tyranny of the beat and sounding for all the world like a lordly turn-of-the-century grand opera tenor. the comparison is apt, for armstrong liked, listen to and learned from opera. i like a deep stuff also. which gases me to no end he told orson welles. late in life he remembered buying his first record player, a windup victrola as a teenager

in new orleans. he said, most of my records were the original dixieland jazz band but i had caruso too and henry burr, tetrazzini. they were all my favorites and then there was the irish tenor, john mccormick, beautiful phrasing. but his style was also permeated with the roof beauty of the blues and if it was his way to sing and play them with a smile, he knew as well as anyone that the world in which he sang could be a hurtful place. he said, like when i played maybe back down clues and i'm thinking about one of the old slow down moments when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. that is a hell of a moment when your woman tells you i have got another mule in my stall. blasco even the classical melodies he loved. when passed through the prism of his vast experience. i've seen everything from a child coming up he said. nothing happened. i ain't never seen before.

he was forever reflecting on the things he had seen. sometimes on paper but more often with his horn. he wrote, when i blow a think of times and things from out of the past. it gives me an image of the 10. like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes, the town, a check somewhere down the line, and no man with no name you have seen once in a place you don't remember. that was why he never used musical terminology when speaking of his music. it was all about life. these are but a few of the myriad facets of armstrong's art. one can go a long way toward understanding him without tensioning anything else. but it is not enough to declare him a phenomenal gifted and imaginative artists and let it go at that. the other reason why he cast so long a shadow is that his personality was his compelling as his artistry. the two could scarcely be

separated, for his lavish generosity of spirit was part and parcel of his prodigal way of making music. even in his old age he held nothing back, and it seemed at times that nothing was beyond him. he really did perform with everyone from leonard bernstein to johnny cash. he really did and his concerts, some of them anyway, by playing 250 or more high c's catch with a high f. he wrote the finest autobiographies, satchmo my life in new orleans without a collaborator. >> admirers included kingsley amos, jackson pollack, the composer virtual thompson called him a master of musical art. stuart davis whose abstract paintings were full of jazz inspired pictures inspired him as a model of greatness. is it any wonder so many munitions long to play the way

he play and sing the way he sang? it was no accident that they usually referred to armstrong not as satchmo, his own favorite nickname, but as pops. he was the father figure of jazz and what his children wanted was to be him, or at least come as close as they possibly could. why did armstrong spend so many hours scribbling on a pad or hunched over a typewriter? partly because he was a gregarious man who enjoyed sending chatty letters to his friends and fans. we actually have a gentleman in the audience tonight you has a couple of letters that armstrong sent him. but also because he believed he had something of value to tell the world. having been born desperately poor, he had worked desperately hard, first as a boy and then as a man and this he had much in common with ragged horatio alger whose burning desire to grow a

propelled him into the ranks of the middle-class. self-discipline, self-improvement, self-reliance. these were armstrong's lifelong watchwords in no horatio alger era could have improved on his iron determination to get ahead in the world. once he did so, he felt an obligation to tell others how to do the same. i was determined to play my horn against all odds and i had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so he wrote in satchmo. a few years later he made the point more pungently in a tv interview in which he said the lord will help the poor, but not the poor lazy. while most jazz musicians, black and white alike, now come from relatively comfortable backgrounds those who were born poor have almost always driven mightily to join the middle class. anyone who doubts that armstrong filled the latter built need only visit his home located

seven blocks from shea stadium in a rundown but respectable part of queens. it is a three-story brick covered frame house whose interior is reminiscent of graceland, elvis presley scottie memphis mash and. from the jetsons style kitchen of the future to the silver wallpaper and golden faucets in the master bathroom, the armstrong house looks like what it is, the residents of a poor boy who cast down his pocket and pulled it up overflowing. unlike graceland though, the house is neither oppressive nor embarrassing and as you stand in the small study whose decorations include a portrait of the artist painted by tony bennett, it is impossible not to be touched by the aspiration visible wherever you look. this it is clear was the home of a working man, bursting with a pride that came not from what he had but what he did. i never want to be anything more

than i am and what i don't have i don't need armstrong said in his old age. my home is good but you don't see me and no biggest big estates and yachts. that ain't going to play your horn for you. in common with other self-made man, armstrong sometimes forgot that his success was due not solely to working, but also to the talent with which he had been born. he was a man of countless generosity to preached the stony gospel with individual responsibility. a ferociously ambitious artist who preferred when he could to do as he was told. an introspective man, who exploded with irrepressible vitality when he stepped into the spotlight. at joyous genius who confounded his critics by refusing to distinguish between making art and making fun. no more than any other genius. as murray kempton said, he endures to mix in his own person

all men, the pure and achieve, clown and creator, god and the phone. yet always results each time he raised his trumpet to his lips for that was when the laughter stopped and that beauty began. he knew that in his words, showmanship does not mean you were not serious and no one who has read his writings can doubt that he was a serious and self-aware. he knew who he was, what he had done and how far he had come and was fiercely proud of it all. he it added that his music mattered more to him than anything else, even his wife's. when i pick up that horn he said, that is all. the world is behind me and i don't concentrate on nothing but it. i love them notes. that is why i try to make them right. c.? the whole world saw and heard. so that is how my book starts, and now if you don't mind, a few

words of epilogue. i spent five years working on "pops," especially in the past few months. a great many people have asked me something like this. that is a lot of time to spend with anybody. do you still like armstrong? do you still admire him or did you get sick and tired of him? that is an easy question to answer. i didn't get sick or tired of louis armstrong. i don't see how you could. he is a rarity of rarities, great man who improves with exposure. the better you get to know him, the more you like him. this isn't to say he wasn't a complicated personality, because he was, very much so. offstage he could read moody and profane. he had a habit of flying into red rage is that he forgot all about the next day and he knew how to hold a grudge. i got a simple rule about everybody he told a journalist. if you don't treat me right, shame on you. but that is merely to say a armstrong was a human being as

flawed as the next man and if there is anything that i learned in the process of writing "pops," it is that louis armstrong's flaws were few and forgivable. in return for his unswerving dedication to his art, he knew of true happiness and shared it unstintingly with his fellow men. not long before he died he told a friend that, my whole life has been happiness. through all the misfortunes etc., i did not plan anything. life was there for me and i accepted it and life, whatever came out has been beautiful to me, and i love everybody. you can't top that. so i will let cops have the last word. what you are about to see is a tv performance of one of his favorite songs, titled a properly enough, on the sunny side of the street originally broadcast in 1958. it is my favorite film clip of louis armstrong, the one that says the most about who he was and what he did. take it away, satcher.

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[applause] >> well now the floor is yours. i would be more than happy to answer any questions that you might have about louis armstrong or about my book, if you will make your way to the microphone. i will do my best. >> thanks so much for doing the book. one is, in terms of his early life there is an hook called louis armstrong's in new orleans. it is sort of set in context. what did you bring new informationally about his early life that we don't have from other books, not that is one-- in the second, how did he react to all the criticism he got from other jazz musicians in the younger, newer wave of the 60s and who did not like his sort of what they viewed as uncle tom of the stage at.

how did he react to that? >> bears a whole bunch of questions there. thomas brothers is the most important scholarly monograph ever written about armstrong. it is a thorough prospectus of armstrong's early years. i think beyond what others did which was to look at all of the existing on site primary sources in new orleans and he was able to do this before hurricane katrina, what i bring to it is not new factual information about armstrong's younger years because they are younger as far as the facts go, but a be a different, perhaps a wider cultural perspective to set them in a larger frame and particularly the frame of someone who has been a working jazz musician. that is one of the most important things about my look beyond the fact that i had private tapes and lots of other sources that did come later in his life, is the fact that i was in business.

that i actually know what it is like, as i was telling somebody the other day, to play it one of those broken bottle joints where they have chicken wire on the bandstand. i think maybe my book is informed by this experience in a way that previous books about armstrong have not been. the second question you asked is a major theme of my book. discussed in great detail there. i can only talk about it in a very compressed way here. when talking about this ui sector member louis armstrong was born in 1901. he seems contemporary to us because he is so completely vivid and present in his films and because there is so much film of him and for those of us over the age of 50 we remember seeing him on television. i first saw him on the ed sullivan show on sunday night, when i was eight years old, thank you very much. because he seems contemporary to us we expect him to be contemporary in a way that he is

not. he wasn't. he was born in 1901 in the deep south. his whole formative experiences as a musician and stage entertainer is formed by the world of vaudeville and also the world of the minstrel show. what he thought was funny, and i might add what his contemporaries thought were funny, black and white alike, was something the younger musicians of the post-world war ii era, the bebop era, did not find funny. they criticize him about it. dizzy gillespie most prominently and i think most sharply, i think they just didn't take him in historical perspective and some of them lived long enough to change their tune, including i'm happy to say dizzy gillespie who in his autobiography written at the end of his life apologized to armstrong for having described him as an uncle tom. in fact i will quote gillespie verbatim because the things that stuck in my mind. he said hell i have my own way. so i think now that we are far

beyond armstrong's life as gillespie was beyond the beginning so that, we can see him as he was, as a figure from history and as someone who's art, and i think his personality, is a permanent interest in permanently contemporary even if there are aspects of it that we would especially want to see at the movies today, by this day. yes, sir. >> thank you for your talk and thanks for this lovely book. i imagine for a serious critic like yourself it is hard to produce an objective book on the subject that is so utterly lovable and for you obviously you pulled off. >> i don't pretend to be. objectivity sounds like something that came out of the icebox and there their a sense in which i'm i am not even slightly objective of louis armstrong. he was a great man but i try to write as a scholar would write and to do what he said on more

than one occasion he would want a biographer to do which was to tell the whole story of his life. >> this book is scholarly and it is warm so it is very nice. i'm going to ask you a very specific question because it it is so thoroughly agreeable. a disagreement about a choice of composition but i will ask you about latter-day armstrong. you can answer it and perhaps talk a little bit about louis the last decade or so of how creative he was and that charges you are familiar with in the last decade of him as a musician. in this book you talk abouthe real ambassador ambassadors as to artist for his own good or >> for everybody who doesn't know the album, it is a musical that island through back roads which was only done in record and armstrong performs in it. in my opinion, they say i look like god is one of the most beautiful pieces ever on race relations.

he was supposedly in tears at the end of it. >> of course one of the song from real ambassadors is in the appendix of my very favorite armstrong recordings. >> there is a whole bunch of other jamming songs. anyways you make the remark and if you can comment on that the comment on that last decade and whether maybe his creativity was limited by the fact that he was working all these years with joel glazer who may not have been as plugged into tapping armstrong's genius until the end of. >> let's talk a little bit about that. joel glazer was armstrong's manager from 1935 until glazer's death a year and a half before armstrong died. glazer was to a great extent responsible for bringing armstrong to a wider popular audience, but as i say repeatedly in my book, people who knew armstrong into new glazer, who played with armstrong, who worked in glazer's office also the same thing which is armstrong went where glazer told him to go but when he got there he played what

he wanted to play. armstrong is not a man who really thinks of himself in a self-conscious way as an artist. he knew he was an artist. on only one occasion did i ever find him talking about how jazz was large. that is in the book or go but he knew who he was but he thought of himself as an entertainer and he didn't think there was anything incompatible between being an artist in being an entertainer. i think he got as much pleasure out of making people laugh as he did thrilling them. and they say this somewhere in the look, we mistake great artists as they were, rather than imagining what we wish they were and try to take them that way instead. the music armstrong recorded in the last 10 years is life, spottier than the music he recorded in the 20s and 30s but the high points are as high as anything that he did at any time in his life. summer song with brubeck, the amazing recording of lack and

tan fantasy that he made with duke ellington and 61 and let us say hello dolly which is a great pop record but also a great jazz it really is. i wouldn't want, if it were left up to me i wouldn't want only to have the music of the last 10 years of armstrong's life listen to but if that is all i had i would take it gladly. who is up next? >> i just have a quick question. you spoke about the five or 600 tapes that he made. is louis armstrong's home in new york a library at this point or is it open to the public? >> i'm glad you asked me that. not only is it a museum but i'm speaking there on saturday. they are throwing a book party for me and i'm going to give a shorter version of this talk in armstrong's own home. it was restored to its original condition a few years ago and

opened as a museum and i will tell you if you have the slightest interest in louis armstrong you must go to this place, because they walls breathe his essence. it is one of the most amazing house museums in the world. thank thank god it was preserved and is the way it is. so, i will be thinking of you all on saturday afternoon when i go there and speak their. the tapes, okay. there are 650 reel to reel tapes armstrong, i will tell you the whole story. armstrong-- armstrong bought one of the first tape recorders in 1947 and bing crosby bought one of the others, by the way. at first he bought it to record his shows so that he could listen to them and perfect them. a reminder that armstrong is in fact a true artist and

self-aware artist but like everybody else who first got their hands on a tape recorder when tape recorders were new, he started playing with it. pretty soon he figured out he could just turn it on backstage in the dressing room or in his hotel room or wherever and let it run. he saved the tapes. they were stored in the attic of the house. they made their way to the armstrong archives. i will tell you a story about one of them because they think it exemplifies what they tell us. they tell is important that. there is one taper armstrong talks about his run-in with the mobsters in chicago and names names, something he didn't do anywhere else but some of the tapes are just fun. so i mentioned this in passing in a talk but i will tell you more about it. there is a tape. my guess it was recorded sometime in the 50s, in a hotel where somewhere in the world. it is 5:00 in the morning and louis armstrong is trying to get his wife lucille to go to bed with him. she is really not interested in this at 5:00 in declines with

thanks. he says it is your duty to keep the horn percolating. [laughter] this did not amuse her one bit and she looks around and you can almost hear the double take on the tape. she sees the tape recorder is running and she says to him, you turn that off. infect you a raise off some of that stuff. he says, i can't do that. this is for posterity. [laughter] /forward 50 years. here i am the scholar with the headphones on sitting in the armstrong archives and i am listening to this tape and suddenly it hits me. my god, i am posterity. he saved it for me. he saved it for all of us because he knew that he was after all louis armstrong and he wanted us to know what he was like. those tapes tell us that that are then anything other than his art. >> congratulations on your nomination for the naacp. to sort of piggyback on that

theme, could you really i guess share with us the true impact of what he did for race relations in the united states? >> yes, i would very much like to talk about that. >> i guess my next question is how did he really grapple with the criticism because one of his others ralph ellison during the late 60s when he was being criticized along with louis armstrong, he really did get bad when the black nationalist told him--. >> essentially armstrong grappled with the criticism by living his life. occasionally he would try to set the record straight and talk about the things he had done. but he didn't lose a whole lot of sleep over what people said about him, even though he didn't like it. he wasn't the kind of man to lose a whole lot of sleep about anything that anybody said about him. as far as what he contributed to race relations, i think i can answer that question best buy telling a story. i come from a town in southeast

missouri called sikeston. none of you will have heard of it. my father witnessed a lynching. it was that kind of town. louis armstrong-- excuse me. for many people in that town, louis armstrong was probably the first black person they ever took seriously as an artist, as a man. i think that by reaching out through his art and his personality, he bridged gaps. that no one else could have bridged. i am a bit affected by this. and that i think meant as much-- a talk about this and less personal terms in the book but i

think that is-- has meant as much to the public at large in the 50s and 60s and was as much of a contribution to racial justice and race relations as anything that anybody was doing at that time, simply by his own personal example. that is the best way i can add to that question and i saw that first-hand. have we other questions? the microphone awaits you. and so do i. but, we have somebody rising to go to the microphone. i will give you a minute while every capture my composure. >> do you address in the book his standing as a jazz icon, with the black community, that black americans versus white? is there a difference? his standing is huge with white americans, i know that but is he considered like the pinnacle? >> he is now.

look, part of what my book is is what scholars call a reception history which is an attempt to try to describe how armstrong is written about at how people responded to him throughout the course of his career. and, like every other jazz musician, armstrong ceased to a great extent to the popular in the black community because it lost interest in jazz as a community. this really troubled him. there is a funny story i tell in the book which i really can't repeat here, about his going to a gig by louis jordan and his was halfway empty and he just couldn't believe what happened. miles davis thought the same way in the 60s about how the racial composition of jazz audiences had changed and yes he was troubled by it. on the other hand again jazz is now a historical music, a historical event rather than a popular music and i think

nowadays, pretty much everybody sees armstrong in the same way, as the central figure in the history of jazz in the 20th century. there is no racial differential there. he is as important to everybody who cares about jazz, no matter who they are. that is something i would say has happened in the last quarter century. there are a lot of factors that have to do it. the efficacy of quince marsalis has been important in making armstrong's achievement known, especially to younger people but part of it is just that jazz is now itself the 20th century jazz, the 20th century is over and we look upon it as a closed event did they know how important armstrong was, but that is the best way i can answer your question. >> maybe that is a very small--. >> in new york is only a small part of the audience for jazz, thank heavens. i do note jazz clubs are in washington as will. >> i want to ask you about your other writing, especially her

writing in "the wall street journal." which i read and i'm sure other people read your columns, and what your sense of your sensibility and sensitivity in writing for the journal brings, not to a wider public audience but to the audience of the people who read those kinds of writings in the publication that is perhaps growing in influence for the kinds of things you are bringing, or whether you feel that way are not. >> i don't know how to answer that. i don't really think about it that way. how i think of myself, what i do, i am a specialist who tries to translate the knowledge of the specialist into general language. i mean i can, and have been the past, done so, written for scholarly audiences but i'm not really interested in doing that. i'm interested in taking what i know about the arts, and they do write about all of the arts, not

just jazz, and try to communicate this knowledge to try to be a teacher and also maybe above all as a critic to try to communicate enthusiasm because i think that is the most important thing that a critic can do. the biggest thing the critic does is to say i saw this and you should too and to be persuasive about it and for me to be able to do that in "the wall street journal" which is now the daily paper with the largest circulation in the united states, well it is a big responsibility and i feel that responsibility. some of you know that in addition to covering theater in new york, i covered theater all over the united states including the city and i am very committed to that. half of my reviews are outside of new york and one of the reasons i do that is because i know i'm writing for a national newspaper that has a national audience. that i take very seriously. whatever the character of the wall street journal readers is, i don't really know what it is. i guarantee you they are not all rich. i am not rich.

but it is a paper with a big readership and therefore it is a big pulpit and i try to use it in the best way that i can. >> thank you. >> are we about ready to wrap here? i think it may be time for me to sign some books. but before we do, is anybody making their way to the microphone? >> i think we are good. >> before i sign your books and i urge you to let me do so, let us play a record. my favorite louis armstrong record. i mentioned earlier in the evening but it is always better to hear music than talk about it, and so without further ado i offer you louis armstrong's 1933 recording of harold r. lang's i've got a right to sing the blues which tells the story better than anything, better even than "pops." we are waiting to throw the