>> i have to tell you something funny i am old fashioned the young people of my staff said this book has to go onto the internet. 3ñrtst

individual feelings and conditions. electronic can do it but here is the qualification. studies showing vocabulary is decreasing precipitously even as the but the goes up and what they are finding that college graduates proficiency in reading comprehension has gone down 15% in the last few years. is dramatic. other reason has something to do with the communication mediums we are using. very few young people are reading books. you find more rare would it words and books and magazines but simple construction at this point* on the internet and televisions what we need to do is not dummy down the

internet but ratcheted up that is why i said what is the purpose of the internet? it should be so we could use the tremendous medium with respect but in a way that is serious to maintaining our species and life on the planet which is to connect with a deep conversation, rethink human nature and explore the 21st century and the real world. then the internet revolution and is worthy of the next stage of consciousness. . .

control so that -- there are some good sites, a couple of presidents, clinton and bush and are getting a lot of support from people who have money so there is some hope but there has to be we changing it. >> i completely empathize with what you're saying. i've been teaching at the school for a long time and i teach the executive program so a lot of the business people around the world have had to suffered through my glasses in the business community we are creating new business models that are quite interesting not like the ones you use to know. i will give an example. philips is in my group. he will go to a city like san

antonio and say to the city we will put in all of the lighting, the outdoor lighting and make compact fluorescent lighting and you don't pay a thing. we will finance it. payback the energy savings and if there is no energy savings we'd lose. at least that is a step in the direction that can get us to a new way of thinking and let me leave with this thought, and this is where i have hope. what i've seen among the kids the last ten years is extraordinary. think back to when your kid. the to your children and grandchildren who now understand every single day -- they made not acted that they understand the very activity with the east, the clothes they wear, the automobile the family uses, they are totally aware that every single activity they engage in every day affects someone else or some other creature and some other part of the planet. that is an extraordinary change in consciousness. the qstn is will the of the bill and resolve to act on that consciousness and make that

first nature, not second major. you get the last word. >> i have a few short points. one is there is a field in psychoanalysis called intercept subject to the. it has to do with gender splitting and trauma and the child rearing. also on of the ways to solve the problem is to eat less meat and jonathan was on c-span this week extending empathy to animals will also help solve the problem and also i was in copenhagen last month and there was such incredible huge energy from the africans, the south islanders, al gore and was almost like the leaders were absurd and irrelevant to everything else going on and there is a lot of local authority mayors,

governors, business people, religious groups etc. so it is decentralizing already. >> it is decentralizing but all i am 65-years-old. i'm not naive, and i know the limitations of government and industry. we have to have as you say we need a powerful resurgence in the civil society. we need the neighborhoods of this world to come together and have a very, very important discussion about human nature and the meaning of the human journey. this is not a satiric or academic. i guarantee the reason i wrote this book is that i realize that even e.u.'s visionary plan and even with a good economic plan and the technology to get it done, we are not going to get there. i absolutely don't think we are going to get there unless we can change consciousness in a generation that separates us from our children and grandchildren. it's only if we can have a

robust global discussion on rethinking human nature, rethinking the human journey, understanding that we are at our core and impacting creature. we do seek empathy with each other. that is the game plan. when we get old and we are ready to pass on and look back at our life the moments that are the most important is not when we have a new deal in the business community. it's when we have an empathetic connection with somebody. when we could feel somebody else's price and condition and root with them andelebrate them and help them flourish. this is what life is all about in the final analysis when we and our day. so the energy in copenhagen is the energy we want in every neighborhood in the world. we need to create the conversation. we need to get the 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. dñ

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? ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ [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, ,ñ

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. ♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪

[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

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 about the 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. jo 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