Well... since Neal Fersko posted to remind us all of his deep love and devotion for jazz, I suppose it's apropos as any time to talk about Pops, who after 98 years, still plays the music which defines this country for good and ill, and played it better than any musician before or since.
Was Louis Armstrong a great musician? Of course - among the greatest in any era or hemisphere. Was he a creative musical genius whose compositions changed the curvature of the earth the way Mozart and Beethoven did? Again, just like with Jaws, who gives a shit...
Americans don't like geniuses, we never have, and it's a straw man to say, as so many people today do, that America must rid itself of its 'cult of genius' because America has never, ever, had a cult of genius. Ridding ourselves of the cult of genius has basically been the entire mission of American history. Our political system is the first long-lasting republic, our science is almost all team-based, and the artform we dominate the world in is movies - a medium made by committee.
Americans have never worshipped geniuses and America is the best proof the world's ever had that we're all better off without them. What Americans have always worshipped is personality, charisma, uniqueness. Americans are repulsed by the otherworldly figure who sees what the rest of us can't, but we worship the personality whose extraordinary singularity can be perceived by every person, no matter how mediocre. This is a country whose people have never taken on faith what it can't understand for itself, and if we're told something is extraordinary, we want the proof right in front of us or we'll chase it out of town with pitchforks and torches. Americans won't even believe in Jesus until they see his face in a cinnamon bun.
Europe believed in great geniuses who see farther than the rest of us. Putting their trust in geniuses got them very far: it brought them Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Beethoven and Newton and Darwin and all those Kings who had 'the Great' appended to their names; but eventually that belief brought them Hitler and Stalin.
Americans rose to world domination because we believed that the uniqueness of a human being is more important than their ability, and that belief in uniqueness allowed millions of humans to reveal their abilities who never would have such opportunities in the rigid castes of the Old World.
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America has only ever believed in two geniuses: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Americans hated the Wright Brothers and didn't notice Tesla until he was an old man. We forgot Jonas Salk because he refused to profit from the polio vaccine, we barely noticed Edwin Hubble and we never even heard of Milton Humason. We didn't even make Eli Whitney a celebrity and Whitney started the entire industrial revolution! We have always believed in brilliant salesmen like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs who claim inventions they had nothing to do with, but that shows how much we prefer con men impersonating genius to the real thing. And would we ever have taken Albert Einstein to heart had he not given us the bomb?
So was there any genius whose discoveries were more immediately applicable than Edison? The lightbulb, storage battery, movie camera, electric power distribution, automatic telegraph, phone powered by battery, and of course, the phonograph... there was life before Edison, and life after him...
We loved Thomas Edison because he was the genius who liberated America from ever needing to care about what a genius thinks. Once you have a movie camera, a minute of moving images can tell a story for the entire world with no translation between languages necessary; and once you have a phonograph, one trumpet can sound louder than a 100 piece orchestra.
Once we had Edison, the genius already did the work for us. By 1907 you could tell a long story without writing down 100,000 words. By 1949, you could record an album the length of a symphony without writing anything more complex than a few songs with four chords, verse, bridge and chorus.
No longer had there to be a sovereign creator whose performers and audience ministered to them like subjects to a king. Instead there was a musical democracy. Musicians no longer had to be geniuses to create great art.
Genius had its day. Geniuses brought us as far into the world of enlightenment as they could, but they could only acquaint us with the extraordinary things. Real enlightenment can only come from figuring out how the extraordinary can improve ordinary situations, and in order to do that, you have to understand ordinary people.
All through the long history of Western art, there's always been a terrible problem: its unrelatability. There are surely some colossal geniuses who create relatable things, but let's face it: most of it is guys like Gaudi, Wagner, Milton, Dante, Michelangelo, Bosch - giants who create larger than life sublimities that drive their audiences insane with passion. Geniuses are obviously not ordinary people. Most of them don't understand ordinary situations. They're obsessives; fanatics who devote decades to getting every detail exactly correct of a vision that could only be conceived of by a crazy person. There is so little space for ordinary life in their world that they wouldn't even know what ordinary life is like. Occasionally you get a Mozart/Tolstoy/Flaubert/Rembrandt/Courbet who uses their abilities to illuminate ordinary people; but they can only tell ordinary stories from observation, not from the inside. Until the 20th century, we had yet to hear the stories and sounds of regular people, and no matter what unique qualities regular people had, they would fade into obscurity the moment everyone who knew them died. A part of them might live on through their folk tales, songs, dances, costumes, embroideries, ceramics and woodwork, but no one would ever know who they were. Were they geniuses? I doubt it matters, but as Edison said, "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Even if they had the inspirational spark and the strength of will a genius needs to make undreamt possibilities real, who among them had the resources to make anybody know?
So no, none of them were artists of genius as we understand the term, but many were unfathomably brilliant artisans who mastered a narrow craft and created beautiful treasures of far more use to people than the Sistine Chapel. Over the sands of time, there were millions of superlative craftsmen who gave beauty and meaning to the lives of billions, and we barely know the name of a single one.
For 3000 years, the stage has been set for a cultural rebellion that only happened in the lifetime of my grandmother.
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That rebellion finally happened in 1923.
1922 was the year Old Europe officially grew too high-fallutin' for the world. That was the year the British Empire was the largest it would ever be and Howard Carter discovered King Tut's Tomb. When Howard Carter became the first man to see King Tutankhamun in 4000 years, it was as though the largest Empire in world history touched the face of the world's first great empire, and shortly thereafter, the British Empire imploded as totally as did the Pharaohs.
It was also the year James Joyce published Ulysses, Wittgenstein published Tractatus, TS. Eliot published The Waste Land, and Marcel Proust 'finished' Remembrances of Things Past. These are four towering and tremendously difficult books of genius, whose revelations elicit religious worship in acolytes who devote every free moment to pouring over their texts to discover ever new meanings within their minutia - meanings whose understanding is entirely beyond the capacities of even the most passionate lay reader.
As classical music and art did a decade before, literature and philosophy became the property of an 'elect' for whom their favorite books were so complex that they take a lifetime to understand. There surely were other writers and composers writing in old forms who were easier to understand, but they did not attract the lion's share of critical attention, and the critics who sang their praises turned a hundred years of audiences off of their most meaningful cultural inheritances.
The greatest prose writers were thought to be the most difficult ones: Proust, Joyce, Mann, Woolf, Faulkner, Musil, Broch - when there were much more accessible ones who in their easier ways were just as meaningful: Willa Cather, Jaroslav Hasek, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Katherine Mansfield, Isaac Babel, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser.... You could make a similar list with accessible creators of every artform, but the point is that a great divide formed in the 1920s between the most highly praised geniuses and their audiences, who suddenly found that to appreciate genius, they had to work like slaves.
The stage too was set for an entirely new way of looking at arts and culture.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am8JxwyQzFc&list=PLQZfrVhldOdHrPvf3AyJ469rhyuQmUXH0&index=37
So listen to what Satchmo (Louis Armstrong) does with this music. It's incredibly simple music. There are no distinctive feats in the composition. The music is meaningful because like folk songs, everything about their style was passed down from generation to generation in an oral tradition which no microphone was ever present to capture.
And like so many folk songs, Pops's music has that 'lived in' feeling that comes from accompanying daily life for centuries. Over an unknown eternity of time, the style of his music was distilled like diamonds to its very essence.
Did Louis Armstrong write his own music? A lot of it... at least probably... The truth is we don't really know and there's no way of knowing. It's claimed he wrote 50 songs, collaborated on more, and occasionally gave credit to other musicians for his own work. But much more often than we like to admit, even the great classical composers based their melodies on folk music they heard in the streets - Stravinsky may never have written an original theme in his life.... and at least with classical music the composer always contributes the form and design, but in popular music, whose form is so often the same from piece to piece, it's not really composition as ever before understood.
And it doesn't matter at all. The ebb and flow of everyday life is in these recordings - a kind of eternal wisdom that contains life's joy and sadness in equal measure: it's the same juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy you get from Mozart operas and Shakespeare comedies, Rembrandt portraits and Montaigne essays, Dickens novels and Chekhov short stories.
Whoever could be said to compose his music, Pops's recordings, particularly the early ones, are a glory of the world, and whether they're listened to in thousands of years, they should be.
Struggling with difficult mysteries is extremely important, and Americans make a religion out of avoiding them, but whether it's through spirituality or philosophy or art and science, attempting to solve impossible mysteries is all that can prepare us for life's many situations from which satisfaction is impossible, and they teach us that however much we struggle, our struggles have meaning and reasons.
But just as important is to have cultural works which speak to our everyday life; that give joy to our daily activities and reasons to get through our small struggles with a smile because we know there's a reward at the end of them.
Like folk music, this new music's most important component is its perfection. There's not a single wasted gesture in the whole thing. Almost every track follows the cliche formula of verse, bridge and chorus. The formula leaves just enough creative room for a 'hook' or 'gimmick' to distinguish one song from the next. But cliches are usually cliches because they work, and these songs are perfectly housed vessels for an artist of singularity to lay something completely unique on top of the generic form. It may not transcend to infinity like Late Beethoven or a Mahler symphony, but like Chopin or Schubert at their briefest, it needs nothing more than what it is. It's absolutely perfect.
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I have another essay in my head that's actually about his music.
....but next week we're gonna do Danny Aiello...
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