Pops A Life of Louis Armstrong Author:Terry Teachout Louis Armstrong is widely known as the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth centruy. A phenomenally gifted and imaginative artist, he also wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies--without a collaborator--and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Jean Renoir and Le Corbus... more »ier ("He is mathematics, equilibrium on a tightrope. He is Shakespearean!"). Virgil Thomson called him "a master of musical art." Stuart Davis, whose abstract paintings were full of jazz-inspired imagery, cited him as a "Model of greatness."
Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout, author of previous biographies of George Balanchine and H.L. Mencken, has drawn on a cache of sources previously unavailable, including hundreds of reels of recordings of backstage and after-hour conversations that Armstrong made throughout his career, newly uncovered material about Armstrong's early life, and Armstrong's own writings, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure. This is going to be the last word on Armstrong in our lifetime--it's a portrait of the man, his world, and his music that will stand alongside Gary Giddins' Bing Crosby and Peter Guralnick's works on Elvis Presley as a classic biography of a major American musician.« less