Conversations on Race

JUNE

2024

June

This month a new book by Larry Tye provides an opportunity to explore three Jazz greats!

The Book

The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America

Click on the introduction below to hear Larry Tye explain his motivation for this book.

(3:42)

A longer interview, with music (1:01:43)

The Men

James (Duke) Ellington

Starting Point: 1899 - Washington DC; family one generation from slavery; secure middle class family - father, butler and entrepreneur, mother, pianist, devoted to James; drop out HS senior year

Early Influences: from mother, willpower and rectitude, commitment to self-improvement per Booker T Washington; from father, polish and flare; poolroom; passion for sports; city of birth. Racism and Jim Crow

Musical Education: piano lessons beginning age seven, DC's street corners, and Frank Holliday's poolroom; Edna Thompson, high school classmate (later wife) and a disciplined piano player, helping Duke score and read music; not musical prodigy - "I could hear people whistling, and got all the Negro music that way."

Career Launch: The Cotton Club, Harlem, NYC (December, 1927)

Persona: crowd-pleaser; understated magnetism; smiled - never grinned; elegant; handsome; the patrician; instinctive aristocrat with common touch; iceberg - more below surface than above

Duke Ellington "wears so many masks that some of his intimates wonder if his own face has disappeared." ...Nat Hentoff

"The Mooche"

October 17, 1928 (3:06)

" Take the A Train"

1943 (3:13)

Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong

Starting Point: 1901 - New Orleans 'Battlefield' slum; unwed 17 yr old mother; prostitute & alcoholic; physically violent; father abandoned family when Louis was 2 yrs old; grandson of slaves; left school after 5th grade; raised by grandmother (domestic for wealthy white family) taught him resilience

Early Influences: from early age multiple jobs (dish washer, dock worker, cleaning gravestones, hawking newspapers, hauling coal, to support mother and sister; age 7 1/2 - first boss, Karnofsky, peddler who brought him into white neighborhood where he first played tin horn and sang to attract customers; close attachment to Jews; 'Scat' inspired by Jews davening; in and out of jail until, at age 12, sentenced for an 'open-ended' stay to Colored Waif's Home; singing in Sunday school quartet attracted Peter Davis, music director at Waif's Home, who invited him to join the home's band, gave him tambourine, snare drum, alto horn, and bugle. Racism and Jim Crow

Musical Education: never had music lesson, learned from music of streets of Black and white Storyville

Career Launch: OKeh Records, Chicago (November 12, 1925)

Persona: smile was his mask (regardless of audience); unmistakable magnetism; artist-showman

"Louis Armstrong is not just the grinning clown he appears to be on television"

... Nat Hentoff

"West End Blues"

1928 (3:21)

"It was the first time I ever heard anybaody sing without using any words," said jazz diva Billie Holiday ... Artie Shaw credited the recording with changing his life: "I couldn't believe my ears. No one had done that on a trumpet, before him." ... "With West End Blues," Shaw added, "I began to see vistas in music that I had not even imagined or conceived of."

... The Jazzmen, p.59

William James (Count) Basie

Starting Point: 1904 - Red Bank, NJ; two siblings had died before his birth; father, Harvey, was an entrepreneur, involved in the Black community; owned his own home, but never able to rise above the lower-middle class; mother worked as a domestic; mother, very close, father, emotionally remote; parents separated later in life; didn't finish junior high school

Early Influences: First passion was the carnival, wanted to be on the road; drawn to the spotlights and footlights of Red Bank's Palace moving-picture theater, where he had multiple jobs; music became his ticket out of Red Bank. Racism and Jim Crow.

Musical Education: Natural ear for music; trap drum from father; mother played the piano and paid for his piano lessons; apprentice to Fats Waller

Career Launch: Reno Club, Kansas City MO (1933)

Persona: silent showman focused attention on the band; leading from the rear; performed as himself; first Black to win a Grammy

"No member of the Jazz pantheon, however, smiles so much and says as little as Count Basie"

... Nat Hentoff (Jazz reviewer and columnist, The Village Voice)

1950 (3:19)

One O'Clock Jump

May 29, 1960 (1:53)

Surprisingly, some in the Black community were critical.

They even called Louis Armstrong an Uncle Tom!

"I hated the way [Louis] had to grin in order to get over with some tired white folks" ... Miles Davis

"Dizzie Gillespie bemoaned his "plantation character."

"A character in James Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues refers to Satchmo's "old-time, down-home crap."

"Wynton Marsalis resented his "shuffling," adding, "I hated that with an unbelievable passion."

Quotes from The Jazzmen, pp. 237-238

"...most of the fellows I grew up with, myself included, we used to laugh at Louis Armstrong ... Everywhere we'd look, there'd be Louis -- sweat popping, eyes bugging, mouth wide open, grinning , oh my Lord, from ear to ear. Ooftah, we'd call him -- mopping his brow, ducking his head, doing his thing for the white man." ... Ossie Davis

"And Thurgood Marshall, who'd helped convince the Supreme Court to outlaw school segregation and would become the first Black Justice, said one reason his fellow Negroes were so delighted by all that Satchmo said about LIttle Rock was because "he's the No. 1 Uncle Tom! The worst in the US!"

Quotes from The Jazzmen, pp. 238, 262

Larry Tye provides an excellent response to the criticism.

"Martin Luther King Jr. knew better than anyone what it would take to pull off a revolution capable of reshaping the soul of America and at long last leveling the playing field for American Negroes.

First you had to have followers and allies who were prepared to challenge not just racist leaders but the cultural bedrock of a racist nation. Nobody's outcry was more heartfelt and unexpected than that of Louis Armstrong, who shortly after the 1957 LIttle Rock school crisis offered this knife-edge rebuke that made headlines from Boston to Budapest: "The way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell." Satchmo mocked segregationist governor Orval Faubus as a "mother-fucker (to make it fit to print, he and the reporter toned it down to "uneducated plow boy"), and derided war-hero president Dwight Eisenhower as "two-faced" and having "no guts" for failing early on to protect the brave Black kids desegregating Little Rock's Central High.

A successful revolution also needed inspirational anthems and symbols. Duke more than rose to the occasion by composing transformative works like Black, Brown and Beige and writing Jump for Joy, a play that banished Uncle Tom from the stage and American life and that insisted it was time to stop turning the other cheek.

A mass movement required money, too, for everything from bringing people to rallies to bailing them out of jail. Count Basie wrote checks, while his wife Catherine Basie not only raised bagfuls more, but played pivotal roles in civil rights groups in New York and beyond.

Most of all, with Negroes constituting just 10 percent of the population, you needed support in white America. No trio did as much as Duke, Satchmo, and the Count to set the table for the insurrection by opening white America's ears and souls to the grace of their music and their personalities, demonstrating the virtues of Black artistry and Black humanity. They toppled color barriers on radio and TV, in jukeboxes, films, newspapers, and newsmagazines; and in the White House, concert halls, and living rooms of the Midwest and both coasts to the Heart of Dixie. But they did it carefully, knowing that to do otherwise in their Jim Crow era would have been suicidal. If James Brown, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard are rightfully credited with opening the door to the acceptance of Black music, it was Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington who inserted the key in the lock."

... The Jazzmen, pp. 257-258

Continue below for more of the details and, in particular, consider watching the extraordinary, and revealing, documentary Louis Armstrong's Black and Blues .

Louis Armstrong

Is this an Uncle Tom?

“I’m Still Louis Armstrong–Colored”: Louis Armstrong and the Civil Rights Era[Warning: This post contains audio excerpts with graphic language and is not appropriate for younger readers.] In September 1957, Louis Armstrong put his career on the line by speaking out against …

For even more, an amazingly robust and informative (and lengthy) overview of Armstrong's first strong outburst of protest, check out "Louis Armstrong and Little Rock: 60 Years Later" HERE

Here's more...

The Entertainer.docx

The clip above comes from a remarkable documentary that corrects Armstrong's Uncle Tom persona. The film is only available on Apple TV, but it is worth a trial subscription. Check out the trailer below and NPR's review.

(By the way, the trailer is excellent. Be sure to watch it in full screen mode.)

From NPR 's review of the film in October 2022:

"It's a perspective birthed out of the civil rights movement and an ensuing era of Black pride, though the film demonstrates how engaged Armstrong was in the cause — often from a pragmatic position behind the scenes but sometimes in an utterly exposed position along its front lines. We get to witness the dissonance of a time when Armstrong is being sent across the world by the U.S. State Department, even as white supremacy is rearing its head back home. Time and again, we see his guarded composure in the company of white interviewers, set against the exasperation of candid moments among friends or in the solitude of his study."

Read the entire review HERE.

And a few words from Reverend Al Sharpton and Larry Tye on May 30, 2024 (2:42)

HERE

Duke Ellington

And what about all this?

We Too Sing America Ellngton.pdf

On February 12, 1941, with war in Europe and totalitarianism on the rise around the world, the great jazz musician Duke Ellington was asked to make some remarks in Los Angeles. His words were a powerful message about the place of African-Americans in a still-segregated country, with observations on the importance of freedom of speech.

The title of his remarks –“We, Too, Sing America”– was a slight modification of the title of a poem by the great African-American poet Langston Hughes: “I, Too, Sing America,” but one that gave it far greater social and political significance. Hughes was undoubtedly inspired by the great American poet Walt Whitman who wrote “I Hear America Singing,” from his longer poem Leaves of Grass.

Click above for coverage of Duke Ellington's 1941 Jump for Joy -- a comprehensive article and an historic recording that includes, among other things, Ellington reflecting on the revue and its context.

A Sprawling Blueprint For Protest Music, Courtesy Of The Jazz DukeHe called it "a parallel to the history of the American Negro." Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige wasn't an immediate hit, but it set a tone for ambitious, provocative works about black life.

Click the graphic above to read, and hear, an NPR discussion of Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige (1943). Be sure to scroll down and listen to Mahalia Jackson singing "Come Sunday," recorded with the Duke in 1958.

In 1963, to honor the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Duke Ellington wrote, directed, and narrated My People, a revue about African-American history, which was presented in Chicago as part of the Century of Negro Progress Exposition.

Ellington actually performed the song "King Fit the Battle of Alabam", sounding off on racial violence engulfing America at that time.

To read the lyrics and hear a cover of the song click HERE.

Listen to some of Ellingtons narration from "My People" along with his personal perspective.

and The Count

"As early as 1945, he insisted that his contracts have a stipulation that unless an integrated band was acceptable to the venue, and unless the venue itself was integrated, he would not play. And the idea of doing that just as World War II was ending was so uncharacteristic. It took Duke Ellington another 20 years to get to that point."

... Larry Tye, NPR Interview, May 29, 2024

Count Basie joining civil rights demonstrators in front of the Mecca - Tallahassee, Florida.

December 1963

"Catharine Basie, Count Basie's wife, was an advocate for civil rights. She helped raise money for civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Conference of Christians and Jews, and co-chaired a committees to honor civil rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr., Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Wyatt Tee Walker."

--- Wikipedia

The Subtle Force - Ed Sullivan - Civil Rights Advocate

Does it surprise you that he began promoting the cause of civil rights as early as 1948, even before the movement officially took off after the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955..

Sullivan had all of the Jazzmen on his show, often, especially Louis Armstrong, with whom he formed a long-time personal relationship.

Louis Armstrong

May 15, 1955

Duke Ellington

June 29, 1959

Count Basie

November 22, 1959

"It is one thing to look at the transformation of the United States of America through the prism of what Dr. King brought to the table. But the Civil Rights Movement would never have been able to sustain itself with the intensity that it did if there were not subtle forces at play. That subtle force was ... Ed Sullivan."

...Harry Belafonte

“By showing black and white performers interacting as equals, and by bringing these entertainers into the homes of millions of Americans on a weekly basis, the program, as well as Sullivan himself, set an example of racial acceptance and integration, not just for the entertainment industry but for the nation at large. In the end, The Ed Sullivan Show advanced the cause of civil rights by enfranchising African-American performers, from its inception in 1948 to its last show in 1971.”

... Maurice Berger

Cultural historian, author, and educator