Terry Teachout’s recent biography Pops is a remarkable work that succeeds in capturing the complexities of the seminal jazz musician Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Teachout has the perfect credentials to write about this pop culture icon: he played jazz professionally before becoming a full time writer and is currently the Wall Street Journal’s dramatic critic. His previous titles include All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and A Terry Teachout Reader.

Armstrong’s life began in infamous Storyville as the son of a fifteen-year-old mother who worked as a sometime-prostitute. Satchmo’s brush with the law at the early age of 11 had fateful consequences: at the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, his love of the cornet (which he played before switching to the trumpet that would make him famous) blossomed. The biography tracks Armstrong’s nine lives, from his start in New Orleans to his tour with Fate Marable playing on Mississippi River steamboat cruises (where he learned to read music) to his move to Chicago to play with mentor Joe Oliver’s Creole Jazz band, then his back and forth to New York and Chicago playing and recording his celebrated records with the Hot Five and Hot Seven. His career then takes a turn (for the worst according to some jazz critics) when he began playing with big bands and crooning pop vocals, but rebounds with a triumphant return to small-group jazz in the 1940s as he also forged a career in movie and television and wrote articles and an autobiography.

Teachout writes playfully, lyrically and musically. You get the distinct impression that he admires Armstrong, and that he very much likes his subject as a person. Despite his fondness for Louis, Teachout is careful not to sidestep controversy.

Armstrong emerges as somewhat of a chameleon, one who could easily reinvent himself, yet at the same time he suffered the effects of self-imposed limitations on his musicianship. Despite his astounding feats with the upper register of the trumpet (namely, his ability to play hundreds of high Cs), his chops, health, and career suffered immensely from his improper embouchure developed during his time at the Waifs’ Home. Additionally, as the pop vocalist and close acquaintance Bing Crosby observes regarding Armstrong’s stretch fronting big bands: “’Louis never had a very good band . . . I don’t know why. He always was great himself but he never seemed to have very many good men playing for him.’”

Teachout writes playfully, lyrically and musically. You get the distinct impression that he admires Armstrong, and that he very much likes his subject as a person. Despite his fondness for Louis, Teachout is careful not to sidestep controversy. He gives voice to criticism of Armstrong’s often “wince-making” public persona (Dizzy Gillespie at one time called him a “plantation character”), his choice of controversial theme songs (“Sleepy Time Down South”), and his somewhat servile and bizarre relationship with manager Joe Glaser. He also devotes some pages to Armstrong’s love affair with marijuana and his rejection at times by key artists of the bop generation. There are instances in Pops when Teachout’s in-depth analysis of Armstrong recordings and performances may reach above the head of a lay reader and feel just a bit esoteric, but he is careful to reengage and he makes the reader want to further educate herself and listen (and re-listen) to the relevant recordings.

Armstrong’s life and philosophy was probably best summed up by words he spoke in a 1969 interviewer with a Time reporter: “I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, ‘cause what your’re there for is to please the people.”

Bonus: Here’s a clip of Teachout discussing Armstrong’s newly released personal tape recordings.

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