For Independence Day, how Satchmo, the Count and the Duke changed America for the better
One of my biggest life thrills was seeing the County Basie Orchestra in Daytona Beach, Fla when I was a senior at Seabreeze Senior High School. As a trumpeter, every time I have played one of his classic arrangements with a big band over the years and across the world, I hear the original in my mind. And I also thrilled to the Duke Ellington orchestra, and agree with Winton Marsalis that "all jazz trumpeters are the children of Louis Armstrong."
These three pioneers changed the way white America looked at Black Americans, their talents, their musicality, their heart and soul. It was not easy for them: they grew up and worked in a Jim Crowe America, where every hotel room was off-limits (not just in the South, but all over the nation!) In fact, the best arrangement for their vast numbers of performances in a year was travel by Pullman railroad cars, where they were treated with dignity, good food, comfortable beds, and a safe refuge.
"Although each of them died over a generation ago, it would be a mistake to believe that Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie are truly gone. Instead, their legacies live on through the cultural influences of Motown and Hip Hop, the Beatles and Bob Dylan; as well as the political and social achievements of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin and Barack Obama, among so many others.
In The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, journalist and best-selling biographer Larry Tye opens a new window onto the lives of these jazz greats, “reveal[ing] so much more about their musical journeys and personal experiences” off the bandstand than Grammy Award-winning jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton imagined possible. “It’s like meeting them all over again.”But the volume is at its most profound in clarifying the trio’s impact on the unfolding movement for racial equality, contending that they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution by taking their tunes into white households that wouldn’t let a Black man through the front door. “The sound of their evolving jazz dialect,” writes Tye, “formed a cultural fulcrum that no outraged protestor or government-issued desegregation order could begin to achieve.”
Particularly at this moment of racial reckoning and political division, The Jazzmen offers a potent opportunity to look back at the lives and times of these three figures who stood for the very racial justice that is in the spotlight today. "
A frequent guest on outlets such as Fresh Air, Morning Edition, MSNBC, CNN and the BBC, Larry Tye returns to On The Bookshelf for his 4th time!
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