Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1900 and died at home in New York in 1971, having done, in the intervening years, as much as anyone since Lincoln to change the history of the United States.

Jazz would not have been the same without him, and the whole artistic history of the United States in the 20th century, quite apart from the country’s political history leading up to the civil rights movement, would not have been the same without jazz. There was no easy conquest, and Armstrong himself was the object of prejudice right to the end. All the more edifying, then, that he himself was colour-blind when it came to the music that he had helped to invent.

Talking about Bix Beiderbecke, Armstrong said: “Those pretty notes went right through me.” Before we let these words stir up bad memories, we should console ourselves with how they once started the long process of putting fallacies to rest. The first fallacy was that white men could not play jazz. Beiderbecke was white; Louis Armstrong was the strongest creative force in the early history of the music; so if Armstrong thought this highly of Beiderbecke, it follows that at least one white man could play jazz.

Everything was against Armstrong’s forming an objective judgment. He had good cause to believe that jazz had been invented by black musicians, who had been systematically robbed of the rewards. Segregation dictated that it would have been inconceivable for Armstrong to hold Beiderbecke’s chair with the touring orchestra of Paul Whiteman, whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against. Armstrong and Beiderbecke would never have been allowed to play together in public. The magnitude of the insult would have excused a bitter view. Yet Armstrong thought Beiderbecke was wonderful and said so.

Nevertheless, the fallacy lingered on until long after the Second World War. At Sydney University in the late Fifties I was introduced to New Orleans jazz by well-heeled college students who had been brought up listening to the shellac record collections of their well-travelled fathers. The definitive Jelly Roll Morton LP had just come out and was used as a teaching aid by proselytes for New Orleans jazz, with the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven collections waiting further up the line for advanced students.

It went without question that jazz was black music. One of the set books of our informal jazz faculty actually said so: Shining Trumpets by Rudi Blesh. In retrospect, Blesh’s book is a touching example of inverse racism: a white scholar, himself from a beleaguered minority, he was claiming, on behalf of blacks, exclusive rights to an art form. Black creativity in jazz was everything the inverted racists said it was, and more. But white creativity was real, and could be discounted only at the cost of obfuscation – a high price to pay for feeling virtuous.

Even without Armstrong’s generous testimony, it would be foolish to admit unquestioned the assumption of automatic black supremacy in a given musical art form. It cuts out too much white achievement. You can still hear, from black ideologues and their white sympathisers, that Fred Astaire couldn’t really dance. He is held not to have possessed the proper, syncopated improvisational skills of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who could lead and drag the beat with different strata of his body simultaneously. But when you consider what Astaire could do, the idea that he should be measured by what he couldn’t is absurd.

But there was a political aspect, which applied beyond the kingdom of the dance to the world of American music in general. White men were in control, and they robbed the blacks. Armstrong never saw a dollar of royalties from all his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings: there were more than 60 of them, they sold in the millions, but for too much of the rest of his life they didn’t save him from a single week of one-night stands. His Hollywood earnings bought him the occasional vacation, but the royalties from his early masterpieces never materialised.

The white men not only took the money, they took the opportunities. Bojangles never got the chance to be Astaire. Billie Holiday bravely refused the demeaning coon-turn roles that Hollywood offered her. On top of the ravages of her abused childhood, her frustrations as an artist drove her to drugs, and her whole tragedy – the tragedy of black talent in a white business – was part of the picture evoked by her signature tune Strange Fruit.

The song is about lynch law but so was her life. Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian – you could make a long list of victims just on the level of genius, let alone of mere talent. The joy of the music is populated with unsleeping ghosts, and anyone who doesn’t see them isn’t using his eyes. But it’s a bad reason not to use our ears, which will hear, if we let them, an awkward truth. Nothing can redress the flagrant inequalities of the past. We can, however, refrain from compounding the insult. Armstrong, with everything against him, knew how to lead an ordered life. Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. Trying to prove to his father that his music would get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day.

The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide. But the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable. Armstrong could play blues with unmatched inventiveness, but his soul moved in jump-time: a sharp, staccato attack was basic to him. Crackling excitement was his natural mode. Beiderbecke, on the other hand, was blue to the roots. Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford’s catchline for The Good Soldier: this is the saddest story ever told.

I listened to most of Beiderbecke’s Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman sides before I left Sydney, but it wasn’t until I was down and out in London in the early 1960s that I first heard I’m Coming, Virginia. An Australian homosexual ballet buff persuaded me to sit down and listen to a piece of music that he held to be the most beautiful thing in his life: better even than Swan Lake.

For a while I’m Coming, Virginiabecame the most beautiful thing in my life too. The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping.

Armstrong could probably have done that too, but he didn’t want to. He wasn’t like that. Beiderbecke was, always: his loveliest-ever outpouring was an example of the artistic freedom that can be attained through being trapped in a personality.

The paradox was that the most persuasive witness to the lyrical distillation of Bix’s broken life, Louis Armstrong, was a man whose life was never broken, even by the full force of America’s most tenacious social malignancy, white prejudice. If it is a political nightmare no longer, Armstrong’s trumpet certainly contributed to the wake-up call. But there is only so much that art can do against injustice, and the blues, from which jazz took flight, were an embodiment of the sad truth that much beauty begins as a consolation for what can’t be mended.

— Extracted from Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, published by Picador and available from BooksFirst at £23 (RRP £25), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/ booksfirstbuy

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