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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Long ago and far away

March 17, 2009 by Terry Teachout

blues.jpg“West End Blues” is Louis Armstrong’s best-known recording. Made in 1928, it opens with a spectacular unaccompanied trumpet cadenza that I discuss in detail in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong:

“West End Blues,” recorded on June 28, starts with a surprise, an unaccompanied cadenza in which Armstrong snaps out four biting quarter notes by way of fanfare, then vaults upward through a chain of interlocking triplet arpeggios to a fiery high C embellished with a touch of vibrato. It was the most technically demanding passage to have been recorded by a jazz trumpeter up to that time, and for this reason alone it was bound to have displeased the old-school New Orleans musicians of Armstrong’s youth, one of whom grumbled that “because Louis was up North making records and running up and down like he’s crazy don’t mean that he’s that great. He is not playing cornet on that horn; he is imitating a clarinet. He is showing off.” Armstrong admitted that he had aspired when young to the facility of the great New Orleans clarinetists: “I was just like a clarinet player, like the guys run up and down the horn nowadays, boppin’ and things.” But his introduction to “West End Blues” has at least as much in common with the florid bel canto cadenzas he had heard in the operatic recordings of Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini, and listeners acquainted with turn-of-the-century American band music will also spot the mark of the elaborate unaccompanied passages in the solos of Herbert L. Clarke, John Philip Sousa’s star cornetist, several of whose records Armstrong owned and cherished. “I’ve heard trumpet solos from 1908 up to the present day–Herbert Clarke and all those boys that really used to blow them horns and it sounds like it was recorded yesterday,” he told Leonard Feather in 1954….

Everybody who knows about jazz knows about “West End Blues.” I doubt, though, that most people know where the song, written by Joe Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor, got its name. Nowadays West End is a lakefront neighborhood of New Orleans, but in Armstrong’s time it was a popular summer resort and amusement park on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain that looked like this:

WEST%20END%20RESORT.JPG

Not far from West End was the Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park, the place where Mitch takes Blanche DuBois on a date in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. The stage directions give the clue: “They have probably been out to the amusement park on Lake Pontchartrain, for Mitch is bearing, upside down, a plaster statuette of Mae West, the sort of prize won at shooting-galleries and carnival games of chance.”

Needless to say, the scene pictured above vanished long ago, and what remained of West End Park was destroyed at last by Hurricane Katrina. But now that I’ve seen that delicately tinted period postcard, I’ll never be able to hear “West End Blues” without imagining a happy crowd of revelers clustered around a Ferris wheel.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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