Narratives of the Past as ‘Performative Engagements’

Pops and his Jazz  | Daniel Stein

Well, me got quite interested in jazz while doing some research on Paul Laurence Dunbar almost around a decade back!

Jazz, a music that emerged as a result of the social upheavals that happened soon after the first world war, and associated with black musicians, is fondly called “the master trope of this American century”!

It was at this point in time, that I chanced to read about Pops [not the Pops of Ghosh’s Gun Island ;-) ] who’s also called Satch or Satchmo, and is one of the most influential names of all time on all things jazz.

So he’s Louis Armstrong aka Pops or Satch or Satchmo!

Quite later on, I got to know, from a wonderful friend - Prof. Thomas - that one Professor Daniel Stein has done a book that’s supposed to be the first ever comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong’s (Pops or Satch) life and works!

The book, titled, Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz is a wonderful tribute of sorts to Pops!

Professor Daniel Stein acknowledges that, this book began as a master’s thesis on Charles Mingus’s and Louis Armstrong’s autobiographical writings and grew into a doctoral dissertation on Armstrong’s autobiographics. Well, such is the power of a master’s thesis or the importance of a doctoral dissertation, which ‘still speaks’ even after the agni pariksha has had its way and sway over the pavapetta candidate on D-day, aka the day of the viva voce! ;-)

Something akin to the retrieval of the archives of the ‘Badabon Trust’, Calcutta, on Cyclone Relief Accounts, 1970’, that we come across in Ghosh’s Gun Island, Professor Stein has literally spent several days at the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College, New York, in the fall of 2009, to access Pops’s oops Armstrong’s original manuscripts!

So much for the ‘power’ of the [‘past’] archives in conditioning our ‘present’!

As those famed Eliotian words in Gun Island, where Ghosh says, “How can the past be present in the present?” In the same way that you might say in English “the present is haunted by the past”. That's how the word “bhuta” has come to mean “ghost”.

Coming back to Louis Armstrong, well, Stein starts his introduction to his book on Pops, with the following line –

To study jazz, we are often told, means to study something uniquely and centrally American… Robert O’Meally calls jazz “a massive, irresistibly influential, politically charged part of our culture” and “the master trope of this American century: the definitive sound of America in our time.”

Reaching for Du Boisian heights, O’Meally argues that “the sound of the American twentieth century is the jazz line.”

If jazz is elevated to the status of America’s master trope and definitive sound, and if it sonically encapsulates the problem of race that W. E. B. Du Bois diagnosed as the defining issue of the twentieth century, then Louis Armstrong is much more than a musician and entertainer loved by audiences in the United States and across the world, Professor Stein quips!

Well, this Daniel Stein read, is such a phenomenal book of sorts, that takes you headlong into Louis Armstrong and his musical life!

Be it on Armstrong’s [Pops’] inventive scat improvisations, or his pioneering vocal techniques, or his life as a recording artist, or his presence on sound recordings, radio & film, or as an icon of the Cold War, or his role as political spokesman for the cause of racial integration, or his passion for writing letters, or the articles and columns that he regularly wrote for newspapers, jazz magazines, and the mainstream press, or his autobiographical narratives, yes! you have it all there!

I was particularly interested in Professor Stein’s take on Louis Armstrong’s autobiographical narratives, which, according to him, are not merely historical source texts about the past, but should be read more as ‘performative engagements’ that continue to participate actively in shaping our efforts to understand the musical and cultural history of New Orleans jazz!

How true! And how wonderfully he’s put it!

Well, doesn’t the same rubric apply to a host of texts that concern themselves with memory studies,  historiographies or studies concerning past events in general!

And, if and when we could afford to do a profound study on narratives of the past as ‘performative engagements’ that continue to participate actively in shaping our efforts to understand the entire system as a whole, our efforts would sure attain such a harmonious fruition of sorts!

Not only that, Professor Stein, says that these ‘participant observers’ whose understanding of the past is necessarily shaped by the ‘pitfalls of memory,’ nevertheless speak with special authority as cultural insiders, using definitive linguistic and narratological means, which goes a long way in analyzing how their language and narrative perspective have determined their unique versions to the story.

I quote, these memorable snippets from Professor Stein –

Armstrong’s autobiographical narratives, document the personal and cultural significance of New Orleans music making, question the very notion of “jazz itself,” and intervene repeatedly in the discursive construction of the “jazz tradition.”

This is why these narratives should not be reduced to mere historical source texts about the past, but can be more fruitfully read as performative engagements that continue to participate actively in shaping our efforts to understand the musical and cultural history of New Orleans jazz. And indeed, Armstrong was very much aware of the discursive power wielded by music journalists and historians and sought to accommodate their interests in addition to furthering his own.

Taking a more disgruntled stance, Armstrong once told Richard Meryman that jazz historiography basically amounted to the production of popular myths. Here, he sought to reestablish his authority as a jazz autobiographer in the 1960s: “What they say about the old days is corny. They form their own opinions, they got so many words for things and make everything soooo big - and it turns out a - what you call it - a fictitious story!

Armstrong’s memories of New Orleans music are therefore triply coded: they aim to set the record straight by relating his version of past events, they afford him prominence as a cultural icon whose life story resonates with American myths of race and black music, and they deliver the raw material for others to present his life story to the public.

If jazz autobiographers intervene in the shifting discourses of jazz, offer alternate takes on jazz history, and revise drafts written by others, the question is how they realize these objectives.

As participant observers whose understanding of the past is necessarily shaped by the pitfalls of memory as well as by complex personal significances and strategic concerns, they nevertheless speak with special authority as cultural insiders and musical creators. This authority rests on specific linguistic and narratological means, which is why this chapter sets out to conduct a series of literary close readings of Armstrong’s autobiographical recollections.

The goal is to reconstruct the historical contexts in which Armstrong produced his depictions of early New Orleans jazz and to investigate the ways in which his language and narrative perspective determined his versions of the story. The usefulness of such a literary approach lies in its ability to contextualize, amend, and sometimes question the conclusions musicologists and jazz historians like Kmen have drawn about Armstrong’s role in the development of jazz.

Musical recordings and personal testimony, as this example attests, must be read in conjunction with and not against each other, if we are to get a sense of the historical complexities and personal significances of jazz.

The best way to accomplish this is to analyze Armstrong’s depictions of his life by making the narratological distinction between story and narrative discourse in addition to tracing the evolution of his autobiographical and musical consciousness to the formative influences of his childhood in New Orleans.

In narratological terms, Armstrong’s depictions capture music making and its social integration on the level of content (story), as well as on the level of narrative transmission (discourse): vernacular music is reflected by a vernacular approach to autobiographical telling, and instead of formal musical analysis, the reader encounters portraits of particularly memorable players, performances, and practices.

So much for the power of music making and its social integration on the level of content (story), as well as on the level of narrative transmission (discourse)!

To be continued…

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