![]() “I go into universities now, and everybody knows every Charlie Parker solo in every key. Riccardi, a director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, recalls that his master’s at Rutgers University in jazz history devoted just two hours to Armstrong in the whole programme. I cringed as a black American.”Īrmstrong’s reputation has improved since, but there’s still much room to recover – and not least in elite circles. While lauding Armstrong as “one of the greatest people of the 20th century”, he was “offended by his presentations … At the time of the rise of Malcolm X, the authority of Martin Luther King, examples in the popular media like Muhammad Ali and others, there was Armstrong – a kind of throwback from another era, with this borderline minstrelsy role that he played. The handkerchief-holding persona – cheerful, fond of silly jokes – he’d perfected had echoes of an “Uncle Tom”, a black person who happily does the bidding of a white master.īob O’Meally, the head of jazz studies at Columbia University in New York, remains divided. Photograph: Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House MuseumĪfrican Americans found Armstrong more troubling still. ![]() On the set of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue, the earliest surviving footage of Armstrong on film. ![]()
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