Jazz Biographers Find Inspiration from the Digital Age and Dickens

‘Concerto for Cootie: The Life and Times of Cootie Williams’By Steven C. BowieUniversity Press of Mississippi, 456 pages‘The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed American Music’By Larry TyeMariner Books, 416 pages“Concerto for Cootie” is not only the first biography of this important jazz trumpeter, it is also the product of what biographers can do with so much more comprehensiveness and alacrity in the digital age: access a wide variety of databases—in this case including the ProQuest Historical Black Newspapers Collection, which reveals perspectives not so available in the mainstream press.Williams soloed with Duke Ellington until Benny Goodman enticed him to his band—a controversial move for Goodman and Williams. It was a bold move to include a black musician in a white band, a risky move for a black musician not only forsaking a Duke but going over to the other side, so to speak. Williams was a crossover artist before that term came into currency sometime in the 1950s when purists worried, for example, about what it meant for a country artist to hit the pop charts.Such, too, was the mythology of race, that certain whites worried about the social/political implications of mixing and matching jazz performances and performers. How would audiences react? How would black musicians conduct themselves in front of integrated audiences? Then Williams upped the ante by becoming a big band leader and innovator drawing on a young talent, Thelonius Monk, for a band theme song.Williams was not done. Mr. Bowie documents with diligence and perception his subject’s involvement in the civil rights movement, which, in retrospect, seems inevitable given his own interest in integrating the music he played across many different audiences. Yet not until Mr. Bowie’s book do we have a full accounting of just how much Williams accomplished.How did Charles Melvin Williams become Cootie? Supposedly, according to the man himself, the nickname stuck when at six or seven he was asked about what he heard as a band played in a park. “Cootie, Cootie, Cootie,” he said. Mr. Bowie is skeptical, noting other explanations, none of which may be accurate. What mattered, the biographer observes, is that Williams had his title, so to speak, alongside the Duke, Satchmo, Dizzy, and Bird.The titled jazzmen, in Larry Tye’s book, could almost be, sans their color, characters in a Dickens epic—like “Great Expectations” with its plebeian protagonist, Pip, seeking not merely to better himself but to become a gentleman. So it is that the grandson of slaves transforms himself into Duke Ellington and American music into an elegance that belied the jungle music appellation applied to jazz; a New Orleans slum kid, Louis Armstrong, at seven (around Cootie’s age) buys his first ten cent horn and charms audiences worldwide with the guttural yet elevating sound of his instrument; the son of a coachman and laundress, entranced with traveling carnivals transforms himself in Count Basie, an impresario of jazz. The six parts of “The Jazzmen” reflect the huge scale and ambition of Mr. Tye’s group biography: “ Setting the Stage,” “Musical Lives,” “It’s an Ensemble,” “Offstage,” “Race Matters,” and “Last Acts.” There are provocative chapters such as “Sachmo’s Battlefield,” “Life on the Rocky Road,” “Side Men” and “Side Women,” “Mistresses and Misogyny,” and “Artists and Entertainers.” Also included are a “Road Map” and “Chronology” to keep it all straight.Here is an example of Mr. Tye’s gritty history that gets down to the street level of Louis Armstrong’s early life: “He would even emulate the flesh peddlers who were celebrities in his community. He’d gotten to know several of the neighborhood ladies when, as a small boy, he sold them red dust scraped from bricks that they mixed with pee and used to scrape their steps. The one for whom he procured, Nootsy, was ‘short and nappy haired and she had buck teeth.’ She offered him a sample and, when he said no thanks, she pulled out her pocketknife and ‘stabbed me in the left shoulder and the blood ran down over the back of my shirt.’”Mr. Tye’s book is promoted with the customary blurbs, yet in this case they don’t do justice to his gift for the telling detail and the Dickensian trajectory from the mire to the majesty of human aspiration.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

Jazz Biographers Find Inspiration from the Digital Age and Dickens

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