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WHAT A WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS

by JASON BERRY Bing Crosby is probably the most well-known voice of the season that rolls fromThanksgiving till late December. “White Christmas” has its many vocal variations, but Crosby’s classic recording leads the way. Other voices from deep yesteryear fill the airwaves like a tidal current of the holidays — Johnny Mathis, Eartha Kitt (silken and seductive on “Santa Baby”), Perry Como, Charles Brown (“Please Come Home for Christmas”), Mel Tormé and the irrepressible Louis Jordan on “May Every Day Be Christmas.” But Louis Armstrong in his ineffable way has become a mainstay of Christmas music — a stature he milked with irony. His last recording was “The Night Before Christmas,” which he performed in an avuncular, jovial tone. It was made several months before his death in 1971 and is played regularly on New Orleans’ WWOZ 90.7 FM on December 24. Louis Armstrong & Friends: What a Wonderful Christmas is the album whose cover features a beaming Satchmo, wearing glasses, a red Christmas hat and a yellow polka-dot bow tie. His gravelly voice, sprinkled with grace notes on the “White Christmas” cut, is a far piece from Bing Crosby’s melodious and angelic tones from the 1954 film of the same title in which he starred with Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney. That was also the year Armstrong published his remarkable memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, a tale as gritty as a Charles Dickens novel in recounting the deep poverty in which he was raised, amid street walkers and petty criminals. It is also a tender story of his mother’s love, with a surge of joy at the end, when the 21-year-old catches the train to Chicago in 1922 to join the band of his departed mentor Papa Joe “King” Oliver: “My boyhood dream had come true at last.” Armstrong’s climb to mass appeal is hardly a conventional celebrity tale. His personality was honed by a form of showmanship in which black musicians on stages of cavernous clubs in Chicago and New York had to strike a dual appeal: In the age of segregation, they played for white audiences or African American audiences, but rarely were the audiences mixed. The earliest film footage of Armstrong shows a

young man so at ease on stage, swaying with the trumpet, his charisma so natural as to invite the world “telegenic” — before television even existed. Yet behind that stage presence, when he put down the horn that soared with celestial high Cs, the musician nicknamed “Satchmo” (for Satchelmouth), likely by Crosby, carried a past trailed with some sorrow. Given his childhood, how could it not have been? In liner notes to Louis Armstrong & Friends: What a Wonderful Christmas, Joseph F. Laredo writes that Armstrong had his first Christmas tree in a hotel room in the early 1940s, while on a concert tour, his wife Lucille trav- eling with him: The forty-year-old jazz giant spent hours sitting up in bed and staring into its twinkling lights.... “He had me take that tree on those one- nighters,” Lucille later recalled, “until way after New Year’s, putting it up every night and taking it down every morning in a dozen hotels. When I did take it down the last time, Louis wanted me to mail it home. It was a real tree, and I had to convince him — I really had to convince him — that the tree would dry up.” Armstrong’s cameo appearance with his band in the 1956 film High Society, which starred Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly, elevated the jazz pioneer to another threshold of popular culture. A year later, he made a triumphant tour of Africa as a goodwill ambassador with CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow chronicling his story in a docu- mentary, Satchmo the Great. By the 1960s, Armstrong was the most famous African American in the world, a pop culture icon alongside Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway. But as the musical currents changed, some bebop and free jazz exponents derided his jovial onstage persona; one critic accused him of being an “Uncle Tom,” to which Billie Holiday famously said, “Of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart.” The holiday tunes he recorded in the ’50s and ’60s, in years of racial turbulence, gained popularity after his death in 1971, and stand today as his permanent Christmas tree.

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