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Where does he fit in? And then once you ask yourself that, you’ve got this fantastically influential figure. Louis Armstrong "Hello, Dolly!" on The Ed Sullivan ShowĪnd also, we are backing up and saying, “What is the history of this figure when we look at the history of the trumpet as an instrument?” Going from Ram's horns to the phenomenal new work across the world by composers and improvisers alike. He's giving in to stereotype.” I think we're recovering from that, learning to look again at those wonderful presentations on The Ed Sullivan Show.
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I missed my one chance - because of the misperceptions created by The Ed Sullivan Show and the wise men and women saying, “There he goes again. What did I do that was more important? And I never saw him live. I was in the school band, and Armstrong played a mile from where I lived in D.C. That’s a view, by the way, that I held as a youngster. I think that we are still recovering from the limited view that Armstrong played a stereotypical figure and should be discounted. And I think it is true that since the centennial, there has been a manifold campaign to resuscitate and elevate the image of Armstrong. Here is an excerpt of the conversation.Ĭan you reflect on how perceptions of Louis Armstrong, in academia and in popular culture, have evolved since his centennial? We're talking about a 20-year period that has been really eventful in the realm of Armstrong scholarship. O'Meally about Armstrong's public profile. In advance of the conference, I spoke with Prof. “His signature flourish of a blazing white handkerchief? If in these familiar scenes what he wears is a comic mask, then what does it conceal? And how do we understand the meaning of the mask (or, as Constance Rourke might say, the “double-mask”) itself?” “What do we make of Armstrong’s semicircular, shining smile?” he wrote in an essay published in the indispensable 2004 collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is no stranger to the nuances of Armstrong’s iconography. He’ll also interview Dan Morgenstern - former Director of the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers, and this year’s recipient of the LAEF's Lifetime Achievement Award. O’Meally, Founder and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies, will host the conference and moderate its first panel, on the subject of social justice. O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University