Heart Full of Rhythm by Ricky Riccardi

Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong By Ricky Riccardi
Oxford University Press, 2020

Ricky Riccardi follows up his 2011 book What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstron’s Later Years with a fine-grain look at a much earlier part of his great subject’s career. Heart of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong tells the pivotal story of Armstrong leaving the narrow loyalties of Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra - the haphazard arrangements, the often-tenous finances, the desperate fraternal loyalty, the unmistakable on-stage magic - and stepping onto a much broader stage. 

Since that ‘broader stage’ is a euphemism for ‘white audiences,’ Heart of Rhythm is necessarily a contentious book, one full of real and perceived betrayals. “Louis Armstrong is synonymous with jazz,” Riccardi writes, and “Jazz is synonymous with Louis Armstrong,” and although that’s true, it’s also a towering status, and you don’t achieve a towering status without towering over people you once saw eye-to-eye. As in his earlier book, Riccardi is unfailingly knowledgeable and fascinating on Armstrong, and in these pages he’s fully aware of the thorny nature of the story he’s telling:

[Armstrong] was much more than a jazz musician; he was a popular artist and entertainer who appealed not just to jazz aficionados, but rather to anyone who regularly listened to music and liked to have a good time. If you were hip, you loved Louis Armstrong. If you were square, you loved Louis Armstrong. He ultimately transcended the world of jazz - and for that, the jazz world never truly forgave him.

This is the period of Armstrong’s career where he went from utterly dominating the venues of the Harlem music scene, legendary places like Connie’s Inn and the Apollo Theater, to playing for the whole world of music in enormously bigger venues and engagements. Right from the beginning of his career, there was no doubt that Armstrong’s own talents were big enough to fill any arena, to reach any audience, to gladden the hearts and quicken the pulses of any listener of any kind. One of the most winning methods Riccardi employs is a heavy use of original reviews and notices, and those early reactions almost always struck the same note of awe at the sheer brilliance of this player they were watching.

But brilliance is a process, and Armstrong felt that process in a way that many of his Dickerson bandmates did not; Riccardi relates him grousing about their occasional lack of professionalism, and of course none of them shared his own perfectionism. When the time came to “shuck” them, Armstrong did it virtually overnight. 

This was at the prompting of his new booker Tommy Rockwell, as Riccardi attests. “Rockwell finally had Armstrong where he wanted him, a single artist that he could book and record instead of worrying about the entire Dickerson band,” he writes. “Armstrong was now about to embark on a life on the road that, for the most part, wouldn’t end for the next 40 years.” And a strong impression that pervades this book is that Rockwell finally had Armstrong where he wanted him for one overwhelmingly simple reason: because that was where Armstrong himself wanted to be.

Heart Full of Rhythm is every bit as full and human as What a Wonderful World; in both cases, Riccardi, surely Armstrong’s foremost chronicler, mines the copious primary sources in order to flesh out the often turbulent details of Armstrong’s personal life - the fractured friendships, the long resentments, the encounters with law and prejudice, most especially the tangled and ultimately amazing relationship with his second wife Lil. All of it is done with a sure ear for the tempo of a complicated story (although this Oxford printing has curiously distracting little defects - typos, a weak Index, etc.), and the two volumes together both comprises a pricelessly detailed look at crucial periods in Armstrong’s life and also summon the vision of what a full-dress one-volume Satchmo biography by Riccardi would be like. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.