SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF
by Terry Teachout
Schoolhouse Theater
Croton Falls, NY
"You know you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played."—Miles Davis.
I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Wali Jamal's towering one-man performance as Louis Armstrong in Terry Teachout's impressive distillation of the life of the iconic trumpet player in his powerful one-act play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, at the beautiful Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, NY.
Marking the 40th anniversary of this venerable theater, the play was directed with skill and grace by Bram Lewis. I found Jamal riveting—his performance conveying all the pain and joy of the universe as Armstrong ruminates backstage before one his final performances on all the ups and downs and racial stigmas he had to overcome to eventually play at what some might conceive as one of the most prestigious gigs available to any musician anywhere, the tony Waldorf Astoria. Jamal not only nails Louis' tragicomic persona, he also does a neat turn playing two other characters who loomed large in the life of jazz master Armstrong—his longtime manager Joe Glaser, a wise-cracking mobbed up manager from Chicago who rescued Armstrong at one point from deep debt and helped grease the wheels of his later career by insisting he cover the Broadway standard "Hello Dolly" (which Armstrong hated, but whose recording of which knocked The Beatles for the first time off their #1 perch on the Billboard singles chart); and icy elegant shades-sporting Father of Cool Miles Davis, who praises Louis' astonishing playing but dismisses his onstage grinning persona as basically an act of minstrelsy designed to cater to the plantation fantasies of his mainly white audience.
That Wali Jamal can transition so fluently from one character's voice to another and inhabit the souls of all three individuals without missing a beat is astonishing. That he can so winningly convey all the contradictions that went into the making of the great Armstrong, who reacts and wrestles out loud with the voices of Glaser and Davis, revealing all the many complexities that went into the making of this American Jazz Master, makes for terrific theater. The late Terry Teachout, a formidable cultural critic, jazz buff, and author of several must-read biographies of Duke Ellington and Armstrong himself, proves himself a dramatist of the first rank in this compelling one-act and his play which encapsulates a lot of biographical detail in the service of the Armstrong's private backstage reveries is able to bring the audience to tears by the end.
All the bold statements, contradictions, turbulent emotions, and love/hate relationships that mark the steady rise and inevitable decline of a great artist are touched on here as Pops declaims his own oral history into an oversized prop tape recorder bearing witness to 50-plus years of consummate music-making.