Satchmo: A life of improvisation

The Schoolhouse Theater, in Croton Falls, N.Y. presents a range of plays but it just so happens that the last three plays I've seen there have been about various facets of the black experience and the most recent, "Satchmo at the Waldorf", by Terry Teachout, directed by Bram Lewis, (running through June 8, 2025) is well worth a visit. 

"Satchmo" was Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), one of the great entertainers of the 20th century. His trumpet playing revolutionized jazz and his singing and joyful stage persona made him beloved by millions.

Louis Armstrong in 1955. Photo/Herbert Behrens

At the height of his fame, in the 1960s, his recording of "Hello, Dolly!" bumped the Beatles from the no. 1 spot on the record sales charts. Watch this clip of "Dolly" from a 1965 Berlin concert - it's all there, the incandescent personality, the improvising horn, the scat singing. The U.S. State Department sent him on a performance tour of Africa, Europe and Asia as an American good-will ambassador. 

However, the "Satch" (a nickname derived from "satchel mouth," referring to his wide mouth) we meet in this play is the private Armstrong.

In a sensational performance by Wali Jamal, this Armstrong paces his dressing room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York before a gig in the high-class Empire Room.

He has reached the top of the show business world, with a comfortable room at a prestigious hotel, yet the days when black performers had to find segregated roadhouses and get food from the back doors of restaurant kitchens crowd his memories. 

Wali Jamal as Louis Armstrong

This is a different Armstrong from the man on stage who always sported a huge grin. His first words in play are, "I shit myself tonight." (The play contains a truly spectacular amount of profanity.) He is preoccupied with his declining health, in May 1971, in what will be his last gig before his death in July. 

Jamal brilliantly conveys the charisma of the man, born in the New Orleans red-light district of Storyville and sent to a boys' home at age 12 where he found the magic - a brass band.

Coming up in the jazz joints of New Orleans, Chicago and New York, Armstrong is squeezed by gangsters and finds manager Joe Glaser, a tough-talking Jew from Chicago -- also played by Jamal with a Southside accent and cigar in hand. 

They form a symbiotic partnership - Armstrong leaves all the business aspects to Glaser, whom he always calls "Mr. Glaser," and Glaser advises Armstrong to "stop blowing your brains out playing all them high Cs. That voice of yours - that's where the money is." They operate on a handshake instead of a contract.

Armstrong's story is riveting, but I began to wonder if the script would illustrate why his playing was so special. Then Armstrong turns on a recording of his "West End Blues," featuring a golden cadenza that he describes as playing "kinda like an opera singer showing off ... then I work my way up to that high C, let it ring out like Caruso."

While the 1960s brought Armstrong worldwide acclaim, social issues such as the civil rights movement and new forms of jazz such as be-bop clashed with his image. Putting on a pair of Miles Davis' signature sunglasses, Jamal becomes the cool rival trumpeter, who spares no words.

"Miles Davis loves the way Louis plays trumpet ... Can't play nothing that doesn't come from Louis, not even modern shit. But I hate the way Louis acts onstage. Man gets up there and pulls out that hankie and starts jumping around like Jim Crow on a stick - all to make them sad white motherfuckers happy." 

Davis' view intersects somewhat with my young years in the 1960s when my black music heroes were Jimi Hendrix and the Motown stars, and Louis Armstrong seemed like a nice, old-timey personality without much relevance to the present. I thought that about Ella Fitzgerald, too. Time and appreciation for their musical genius has shown me the shallowness of those early opinions. 

The audience at "Satchmo" was predominantly white, and this is the value of Schoolhouse Theater's bold play choices, courtesy of Lewis, producing director, and Owen Thompson, artistic director. One of the previous works I saw was "MisUnderstanding Mammy," a one-woman play in which actress Hattie McDaniel defends the maid and cook's roles she played against accusations of racial pandering. (The third play was "Master Harold ... and the Boys," set in the time of South African apartheid.) 

Director Lewis keeps the action interesting as Armstrong reminisces, holding his horn, or sits wide-legged as Joe Glaser. Jamal suggests Armstrong's distinctive gravelly voice then switches to Davis' smooth higher-pitched speaking tones, changing his body language for each of the three characters. 

Tom Christopher's set design is described in the program as "the style from the twenties known as Brutalism. Odd angles. Trapezoids."

I found it odd, indeed, since the play is set in the 1970s, Armstrong was a real person and the Waldorf is a real place. It was strange to see Armstrong pick up a phone handset shaped as a block of white plaster, but the nearly all-white set and impressionistic furniture certainly kept the focus on the main character and his emotions.

Dennis Parichy's lighting design literally and subtly highlights the character changes.

Toward the end of his life, he recorded "What a Wonderful World" and it became a signature song for him. This video is from an ABC broadcast in 1967 and between his great big smiles, you can see the seriousness of a man for whom music was existence itself.

About his horn, he says in the play, "Everything I got in this world come outta this. My life, my soul, all right here."

It is indeed a wonderful world that gave us Louis Armstrong.