Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sighs and pleads in counterpoint with the airport announcements. The melody is barely audible but still unmistakable above the thunderous whisper of a thousand four-wheeled suitcases rolling across granite floors, the centripetal chorus of cellphone chatter, the irregular cadence of perpetual motion marble contraption’s ding, and the breathless hushing of the moving sidewalk. Plugged into their private audiotopias, most of the coffee queuers halfway out the gleaming A concourse at Sea-Tac are oblivious to Satchmo’s unsinkable melancholy as it bursts out into uncontainable joy.
Through the giant glass windows past the planes at their gates, the International Arrivals Facility lurks in the fog. It has just been completed to the tune of a billion dollars. More plans are in the works, the ostinato of airport expansion will never end. Until it does, halted not to by fog but by fire.
Even embedded in this Sea-Tac symphony, the trumpet tune’s contours are immediately identifiable. Iconic Armstrong does not need Shazam to name him.
It’s his “St. Louis Blues” from the 1954 Columbia recording, Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy.
Blue indeed: earlier that morning the weather report delivered by mother’s big television back on Bainbridge Island pegged the temperature in St. Louis well below freezing.
The thought occurs to me that Armstrong’s version of “St. James Infirmary” might be the more topical choice, what with the COVID beast busted out of her cage, hobbled and less lethal, but still eager to claw, scrape and bite. But that hospital dirge might depress travelers, even subliminally, curb their cravings to consume, put them in an even worse mood than the weather and waiting already has.
I’m not buying any coffee, just standing outside the place. The fog isn’t lifting, the delays piling up. There’s time to listen.
Armstrong’s “St. Louis Blues” is a cauldron of counterpoint: the leader’s crisp yet juicy chunks of melody buoyed by Trummy Young’s bubbling trombone and the steaming spice of Barney Biggard’s clarinet, all in the rhythm section’s tasty broth (Billy Kyle on piano, Arvell Shaw on bass, and Barrett Deems on drums.) There are vocals from Velma Middleton who, after a few minutes, breaks into the famous opening lines, “I hate to see the evening sun go down / It makes me think I’m on my last go round.” Those are words that hit home with any traveler, especially ones already weary before their winged chariot has even gotten off the ground.
Then Armstrong himself sings—of beating some sense into a woman for thinking she “ain’t good looking, ain’t built so fine.” He does it with plank stolen from picket fence, having previously been himself slapped by a Gypsy fortune teller after she looked at his offending palm. These musicians, great performers of texts, deliver their lines with humor and humanity. In the first week of 2024 in super-sensitive, super-high-tech Seattle, no AI censor yet has the nerve, even if already the capability, to emend the lyrics.
The tune ends in triumphant polyphony, both spontaneously coordinated and sublimely anarchic—the ultimate tonic for the regimentation and ennui of airports and airplanes.
I had been hoping to make it to Chicago for my connection, soon after the “sun goes down,” but it looks more likely that I’ll be spending the night there instead.
What comes over the speakers next is a musical evocation of traffic jostling and jamming on the Champs-Elysées. This makes some airport sense. The audio travelogue has transported me from brooding St Louis to bustling Paris. Maybe it’s yet more subliminal advertiser for the airline industry, but this is art that will always soar above those who abuse it.
The tune is “Parisian Thoroughfare” written by that founding father bebop, the pianist Bud Powell. But it’s Bud’s younger brother, Richie, who is on the piano now, his locomotive, streetcar chords in riding above George Morrow’s oscillating bassline and spurred on by drummer Max Roach’s cymbal swoosh that then moves deftly from the background to the foreground, from the edge of the metal disc to its domed bell that ding-ding-dings like a streetcar stopping. This one never stops. The French word for traffic is circulation and this is music that circulates and celebrates with unsurpassable exuberance and charm. Clifford Brown’s trumpet honks and jockeys for position. Tenor saxophonist Harold Land quips in with his own busker’s street music.
Out of this harmonic stasis, all motion that doesn’t advance breaks the irrepressible swing of the melody now flowing. There is counterpoint here too, but of a different vein—sleeker, more overtly virtuosic, prouder of its polish than is Armstrong’s ensemble; faster too, occasionally almost furious, but never losing its cool. Land, Brown, and Powell deliver solos that duck and weave through the traffic then trade-off with Roach before he takes his own rollicking, relentlessly inventive yet formally convincing solo.
I know the track because it comes from one of my favorite records, an LP I bought as a kid: Clifford Brown & Max Roach. It was issued the same year as Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy, the chronological fact that offers an irrefutable rejoinder to claims that music history, like an airplane en route, moves in a straight line. It never has and never will.
My boyhood friend, the brilliant drummer Michael Sarin, reminded me last week that Roach would have celebrated his hundredth birthday on January 10th. The Zeitgeist is indeed as busy as the great percussionist himself in “Parisian Thoroughfare.”
A year-and-a-half after recording the album, Brown was killed in a car wreck along with Richie Powell and his wife. Their quintet existed for only two-and-a-half years but produced a rich, unique body of work. After the shocking loss of his friends and colleagues, Roach would be plunged into depression, seeking solace in drugs and alcohol but continuing to work until emerging again as a mighty, radical musical force until his death in 2007.
As “Parisian Thoroughfare” coursed through the concourse, almost none of its of cheerful complexity could be heard. Roach’s solo from the Champs-Elysées merged into the sounds of the jet age. Somewhere beneath the sonic scrim, the quintet came back in for their final soundscape of ground traffic receding into silence …
I waited for the next number to come out from the coffee place, thinking it should be Count Basie’s “Going to Chicago Blues,” Jimmy Rushing singing “When you see me passin’ baby, hang your head and cry!”
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
Be First to Comment