Satchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man show starring John Douglas Thompson (left) , plays at Long Wharf Theatre’s Stage II, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven, Conn. from October 3 through November 4. It is the first play by Wall Street Journal Drama Critic and Armstrong biographer, Terry Teachout. This is an edited version of a five part interview posted in Berkshire Fine Arts www.berksirefinearts.com

Terry Teachout- I’m fortunate because I work for a newspaper that is a national paper and does have the money to cover the arts in a serious way. It wasn’t my idea, originally, to be America’s Drama Critic. The Journal said, look, we’re a national paper. Why don’t you go out there and see what is to be seen. At that stage I knew nothing about regional theatre. Now I know a lot about it. I know where to find it and what’s good. But I shouldn’t (emphasis) be the only one doing this. That’s ridiculous. artes fine arts magazine

Charles Giuliano– How does it feel to be the Last of the Mohicans?

TT I don’t like it at all. I like the job. I love what I’m doing. But there should be a half a dozen or more people doing what I’m doing. The news magazines are dinosaurs. They are doomed to extinction. Newsweek in its present form is not going to last much longer. It just isn’t. It will become an entirely on-line publication. Both Time and Newsweek started pulling back on the arts several years ago. The New York Times should be covering more regional arts of all kinds. Why they don’t do that is not mine to say. I don’t work for them.

CG Your book on Louis Armstrong and now the play Satchmo at the Waldorf are remarkable. It’s rare to find someone who knows the music and can also write.

TT Most jazz biographies nowadays are written by musicologists. You don’t necessarily learn how to write in the course of learning how to be a musicologist. That’s not a knock on them. I couldn’t do my work without their work. I’m a serious scholar but standing on the shoulders of countless other people. When I was thinking about what kind of book do I want to write and who would my models be. For the most part I wasn’t thinking about jazz biographies. I was thinking about W. Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson, or the David Kerins’ two volume, Berlioz biography.

CG Given that there is a lot of material on Armstrong what was the motivation?

TT It was the tapes. The tapes are generally accessible. But at the point where they were made available, no biographer had used them. When I realized that I knew that it was time that somebody did. That was really the trigger for this book. Because I had some sense of what the tapes would mean. Everybody knew that Armstrong had recorded big chunks of his private life during the last quarter century of his life. I assumed they would be as revealing as they turned out to be. So that’s why this book got written. That, and love for Armstrong, which is a different matter.

CG The other day John (Douglas Thompson) was saying that there are some 2,000 hours transcribed.

TT There are 650 reels. Very few of them actually have been transcribed. They have been indexed. So you can find things on them and several of the key tapes have been transcribed. Of the 650 reels a significant part of that is Armstrong’s record collection., which he taped so he could listen to the music on the road. He also taped most of his radio and TV interviews in the last fifteen or twenty years of his life. So that’s a lot of the material. But, even including all of that, there is a huge amount of these very informal conversations. It would simply be a matter of Armstrong setting up the tape recorder in a corner of the dining room, in his dressing room, in his hotel room.

The funniest one is in the dressing room when (the actor) Stepin Fetchit has come back stage. He came to say hello and they’re getting high…literally! It’s very funny.

CG It must be hilarious.

TT It’s an absolute hoot. You never know what you’re going to get. Most of it is interesting, but not really useful as source material; but fascinating. It was useful to me as a playwright because you got to hear what he talked like. He talks candidly on the tapes about the troubles he had with the gangsters in Chicago and elsewhere. He talks quite candidly about marijuana.

CG What did he call it?

TT His favorite word for it was gage.

CG He also called it muggles.

TT Yes. He also called it Mary Warner, which we actually use in the play. We’ve tried to find a perfect pronunciation for that. We haven’t quite found it yet but John’s getting there. Much less often grass.

CG How much did he smoke?

TT He smoked every day.

CG A lot?

TT It’s a little hard to tell. He smoked in the morning while sitting on the toilet. He would smoke in the evening after a gig. He saw marijuana as a kind of analog of Swiss Kriss (an herbal laxative for gentle, natural relief of constipation). One cleaned out your head and one cleaned out your body.

CG On the tapes did he talk about the early years with King Oliver and the Hot Five?

TT He talks about Oliver often. He tends not to sit around and talk about records he’s made. He’s the same way in interviews. If you asked about them he would tell you.

We are fortunate that in addition to the tapes we have an enormous amount of film. Armstrong came through on film. I think if he had been white, and if he wanted to, he could have had an acting career like Sinatra had. You get a taste of this in his last film Sammy Davis’s A Man Called Adam.

Armstrong had a dramatic role as an older, run down, jazz musician. He doesn’t do much in the film, but enough to know what we’ve missed. All of his Hollywood films are him playing some caricature version of himself. Yet his personality comes across, because he is so incredibly photogenic.

CG He was on screen friends with Bing Crosby but I think he commented that he was never invited to his house.

TT That’s true, but nobody was invited to Crosby’s house. Crosby was a very strange bird. He was very private. But I don’t think there’s any question that he loved Armstrong. He didn’t ask anybody. And Armstrong, I think, understood his peculiarities. He didn’t hold it against him. When Armstrong mentions that he has never been invited to Crosby’s house, it’s in passing In a print interview.

CG In the play he talks about not being invited to Glaser’s house. (Joe Glaser was Armstrong’s long term manager and a character in Teachout’s play.)

TT That’s different.

CG Did Glaser go to his house?

TT Not in the later years. As Lucille (Armstrong’s wife) said “They are not the kind of people who got along face to face.”

CG How did you move from the book to a play?

TT I did the book tour in the fall of 2009. When it was over, I went to Florida to do a residency at Rollins College.

I got an e mail from John Schreiber who now runs the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, but who had been a theatrical producer. He was one of the producers of Jelly’s Last Jam and Elaine Stritch’s one woman show. I didn’t know him from Adam. In fact I didn’t recognize his name. I looked it up and figured out who he was. He wrote to me at my blog and said “I read your book and liked it very much. I didn’t know Armstrong but I knew Glaser. I wonder if you have ever thought about writing a play based on this book or getting somebody to do so.” I hadn’t thought about it. The thought never occurred to me. I had never thought about writing any play. I had just written an opera. But that’s a different kettle of fish. I thought, well, this is interesting. This man knows what he’s talking about. Here I am at Rollins College. For once I have a little time on my hands. Why don’t I see what will come out? I sat down and four days later I had the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf.

CG There is a compelling moment in the play in which we hear Armstrong scat along with and explain a tune. Is “West End Blues” based on opera, as you indicate in the play?

TT Yes. That opening cadenza is a kind of cross between coloratura singing and the coloratura-derived cornet solos at the turn of the century, by people like Herbert Clark. I was the first scholar to identify records in Armstrong’s collection by Herbert Clark.

They clearly left their mark on that opening cadenza for “West End Blues.” Satchmo says “I put everything I knew into that motherfucker.” I made that line up but it an amalgam of a wide range of sources. The version we hear on record was almost certainly prepared in advance. I don’t mean to say he sat down and wrote it out but he worked it out…played it on the gig and developed it into a set piece, and then played it like that for the rest of his life.

CG What are we going to see in New Haven (Long Wharf Theatre) where the show moves after Shakespeare & Company (Lenox, MA)?

TT This play but tighter. The transitions that had to be done crudely, because we were making cuts at the last minute, during the final week of rehearsal, but will be smoothed out. There will be some speeches where the order of events will be changed, for ease on the ear. When I first wrote the play I thought of Armstrong as a rambling story teller. I learned, and Gordon (Epstein the director) showed me, you can create that illusion but you really have to be very careful about tense and sequence. So the audience can follow you right down the narrative trail. In the last scene, for example, we transposed two speeches, so it flows more correctly to the end. The two Miles (Davis) speeches, although they will contain the same content, will be recognizably different. The second one, the order of everything that happens in the speech will be changed. For the first one there’s a new transition as I mentioned earlier. It sets it up so everyone in the audience will know without question that it’s Miles Davis who is standing there. We just couldn’t fix that here. You don’t worry about it. You go with what you got.

And, of course, the play will be done with a radically different stage. At Long Wharf it is a modified proscenium, a shallow shoe box. John will be closer to more of the audience. As a result, some of the laugh lines, which are being played upstage, will work better in Long Wharf.

CG What’s it like to work with an actor like John Douglas Thompson, and a director on the level of Edelstein, for your first play?

TT Gordon is one of the three or four best theatre directors in America.

When it became clear to me, about a year ago, that this play had a chance for professional production, up to that moment it was an interesting game I was playing. At that moment, I allowed myself to draw up my fantasy list of who I would love to direct this play. It had three names on it and one was Gordon Edelstein. John was not on this list because he never occurred to me that John, a Shakespearian actor, would have wanted to do this show. When Lizzie (Aspenlieder of Shakespeare & Company) asked me “Would you be interested in having John do a reading of it?” You could have knocked me down. I probably fell out of the chair. I was staggered. I knew, specifically, having seen him in The Emperor Jones, I knew he could eat this up. But Gordon, I allowed myself to fantasize. What I didn’t know was how serious and knowledgeable he is about music. I had seen enough of Gordon’s work to know that he would be able to balance the two sides of this play—the anger and the lyricism. Gordon seems like a tough guy but he’s actually a poet. He’s so good at detail. I admire him extravagantly. So I let myself fantasize that Gordon Edelstein might direct my play.

By Charles Giuliano, Contributing Writer, critic and publisher of www.bershirefinearts.com

 Satchmo at the Waldorf, through Nov. 4th @ Long Wharf Theater: www.longwharf.org