Pops: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong

Dust jacket notes: "Louis Armstrong was one of the greatest jazz musicians of the twentieth century and a giant of modern music culture. He knocked the Beatles off the charts, had numerous hit records and shifted the jazz scene's focus from collective imiprovisation to solo performers. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage Armstrong was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and sharper-edged than his worshipping fans ever realised. In Pops Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of rich new sources unavailable to previous biographers, including hundreds of reels of private backstage recordings and after-hours conversations that Armstrong held throughout the second half of his life, to craft an in-depth biography of the towering figure whom Philip Larkin described as 'an artist of Flaubertian purity...more important than Picasso.'"