S1E81 - Larry Tye - Jazz – Backdrop to the Civil Rights Movement
Biographer (Bobby Kennedy and Satchel) and award-winning reporter Larry Tye talked to us about his newest book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America. All three of these iconic musicians, Tye noted, though from different backgrounds, had to endure Jim Crow and racial bigotry but “opened the eyes, ears and souls” of White men and the women they wooed and “set the table for the civil rights movement.” Tye took on this writing task out of a promise he made to Black Pullman porters. His many books have resulted from what he, as a journalist, was drawn to enough to devote three years to. The Jazzmen emerged from looking for what these three musical geniuses did in music and the world and despite Tye describing himself as tone deaf and knowing nothing about music and discovering the moral feet of clay of all three of these men of faith. We discussed the lives and times of each of the three and then talked about women in jazz – mostly singers except for Armstrong’s wife, Lillian Hardin, and we touched on the origin of the nickname Satchmo for Armstrong and the different class backgrounds of the three and some of their famous sidemen as well as the links between the three and Jewish managers, bandmates and mobsters and Armstrong’s adoption by a Jewish family and the Jewish origins of Superman. We spoke, too, of jazz language, Wynton Marsalis, Jon Batiste, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck and what Bobby Kennedy Senior might have felt about his son and namesake running for president.
Biography
Larry Tye is the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Demagogue, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and coauthor, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. He has appeared on Fresh Air and Morning Edition, MSNBC, CNN and the BBC, among numerous other media outlets. Previously an award-winning reporter at the Boston Globe and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship. He lives on Cape Cod.
Conversation recorded on May 10, 2024.