Word: jazz
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...always seen himself as a split-personality sprinter. There's 200 Michael, who puts a hoop in his ear, turns the hip-hop up and gets into trash-talk wars with the very willing Greene. Then there's 400 Michael, who listens to jazz before a race and spends evenings answering e-mail from fans. With Mr. Hyde now sidelined, mellow Dr. Jekyll will have extra time in Sydney at his keyboard...
...Legacy division, which this week sends into the stores a boxed set of yet another remastering of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of Louis Armstrong. The excuse? To help celebrate Louis Armstrong's 100th birthday, July 4, 2000, say the press materials. This is rather odd, since jazz scholars all agree that Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901. Odder still, the vaunted remastering is only slightly better than mediocre. So what is the fair-minded critic's response to all this...
...course--because any opportunity to draw attention to this hallowed music requires celebration. Originally recorded primarily in Chicago between 1925 and 1929 as what was then called race music, Armstrong's sessions with his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands quickly elevated him to national renown. They are to jazz (to American popular music in all forms, really) what Shakespeare's plays are to English literature: both the never fading banner of pure genius and the foundation for everything that came later...
...20th century. Then there's his rhythmic invention. On cuts like Muggles, Potato Head Blues and the epochal West End Blues, he breaks breathtakingly free from his sidemen, swooping and soaring over the ensemble like some brilliantly feathered bird. Such flights enable him to accomplish what every pop or jazz performer worth noting has tried ever since, personalizing the music, taking it away from the written score, making...
...deeply, puffed out their chests and projected. After him, most have tried to do what he did so magnificently: find elation or sadness or humor in the song and let it issue forth as a purely human statement. Dizzy Gillespie, speaking of Armstrong's role in the development of jazz trumpet, said, "No him, no me." They're words that could be spoken just as appropriately by singers as disparate as Tony Bennett and Mick Jagger...