[E]ven if he hadn't been born on July 4, 1900, as he later claimed (his registered birth was Aug. 4, 1901), the symbolic myth seemed appropriate for someone who would go on to symbolize America on the world stage.

This was later celebrated in a musical written by the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck and his wife, Iola, that premiered at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962 and became an ambitious soundtrack album the same year. Felicitously titled "The Real Ambassadors," it featured Armstrong, Brubeck's Quartet, the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan and Carmen McRae, with music by Brubeck and lyrics by Iola. It dealt with such issues as America's place in the world during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the image and nature of God and the music business. Set in a fictional African country, "The Real Ambassadors" features Armstrong as its star and central character, with his shining trumpet and gravel-mouthed vocals delivering the memorable Brubeck score.

The implication was that Armstrong, like America, was a beacon for the entire world. But if you belong to everyone in the world, this means‌ that you've taken, or at the very least assumed, a particular position in relation to that world. And if you belong to the American mainstream, as Armstrong did, perhaps the most effective way to be political without creating a disturbance is to pretend you have no politics at all. The European lesson for this very American form of self-deception is that claiming to have no politics ultimately means adopting the sort of bad politics that entails accepting the status quo. This was far from the message of "The Real Ambassadors," but for many people, even today, it often registers as the Armstrong persona.

To believe, as Davis once did, that Armstrong's racial politics were set by the mercenary white folks who succeeded the slave owners was to believe that those politics were reactionary, that even Armstrong's duet with Barbra Streisand in "Hello, Dolly!" or his crooning "What a Wonderful World" was corny and shopworn. It's worth noting that Armstrong's disdain for bebop -- expressed in one interview as his enthusiastic preference for Guy Lombardo, a non-jazz bandleader associated with mainstream schmaltz -- probably had as much to do with the lifestyles of beboppers as it did with modernist musical forms. As recounted by one of his biographers, the late Terry Teachout (a former jazz musician himself):

Except for [Dizzy] Gillespie, whose jokey demeanor on the bandstand was more like Armstrong's than either man cared to admit, the boppers disdained the showmanship that was his trademark. More than a few of them were heroin addicts (that was what he had in mind when he spoke of their "pipe-dream music") whose habits made it impossible for them to conduct themselves with the professionalism that was his byword. Above all, though, their music was uncompromising in a way that he saw as threatening to the public's acceptance of jazz.

Yet Armstrong's own musical genius could attain a burning and cascading complexity of its own -- at least in his early recordings, and more fitfully afterward. To my untutored ear, his famous cadenza at the start of "West End Blues," recorded with his Hot Five in 1928, even anticipates some of the multifaceted virtuoso breaks of the supreme bebopper Charlie Parker, which came two decades later. In "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" (2009), Teachout points to "a shift of gears known to contemporary classical composers as a 'metric modulation,' in which he turns a single beat in the second measure ... into two-thirds of a beat in the third measure."