The famed right-wing critic Terry Teachout once thundered, “Politics makes artists stupid,” from his perch at the Wall Street Journal, on panning the pro-Palestinian play My Name is Rachel Corrie. Teachout, a conservative flag-waver first and a critic second, has just published his first new book in five years, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and while the author’s flame-throwing antics don’t take center-stage, they’re present here all the same, boxing their way out of the margins.

Teachout intends this biography to be a populist celebration of the trumpeter/vocalist, yet he can’t resist sneaking in broadsides at Armstrong’s “enemies”—almost all of whom, in Teachout’s view, are other critics.

Armstrong (1901-71), from New Orleans to Chicago, had his early career controlled by pistol-packing handlers whose mob connections went undisguised. Even when Armstrong embraced the management of Joe Glaser, he tied his fate and fortunes to the care of a man who was a convicted rapist and one-time Capone protégé. There were villains, undoubtedly, in Armstrong’s life, from the nickel-and-diming gangsters to the Jim Crow racists of the South who refused him entrance, while on tour, to white establishments. In an especially poignant quote, Armstrong remembers, “Sometimes we’d go to the back doors of restaurants where there were Negro chefs. They’d give you want you wanted.”

And yet Teachout reserves his harshest opprobrium for … John Hammond. Admirers of Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Count Basie, and Benny Goodman would likely agree that the musical history of the 20th-century would be poorer were it not for Hammond (he signed them—and dozens more influential performers—to Columbia). Teachout, undeterred, churlishly derides the impresario/critic as “a coupon-clipping Ivy League dilettante,” and deadlier still in Teachout’s estimation: “a man of the left.” As early as 1938, Hammond expressed legitimate concern over the commercial direction Armstrong’s career was taking. (By 1956, when New York Times columnist John Wilson wrote that Armstrong’s on-stage mugging shouldn’t be “accepted as representative of well-played jazz,” Hammond’s minority opinion had become consensus. Teachout waves Wilson away as “brutally condescending.”)

It’s odd, given Teachout’s track record, that he should attack Hammond for doing what an impassioned critic ought to do—which is to challenge orthodoxy. One cannot help but recall the old adage about the pot and kettle when Teachout blackens Hammond as, “self-confident to the point of arrogance,” while, I might add, mentioning not a word about the Congressional Republicans who denied Armstrong the Medal of Honor.

Curiously, too, Teachout omits the entertainer’s refusal to gig at the Nixon White House in 1969. For that, turn to an earlier Armstrong biographer, the jazz critic Gary Giddins in the 1988 Satchmo, who relates how the musician truly felt about the invite: “Fuck that shit. Why didn’t they do it before? The only reason he would want me to play there now is to make some niggers happy.”

Furthermore, Teachout’s attempts to pigeonhole Armstrong as an up-by-the-bootstraps figure for the Right are painful. “The raw note of contempt is unmistakable,” the author insists, over the trumpeter’s reminiscences of the poor and black shooting dice in an alley in New Orleans, which seem to me spoken more in sorrow than in anger: “They did that in place of going to work … trying to win … gambling off the money … to feed their starving children.”

Maybe these anonymous men tried and were defeated by circumstance, but Teachout couldn’t and wouldn’t know that. The “unmistakable contempt” is entirely his projection.

Despite politics making artists stupid, Teachout, as he should, portrays Armstrong’s lambasting of President Eisenhower and Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus during the Civil Rights era, as heroic. Indeed, the six-or-seven page stretch devoted to the uproar from Armstrong’s statements on ending segregation leaps out as the leanest, most sustained passage in a book that too often has the ring of narration for a PBS documentary.

Teachout, remarkably, treats us to Satchmo’s saucy telegram to Ike: “Daddy, if and when you decide to take those little negro children personally into Central High School along with your marvelous troops, please take me along …”

The publicity for Pops highlights that this is the first Armstrong bio to be penned by a trained musician: Teachout enjoyed a short-lived career as a pick-up bassist before taking quill to parchment.

What does that matter, though, in the face of observations such as—"[H]is ‘West End Blues’ cadenza has a propulsive momentum altogether unlike the freer ebb and flow of classical rubato. He is on the move from the first note onward, raising the rhythmic stakes still further with a shift of gears known to contemporary classical composers as a ‘metric modulation,’ in which he turns a single beat in the second measure of the cadenza into two-thirds of a beat in the third measure. This instinctive, almost imperceptible change of tempo allows him to slip without a hitch into the spiraling triplets that lead to the high C, from which he skitters back down to a low A-flat in a tricky flurry of triple-tongued notes.”

Exhausting, isn’t it? But I never heard the music that Teachout was trying to sing.