Hugues Panassié’s Louis Armstrong is a compact, admiring study of Armstrong as musician, performer, and social presence.

He goes deep into his New Orleans childhood, how he became a trumpet player, a singer, then suddenly the global figure who somehow remained attached to the world that made him. Panassié writes as a jazz critic of the old school — reverent, opinionated, occasionally florid, and very much writing from inside the mid-century cult of jazz greatness.

Panassié was one of the major early European jazz critics, especially associated with traditional jazz and deeply resistant to bebop and later modern forms. That makes this book interesting not only as an Armstrong biography, but as a document of jazz criticism itself: full of devotion, hierarchy, argument, and the slightly insane confidence of men who believed civilisation could be sorted by horn tone.

A useful little artefact for readers interested in Armstrong, early jazz writing, New Orleans music history, and the making of jazz mythology.

Paperback. English-language edition published simultaneously in the United States and Canada, copyright 1971 Hugues Panassié; French-language edition first published in Paris in 1969. Printed in the United States. Fair shelf wear/creasing and rubbing, especially to edges; internally clean from photos.