Terry Teachout, jazz. literature, dance and drama critic, podcaster,
blogger, playwright, album annotator, opera librettist and biographer of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, H. L. Mencken and George Balanchine, died January 13 of unspecified causes. He was 65.
Born and raised in Missouri, Teachout studied music and journalism at William Jewell College, then worked as a jazz bassist and wrote about jazz for the Kansas City Star. After three years at the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana he moved to New York City, establishing himself an editor, editorial writer, arts critic and essayist in Harper’s Magazine, the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal and Commentary, among other publications.
In 1990 Teachout edited his first book, Beyond the Boom, a collection of political essays on post-Vietnam War American culture (according to Wikipedia, he was a founding member of The Vile Body, a 1990s organization of conservatives in New York City publishing and journalism). In ’91 he published City Limits: Memories of a Small Town Boy. Among his biographies biographies which followed, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009) was exceptionally well received by critics in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Review of Books and The Economist.
In 2011 Teachout’s one-man/two-character play Satchmo at the Waldorf premiered in Orlando, Florida. After a year of revision (which included a brief addition of Miles Davis to the story of Armstrong and
his mob-associated manager Joe Glaser) the production was staged in Lenox MA, New Haven CT and Philadelphia to glowing reviews (The Boston Globe: “tour de force… a work of insight and power”; the New York Times: “Mr. Teachout has done a fine job of building a fiction-plus-fact theater piece.”) Productions of the work continued across the U.S. into 2018.
Among honors, Teachout received a Guggenheim fellowship to write Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. President George W. Bush appointed him to the National Council on the Arts in 2005 (he served to 2010). He received the Bradley Prize from the eponymous foundation promoting “American exceptionalism” in 2014.
Besides his own prodigious support of the arts by reporting on them, Terry Teachout has been celebrated by other writers for his openness, generosity and support of their early and developing careers. Of JJA members’ tributes, here is Ted Gioia’s personal reminiscence in The Honest Broker and Marc Myer’s remembrance of his friend in Jazz Wax.
