Professor David Peimer
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
Summary
From tough beginnings to jazz greats of the century, how did Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong achieve such heights? What lies behind these two remarkable global and iconic artists? How do we see them today?
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Well, he originated it to reach such a wide audience. So he’s credited often as inventing scat singing, but it was also in the air at the times as well. But he’s the one who in a way crystallised it and made it into, I suppose, the genre it is, and he’s the one who made it so influential in jazz and other kinds of singing and music, for sure.
Yeah, he was, of pandering to the white man’s image. He was, Joe, and good point. As some of them said, he’s half-vaudevillian, he’s half-entertainer, he’s half-musician, you know, and criticised him for not speaking out more and, you know, about racism. You know, in the end, we can speculate, but there’s no hard and fast evidence of what they actually said or thought about other than wanting the music to speak to all races, all nationalities, religions, which I think is often a lost quality these days.
No, not that I know of. I don’t think this came from any damage. Just, you know, his gift of a voice.