Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The House That Oliver Built

  As he steps out of the cab to gaze across 31st Street, music pours through the open front door, Oliver and his band playing “some kind of a real jump number.” Suddenly he is in direct contact with the sound that mesmerized him during his midteenage years, when the Oliver–Ory band was at its popular peak in New Orleans. The moment overwhelms him and he is reluctant to go inside. Maybe he isn’t good enough to join this band, he says to himself. Oliver’s status exceeds even what he had achieved in New Orleans, where he was the dominant figure in Armstrong’s life. Now he is the larger-than-life King of Lincoln Gardens.

  A canopy stretches from the front door of the hall to the street, and along its front is a painted canvas sign spelling out the main attraction: “KING OLIVER AND HIS CREOLE JAZZ BAND.” As Armstrong enters the crowded lobby, he notices how the space amplifies the music, increasing the excitement. Florence Majors, the white owner of the hall, greets him, and so does Bud Redd, the “colored” manager who works for her.

  From the lobby he steps into the largest dance hall on the South Side of Chicago, which holds, according to various estimates, between 700 and 1,000 people. Tables sit along the sides, and halfway up each wall is a balcony wrapped around the interior, seating about 100 people. Benches pushed against the walls are occupied by shy ladies who lack escorts. Bright colors give the hall a festive feeling. Artificial maple leaves dangle from chicken wire strung across the ceiling, and at the very center hangs a large crystal ball, the “Ball of Fire,” imported from Europe for $5,000. The hall is generally dim, with a single light above the bandstand cutting through the smoke and haze. But when the band turns to slow blues, around midnight, multicolored spotlights strike the Ball of Fire as it rotates, scattering light unpredictably over the dancers, who grind away in an embracing dance known as the Bunny Hug.

  The musicians sit in a row across a four-foot-high bandstand, in traditional New Orleans format. At far (house) right is Bill Johnson, string bass and banjo. Johnson was the one who opened up this whole scene when he brought the Creole Band to Chicago in 1915. He is the oldest player (b. ca. 1874) in this band, and he’s been around. In New Orleans, he sometimes played at Lulu White’s legendary house of prostitution, sometimes with the Eagle Band, sometimes with the Excelsior Brass Band (tuba). Louis has never seen Johnson before, and he is fascinated because Johnson looks so much like a white person.

  Lincoln Gardens (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 87, Willliams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Next to Johnson is pianist Bertha Gonsoulin. In New Orleans, very few of the bands Armstrong knew had pianists, for the simple reason that very few of the venues they played had pianos. There was a small group of women pianists active on that scene, however, and Oliver has continued that tradition in Chicago. One role of the pianist is to respond to requests by pulling out some sheet music and reading through it, leading the rest of the band, which stumbles along, playing by ear. Violin players usually filled this role in New Orleans, but in Chicago pianos and pianists are more common. More women than men have Eurocentric training on the piano and can read music well. A female pianist also adds sex appeal, which is appreciated by the patrons and the musicians, too.

  To the left of the piano sits clarinetist Johnny Dodds. Armstrong played with him in the Ory band after Oliver left New Orleans. In that band, Louis was playing lead cornet; now he will be playing second cornet, which means that he and Dodds will work closely together. Dodds is quiet, serious, and professional. He avoids alcohol, doesn’t curse, and wears gloves to protect his fingers. He has little interest in material things, but likes to keep track of the Chicago White Sox every day through box scores in the newspaper. His reserved manner seems incompatible with the intensity of his funky blues playing, which has earned the nickname “toilet.” He hates clowning by musicians on stage and he tries to avoid playing music he considers trivial, which he thinks of as “prostituting” himself.

  Alongside Dodds sits Oliver himself, “Papa Joe,” as Armstrong calls him, radiating authority. “If anyone ever looked good in front of a band it was Joe Oliver,” said drummer George Wettling. “He had a way of standing in front of Johnny and Baby Dodds and the other cats that was just too much.” Oliver occasionally discharges big slurps of tobacco juice into a brass cuspidor. On the other side of his chair is a bucket of sugar water with a big piece of ice in it, from which band members freely fetch drinks for themselves whenever they get thirsty. Sugar water is not a typical feature of jazz bands in Chicago, but Oliver encourages it while discouraging boozing.

  To Oliver’s left is trombonist Honoré Dutrey, whom Louis used to follow around when Dutrey played in parades. A good reader, Honoré played with the Excelsior band and with John Robichaux’s orchestra before he joined the Navy in 1917. A ship accident seriously damaged his lungs, and Dutrey now suffers from asthma that compromises his playing and leaves him short of breath. Occasionally he scoots behind the bandstand to inhale a nasal spray the doctor has prescribed for him before he takes a solo. Dutrey is businesslike and saves his money so that he can buy property around town.

  And on the far left side of the stage sits drummer Warren Dodds, Johnny’s younger brother, known to all as “Baby.” Louis and Baby know each other very well from their time on the riverboats, a job that Dodds lost due to a serious drinking problem. Armstrong is delighted to see that things are now going better for Baby. After the riverboat job, Dodds hung out in New Orleans until he got a surprising summons from Oliver—surprising because just a few years earlier Oliver had been one of the musicians in the Ory band who humiliated Baby by collectively walking off the stage, leaving him behind to play by himself; they repeated the stunt until Dodds got the message and stopped showing up. When the call came from Oliver to join his band in San Francisco in the middle of a tour, Dodds felt like his world had suddenly been born anew.

  Oliver landed this highly visible leadership position through a formidable combination of talent, hard work, and force of will. He left New Orleans with clarinetist Jimmie Noone in the summer of 1918 to join Johnson’s band at Royal Gardens. Meanwhile, a band led by New Orleans clarinetist Lawrence Duhé was thriving at the Dreamland Café, in the 3500 block of South State Street. The big draw in Duhé’s band was the hand-cupping, growling cornet work of Thomas “Sugar Johnny” Smith. But Smith was dying from tuberculosis. So Duhé convinced Oliver to double up with his band. Oliver was the perfect replacement since he, too, was an expert in creatively manipulating timbre to produce freak music.

  But before Duhé knew it, Oliver was stepping out and making deals for the band on his own. This might seem like a helpful gesture, but it was actually a power grab. In New Orleans there was always one person designated “manager,” whose responsibility it was to contract the job, collect the money, and pay the musicians. It was a position of real advantage, especially since managers were not always straightforward about dividing up the pay. This was not the first time Oliver had hijacked the manager’s responsibilities. A few years earlier, in New Orleans, Kid Ory had strategically invited Oliver to join his band; before he knew it, Oliver was contracting jobs for the “Oliver–Ory Band.” Ory was shrewd enough to recognize Oliver’s popularity and acquiesce.

  At Lincoln Gardens, Oliver’s freak style has become the main focus of his playing, and he rarely plays with an open horn. Partly as a matter of showmanship and partly as a matter of technique, he rotates through an assortment of mutes, hats, bottles, and buckets. “He’d put his hand over the mouth of the [cornet] and it would sound like a mouth organ. We used to call him ‘harmonica,’” said Baby Dodds. “With an ordinary mute, [he] could make the horn talk,” remembered Buster Bailey. “I never saw anyone in my life use mutes the way he did,” said Barney Bigard. Oliver’s talking-cornet version of I’m Not Rough was so compelling on his first night in Chicago that Calwell “King” Jones, master of ceremonies at Royal Gardens, placed a paper crown on his h
ead and proclaimed him King while men in the hall threw their hats into the air in celebratory delight.

  In May 1921, a little over a year before Armstrong’s arrival in Chicago, management decided to renovate Royal Gardens, so Oliver took the band to California for an extended stay. In Los Angeles they worked at a multiracial “black-and-tan” cabaret that received them well and paid them nicely. Baby Dodds noted how it was during this West Coast stay that the band was first presented as “King Oliver’s Creole Band.” Oliver started to speak in terms of “my” rather than “our” band, and Dodds sensed a distinct change in atmosphere.

  Dodds also described a lively incident in San Francisco that reveals a crucial dimension of how the new music from New Orleans was received. At a matinee performance in the California Theater, some “little smart guy” called out from the audience, “I thought you said those guys were Creoles. Those guys are no Creoles. Those are niggers!” Oliver and Dutrey immediately started chattering in French patois. “The people just stared,” said Dodds.

  What was Oliver thinking when he identified himself and his musicians as Creoles? Certainly no one in New Orleans had ever mistaken him for a Creole; people there thought of him as belonging to the opposite end of the social spectrum reserved for people of color—field hands from the plantations who had recently immigrated to the city. The word “Creole” pops up again and again in Chicago during the late teens and early twenties in names like the Original Creole Band, the New Orleans Creole Band, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and Charlie Elgar’s Creole Band. This may have begun as an attempt to siphon off some of the heavy notice granted to the Creole Band. Perhaps it was easy to confuse the public about whether or not they were going to hear the band that had moved through town with so much publicity a few years back.

  But “Creole” held other kinds of appeal, too. The word instantly conjured up the sexual legends of New Orleans, with its spicy images of octoroon mistresses, available to French settlers in antebellum times, as well as their modern-day counterparts in the city’s famous prostitution district. Light-skinned African Americans were regarded by many whites as highly charged with eroticism. Almost all of the skimpily clad female dancers at black-and-tan cabarets fit this profile, for example. Musicians from New Orleans found it useful to project these connotations of risqué sexuality onto the new dance music as a way to highlight its visceral, kinetic energy.

  “Creole” could play out on the national stage in yet a different way. People of mixed ancestry did hold a special place in the white imagination, but according to the simplified biracialism of the United States, to be of mixed race simply meant that one was “colored” and therefore locked into the same social and legal categories that all other colored people belonged to. According to this logic, “Creole” connoted black authenticity from New Orleans, and that was, in some quarters, becoming a desirable musical identity to have. “Creole” helped Oliver and his band separate themselves from white “imitators,” which was something black minstrel bands had been trying to do for a long time. The nationwide success in 1917 of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the white group that raked in financial rewards for ripping off black music, gave this logic an urgent punch.

  In any event, Armstrong must have chuckled when he heard the story about Oliver pretending to be a Creole and chattering patois in California. Many Creoles in New Orleans lived a snooty life apart, clinging to their ethnically defining ways. As an acknowledged master of the new music that had developed in his section of town and was now becoming popular elsewhere, the old Creole arrogance must have mattered to Oliver very little. To borrow a phrase Oliver sometimes used, he could “make some good jack” on the word “Creole.” I doubt that it meant anything more to him than that.

  By summer 1922, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band was back in Chicago, with renovations complete and Royal Gardens reopened as Lincoln Gardens. Intent on hiring Oliver, the owner paid moving expenses for the band’s return from California. On June 21 she took out an advertisement in the Defender: “Dance to the Music of JOE OLIVER’S CREOLE JAZZ BAND/JUST BACK FROM A GREAT YEAR ON THE COAST/ Entertainers Refreshments.” One report has the band making a weekly salary of $1,000 (the figure seems high, since Baby Dodds said his take was $55 per week). Oliver wrote to Little Louis, the only student he ever took, to come and join him, and he dipped into his stash of jack to buy a one-way train ticket. “You can stick your stinkin’ feet in my bed,” he wrote.

  Oliver’s soaring popularity boded well for Armstrong, who must have seen the opportunity as one that would bring him to a higher level of compensation and also artistry. The job would allow him to resume the apprenticeship that had been interrupted when Oliver left for Chicago in 1918; that is one way to think of his 1922–24 stay with Oliver’s band. On the other hand, it’s not clear that he still needed any apprenticing, since his cornet playing was now impressing a lot of people. Paul Mares, a white cornetist from New Orleans who liked to hang around the bandstand at Lincoln Gardens, teased Oliver about the “kid” he had heard back home: “If he ever gets here, you’re dead.” Oliver’s own band members asked him, perhaps innocently or perhaps not, whether Louis was being brought in to play first cornet or second, to which Oliver could only stammer in response: “It’s my band. What am I going to do, play second?”

  Interior of Royal Gardens, ca. 1919 (University Library of Southern Denmark)

  The Floor Show

  The hall at Lincoln Gardens is crowded, and Oliver doesn’t notice his protégé’s arrival until he gets close to the bandstand. He stops the set to make introductions. “Have a seat, son, we’re going to do our show,” he says. “You might as well stick around and see what’s happening because you start work tomorrow night.” Those who haven’t seen Louis for a while are surprised by his appearance. Wearing a brown, box-back, double-breasted suit with padded shoulders, a pair of wide pants, a straw hat, and tan shoes, he weighs 226 pounds, his stomach protruding noticeably and his clothes too small. They greet him as “Dipper Mouth” and “Little Louis,” names from his childhood, the latter now with a laugh due to his expanding bulk. He combs his hair in bangs.

  With the introductions complete, the band returns to the floor show, already in progress.

  The canvas sign at the front entrance makes clear that Oliver is the main draw; his band follows in second place, and the floor show follows that. Yet a floor show is still part of a ticket holder’s expectations, still part of a fun night on the town. Armstrong has seen this kind of entertainment before, but never with Papa Joe Oliver’s band playing the most inspiring music he has ever heard in the background. Similar blends of music and entertainment will remain part of his professional activity for decades.

  Oliver’s band played mainly for dancing back in New Orleans. The music had a few additional uses there, such as the famous “funeral with music,” but jazz did not become heavily entangled with vaudeville until it left the city. When that happened it was immediately tainted by the trappings of blackface minstrelsy. Jelly Roll Morton, for example, masked himself with black grease paint for comic performances in the early 1910s. A reviewer from 1912 described him as “grotesque in his makeup,” an impression that is confirmed by a surviving photograph of the great bandleader-composer-pianist.

  The success of the Creole Band, which left New Orleans in 1914 for extensive tours, crisscrossing the Midwest and Northwest and dipping into Canada, alerted other New Orleanian musicians to the potential of vaudeville. At the center of the Creole Band’s act was a skit described by one newspaper as “the familiar ‘Uncle’ and ‘the boys’ [routine] which has been a part of colored shows and touring minstrels for years.” It was through this bit of racist theater that the nation was first exposed to the exotic new music from New Orleans.

  The Creole Band’s skit was performed in front of a backdrop painting of a plantation, with log cabin, the master’s big house, and “many little darkie huts” scattered amidst blossoming cotton fields. The musicians dressed as
slaves. After a long work day they decided to wander over to the cabin of Old Black Joe, portrayed by Morgan Prince, who wore black grease paint, a long coat, simple hat, gray beard, and a wig. With a full moon rising slowly in the background, Bill Johnson began to play My Old Kentucky Home on his string bass, his music magically putting “vigor into the old man’s rheumatic knees,” as one reviewer put it. After this, Prince and the entire band performed Stephen Foster’s Old Black Joe, the infectious ragtime rhythms loosening up Joe’s arthritic knees and causing him to dance in a way that held tremendous comic appeal. The musicians then sang the song in close, barbershop-style harmony, according to the improvising, African-American vocal tradition that was especially strong in New Orleans.

  For a reviewer in Peoria, the Old Black Joe skit revealed “the southern plantation darky as he really is in his sportive hours.” In Dubuque the scenery was felt to be “romantic in its picturesqueness and appealing in its charm.” For a student newspaper at Purdue University, the whole production was “good, clean, wholesome and enjoyable.” Entertainment like this was an essential part of how the nation was still trying to reconcile itself to the Civil War, still trying to heal wounds that had been festering for five decades. This was accomplished by romanticizing slavery. Late minstrelsy was doing what minstrelsy had always done—helping the white nation define blacks as inferior. It served the new project of locking blacks into the “separate but equal” place that was being mapped out through the expanding legal system of Jim Crow.