Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Thinking of the darkies on stage as authentic was an important part of the wholesome fun. Their syncopating skill was so strong that it could only have been “born in the bone,” in one writer’s estimation. “The mask of minstrelsy is torn off,” said another from Sioux City, meaning that in contrast to white imitators, the Creole Band offered the real thing; they performed songs that, he believed, had been passed down from antebellum times. “They all hail from New Orleans and were working on the levee there when they were picked up by a café owner, who engaged them to play in his restaurant,” wrote another in full-blown fantasy. More knowingly came this from an African-American weekly: “It is an act that shows very clearly what the white theatre patrons like the colored performer to do.”

  At least one member of the Creole Band was a descendant of the middle-caste gens de couleur libres of antebellum New Orleans. None had ever worked a levee or lived on a plantation. Their new white audiences believed that they represented the plantation culture of old, not the urban transformation of that culture that had so gloriously emerged in New Orleans. And represented it in pathetic terms, as a culture of subservience, superstition, illiteracy, ignorance, and inferiority, one that belonged to people who were formerly in chains and who now took their “natural” place at the economic bottom of society, happily and innocently generating wealth for those above.

  For three extended vaudeville seasons, middle America flocked to see the Creole Band strum and strut and sing in full-on displays of minstrelsy. Jazz was surrounded by plantation imagery as soon as it left New Orleans, and the theme would keep crowding in on Armstrong for the rest of his life. In the early 1930s he picked up When It’s Sleepy Time Down South as his signature song, with its imagery of “darkies crooning under a pale moon” in blissful ignorance. In 1942 he performed the song for a movie short by the same name, seated on a cotton bale in plaid shirt with a farmer’s hat—the full dress of the authentic plantation darky, displayed for a new generation of white Americans. In the early 1950s, as the fervor for civil rights started to take hold, African Americans burned his recordings of the song in protest, forcing him to reissue it with revised lyrics. “Louis is the plantation character that so many of us … younger men … resent,” explained Dizzy Gillespie in 1949. Gillespie and Armstrong later became close friends, but others found it difficult to loosen his image from these degrading fantasies.

  But in 1922, King Oliver and his bandmates are not slicked out in blackface, and they are not trying to convey a sense of retrogressive plantation authenticity. Indeed, the floor show at Lincoln Gardens differs from the Creole Band’s in a fundamental way: the audience here in Chicago is overwhelmingly black. The very name of the hall telegraphs the demographics of the place. Venues that are mainly black take less in at the box office than cabarets with substantial white patronage, and that accounts for the relatively slender dimensions of the floor show here. But the patrons prefer dancing anyway, so the emphasis on Oliver and his band works for everybody.

  King Jones, master of ceremonies, directs the floor show. He leads the good time by having one himself, or at least appearing to. He dances in front of the band and sometimes pretends to conduct it, making a farce out of his obvious lack of connection to the music. The band pays no attention to him and the people love it. Jones is from the Caribbean and puts on a show of pompous British mannerisms, announcing the acts with tremendous projection, “Ladies and Gentlemen …”

  One or perhaps two singers are featured; someone named “Bodidly” has been associated with the place, and so has Ethel Waters. As with virtually all floor shows during this period, the centerpiece of the presentation is a row of light-skinned dancing girls; we know of one group named Miss Cleo Mitchell and Her Fast Steppers. Ma Rainey’s traveling troupe is the exception to the rule of café au lait skin, reportedly because the singer doesn’t want to perform with women who are lighter than she is, a policy that wins her favor with southern audiences.

  Armstrong already knows one part of the floor show very well—drummer Baby Dodds doing his “shimmy beat,” a bit of musical comedy that has Dodds shaking his stomach muscles in time with his drumming. Always a hit, Dodds’s shimmy routine may have even been the reason Oliver invited him to join the band. Oliver had been reluctant, but Dave Jones, who was with both Dodds and Armstrong on the riverboat band, insisted he give Baby the call, despite his known liabilities. “That fellow is just as big a drawing card as Louis Armstrong,” said Jones. Armstrong might have agreed with that, since he later wrote that Baby’s shimmy “was in my estimation the whole worth of the price of admission.”

  For the climax of the floor show the band performs a piece known as Eccentric, based on That Eccentric Rag. Oliver used to perform the piece in New Orleans, and now for Lincoln Gardens he has discovered its vaudeville potential. The focus is on the “breaks”—brief moments at the ends of phrases where the background accompaniment stops and a soloist offers a little bit of dazzle. Usually a break is one or at most two measures (a measure defined as four beats), but Oliver’s arrangement of Eccentric includes breaks of four full measures, alternating with four measures of activity from the band.

  The unusual format leaves room for a dash of racially inflected comedy during the last chorus. In the break, Oliver imitates a baby with his wah-wah cornet, and as he does, bassist Bill Johnson walks over to pet the instrument. The first time they do this, Oliver’s cornet is identified as a white baby, and Johnson soothes it, “Don’t cry, little baby.” The last time the baby is “colored”—“Baaaah! Baaaaaaaaah!” it bawls, causing Johnson to yell, “Shut up, you li’l so and sooooooo.” This brings down the house with thunderous laughter and applause.

  Perhaps it surprises Louis at least a little to see Oliver’s skill and creativity being channeled into a racially charged bit of minstrelsy. Johnson’s almost-white appearance is part of the skit. “You would swear he was a white boy,” remembered Armstrong. “He had all the features, even the voice—yes he really did look like an o’fay (southern boy).” It is a fresh twist on blackfaced masking—a person of racial ambiguity who can change his identity right before your eyes. Johnson has a nice comic touch, an “unlimited” sense of humor in Armstrong’s estimation, honed no doubt during his years of touring with the Creole Band. Eccentric is thus built on a felicitous blend of talents, Oliver’s skillful and creative freak music combined with Johnson’s white appearance and comic timing. The package is completely new to Armstrong, and he stares in fascination.

  Oliver’s orchestra in San Francisco, 1921 (Courtesy of the New Orleans Jazz Club Collections of the Louisiana State Museum)

  A publicity photograph of Oliver’s band taken on their California tour earlier that year shows the musicians posed in plantation outfits, the same kind of farm clothes that the Creole Band used earlier in its authentic rendition of Old Black Joe. But at Lincoln Gardens, Oliver and his men are tricked out in tuxedoes. These are some of the terms of presenting jazz in the various venues where it is performed. Armstrong has only been in the city for a few hours, but he is already getting a sense of what the long trip from New Orleans to Chicago might mean.

  The Dance

  After intermission comes the dance segment of the evening. Dancing is difficult when the hall is crowded, but everyone has a good time anyway. “The people came to dance. One couldn’t help but dance to that band,” remembered Baby Dodds. “The music was so wonderful that they had to do something, even if there was only room to bounce around.” Bud Freeman described the dance floor as “a picture of rhythm such as I had never seen.”

  Oliver directs the music with very few words. To let the musicians know what tune is coming, he turns around and softly toots a few notes. He sets the tempo by beating his foot against the foundation of his brass cuspidor. Musicians admire his knack for determining just the right speed, one appropriate for the piece and for the audience, a skill considered to be the mark of a good bandleader in New Orleans. That attitude still holds in Chicago, an
d it will continue into the swing era and beyond; musicians would praise both Ellington and Basie, for example, for an uncanny sense of judging the mood of a hall and responding with the right tempo.

  Yet, even though Oliver has had a great deal of experience, he has been forced to adjust to a different set of expectations in Chicago. There is a demand for tempos faster than the typical pace of New Orleans. African-American dance halls in the uptown section of New Orleans featured blues played at an extremely slow tempo to accompany the “slow drag.” Most other dances were moderate. In Chicago, tempos all around are noticeably ratcheted up. “The fastest numbers played by old New Orleans bands were slower than the Chicago tempo,” said guitarist Johnny St. Cyr.

  There are several reasons for this regional difference. For one thing, it is easier to generate excitement and disguise musical inadequacies with a fast tempo, just as low-quality beer is more drinkable when it is ice-cold. “When musicians from other places … played hot, they just played fast,” said Emmanuel Sayles. “That’s what people called playing hot.” New Orleans musicians, on the other hand, could “play hot and at the same time be playing in a groovy tempo where you [could] dance or clap your hands or join him.”

  The fast tempos also have something to do with a different conception of what dancing is about. The famous team of Irene and Vernon Castle promoted dancing as exercise, which helped legitimize the peppy ragtime dances of the 1910s that gave way to the peppy jazz dances of the early 1920s. “We are making ourselves lithe and slim and healthy, and these are things that all reformers in the world could not do for us,” wrote Irene. It’s hard to know if this idea reached the patrons of Lincoln Gardens, but one thing is certain: the idea of dance as health-inducing exercise had never occurred to the patrons of Funky Butt Hall in New Orleans, which was named after a grinding dance, moving the “rear end like an alligator crawling up a bank,” in one observer’s description.

  But in Chicago, dancing for health is a good way to brush back charges of immorality. An article in the Defender from September 1, 1923, notes approvingly how King Jones is “in charge of the dance floor” at Lincoln Gardens and how “correct dancing is insisted upon.” Behind that remark stands the work of white reform organizations like the Juvenile Protective Association, which takes as its mission the hiring of chaperones to go out on the town and inspect the dance halls firsthand. When a chaperone sees a couple staying in one spot too long he barks out, embarrassingly, “Get off that dime, man. Let’s move it around.” The ultimate threat is forced closure of the hall. This kind of intervention is also completely alien to the transplanted New Orleanians.

  Faster tempos alter both the dancing and the music. Tempo guides an improviser’s approach to musical design and shapes the listener’s sense of sonic patterning. Isolated gestures stand out and carry more weight at a leisurely tempo. There is also a greater sense of the independence of melodic lines, which happens to be a central feature of Oliver’s band. Since African-American jazz from New Orleans did not get recorded until the musicians migrated north, the earliest sonic documents we have of this music are conditioned by the faster Chicago tempos. It is bracing to think of this skewed situation as determined by an attempt to banish sexualized movement.

  The tempos may be new to Armstrong, but the repertory is not. High Society, one of the favorites, was an old New Orleans standard brought from street marches into dance halls early on. A recording by the Oliver band in 1923 clocks in at the standard length for all recordings of vernacular music during this period—around three minutes. But at Lincoln Gardens the band likes to stretch out with High Society. King Jones steps in front, turns to look back at the leader, and shouts, “Oh! One more chorus, King!” When Oliver eventually decides it is time to finish, he signals the final chorus with a single stomp on the floor. Having brought the heady rush of one driving chorus after another to its end, he pulls the cornet away from his lips, glances down at a young admirer, and winks while he says, “Hotter than a 45.” (Or, more colorfully: “We were hotter than a pussy with the pox.”) A few patrons dance the entire time, but many find a way to move in time with the music while they listen. And some of those listening at Lincoln Gardens are a bit surprising to Armstrong on his first evening in Chicago.

  The Alligators

  Around the bandstand are clustered a set of ten tables or so, seating about 50 people. Sometimes referred to as “ringside” seating, the area forms a sort of barrier between the musicians and the dancers. It feels like a special place, one that marks a unique kind of participation in the musical event. It is a zone where the participants do not dance but listen. Ringside at Lincoln Gardens is often populated by musicians. And not just any musicians—white musicians.

  By the time of Armstrong’s arrival in August 1922, Lincoln Gardens has become well established as a hangout for young white players who are in awe of Oliver and his group. “There were lots of the musicians from downtown Chicago—hurrying from their jobs—to dig us every night that we played at the Lincoln Gardens,” wrote Armstrong. Louis Panico, cornetist in Isham Jones’s prestigious band, is there on Armstrong’s first night. Drummer Dave Tough, saxophonist Bud Freeman, and cornetist Jimmy McPartland attend regularly. Cornetist Wingy Manone will soon acquire the honor of being the “first white boy musician” Armstrong will ever meet. Paul Mares and his colleagues in the future New Orleans Rhythm Kings like to hang around, and so do guitarist Eddie Condon, drummer George Wettling, and cornetist Muggsy Spanier. A young Benny Goodman will eventually make his appearance, and even the lofty Paul Whiteman stops by now and then.

  “Well it looks like the little white boys is here to get their music lessons”—that is how the 300-pound bouncer, half teasingly, half menacingly, likes to greet the young musicians at the door. Condon, a little nervous, rides his bike to the hall and recruits older acquaintances to come with him. “A nod or a wave of [Oliver’s] hand was all that was necessary,” remembered Condon. “Then the customers knew that the kids were all right. Night after night we made the trip.” Wettling claims his favorite place at the table on the far side, right in front of Baby Dodds. Spanier and a few others are brave enough to ask if they can play with the band from time to time.

  The scene is totally new for Armstrong. In New Orleans he rarely heard white musicians play, and never got to know any of them. The reason was simple: it was “because New Orleans was so disgustingly segregated and prejudiced at the time—it didn’t even run across our minds,” as he bluntly explained. He made some acquaintances during his time on the riverboats, but that, too, was unusual and fraught with the tension of enforced segregation on a floating object. Here at Lincoln Gardens, white musicians have their own ringside seating in front of the bandstand. Nothing in his previous experience of race resembles this.

  Management has good reason to accommodate the eager guests. Simply put, far more money is to be made from whites than can ever be made from blacks. Lincoln Gardens is thriving as a place for African-American dancers, but why not expand a little bit and see what happens? A black-and-tan cabaret like the Sunset Café, which is much pricier, makes it a point to attract whites, and the higher income benefits both the owners and the blacks who work there. The white clientele at Lincoln Gardens is mainly musicians and other entertainers.

  With the venue packing in crowds of up to 1,000, it can afford to pay musicians pretty well. But if a step can be taken in the direction of the black-and-tan cabarets, this is surely something to explore. Hence the best seating in the house, right under the tips of the musicians’ fingers. A few of the youngsters have convinced themselves that the preferential seating is offered as a sign of respect, but others are more realistic. “They were always happy to see white people come … because we had the money,” remembered Wild Bill Davison. “So there was no bad treatment. You got the best of it, really, whether they liked you or not.”

  At some point in 1923 management will experiment with a whites-only night on Wednesdays. Known as the “midnight ramb
le,” the format calls for the band to quit playing at 11:00 p.m., at which point black customers are asked to leave the hall so that whites can enter for a midnight show that carries a ticket price bigger than usual. The experiment does not appear to have gathered many customers beyond the musicians who had been coming all along. “We’d just sit and listen to these guys,” pianist Tom Thibeau remembered. “White musicians mainly, just sitting around listening to these Negroes play.” In separate discussions, Paul Barbarin, Baby Dodds, and Bud Freeman concurred: “I never saw any white people outside of our own clique,” Freeman remembered.

  Everyone knows that it is not simply a thirst for entertainment that draws them in. They are there for their lessons. “All of us white boys were coming and borrowing from King Oliver,” remembered Hoagy Carmichael. Oliver and his colleagues have had prior experience with white musicians ripping them off and taking credit for their inventions, but now the situation involves bigger numbers of participants, sustained exposure, and higher stakes. Whites in New Orleans showed little interest in early jazz, so there was not really much of an engine to drive the project of white musicians stealing black music. In Chicago, that project is gaining strength. The New Orleanians have a name for the white predators, one suited with certain irony to their Louisiana homeland: they call them “alligators.” “They were guys who came up to swallow everything we had,” explained clarinetist Buster Bailey.

  There are stories about ringside musicians transferring what they hear into musical notation that they scribble on their cuffs. “The white man can write down the black man’s musical riffs and chord changes on his shirt cuff, but he will never be able to capture the black man’s rhythm on paper,” insisted one observer. The image serves as a symbol of cross-racial appropriation, the on-the-fly attempt to capture the slippery essence of largely unnotatable music. With repetition, good musicians can memorize what they hear, just as Armstrong did when he listened to Oliver in New Orleans. “It got so that I knew every phrase and intonation they played, just from listening,” said Spanier. “In spite of myself, I was doing the same things—as nearly as possible, of course.” A few weeks after Armstrong’s arrival, Paul Mares and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings released their very first recording, on Gennett Records, a version of Eccentric that is full of the freak inflections that Mares and everyone else were admiring at Lincoln Gardens.