Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  These April 1923 sessions document very well how Oliver and Armstrong each conceived a solo. On Dipper Mouth Blues Oliver plays the solo that quickly became identified with him and is now his most famous. On Chimes Blues, Armstrong displays the cautious efforts of a young apprentice. The solos are a world apart. At first glance, the comparison hardly suggests that the younger player regarded the older one as the central musical influence in his life.

  Dipper Mouth Blues is one of the best representations we have of the freak style that made Oliver famous in Chicago. When the band recorded the piece again ten weeks later, on the OKeh label, Oliver played the solo almost exactly the same. (The OKeh version is technologically superior to the Gennett and more widely reproduced.) It was, in fact, standard practice in New Orleans to craft a solo over time and then stick to it. “Once you got a certain solo that fit in the tune, and that’s it, you keep it,” explained Armstrong.

  In three consecutive blues choruses, Oliver demonstrates freak wah-wah effects with the business end of a toilet plunger—or perhaps simply his hand—manipulated over the muted bell of his horn (the effect is more pronounced on the Gennett version). It is unusual to have a solo go for three choruses like this. The stretch encourages Oliver to craft a nice sense of expansion from the first chorus to the second and then into the third, giving the entire sweep of melody a feeling of fluidity and breadth. Oliver in this solo shares two basic values of melodic design with Bessie Smith: his range from low note to high note is relatively narrow; also, the solo keeps moving through the same limited selection of pitches. A melody like this puts emphasis on the bluesy details of expressive timbre, pitch bending (for example, the beginning of the first chorus), and dragging behind the beat (for example, the beginning of the second chorus).

  This is the kind of playing that could “hit you inside,” as Bushell said about Oliver’s best music, and “make people jump out of their seats.” Oliver scorned elaborate melodic contours, which he called “snakes,” and advised two of his protégés, Armstrong and trombonist Clyde Bernhardt, to get rid of them. “All them snakes you makin’ loses the flavor,” he told Bernhardt, “it don’t mean a damn thing.” Armstrong first got that advice around age fifteen. “He’d hang around and he’d listen to me play a while. He’d tell me, ‘Listen boy, play some more lead. Stop so much of that variation. Play some lead.’” What Oliver liked was a “phrase that stayed with you,” as Armstrong put it.

  Bushell said that the eastern players could not match the New Orleanians in blues because they were caught up in a “ragtime” conception with “a lot of notes.” “Hot” music depended on heavy vibrato, aggressive attack, rhythmic drive, and strength. The successful blues singers from the early 1920s made their careers without microphones in venues that required tremendous vocal projection. They had to belt it out, and an abundance of hot features helped. Preachers developed the same kind of projection and used the same means of expression.

  Chimes Blues is one of those pieces that is removed from the plantation vernacular even though it has the word “blues” in its title. The title may be an ironic comment on social distance: on the plantations, one would not have heard blues played on chimes, which are imitated by the piano in the middle of the piece. Lillian Hardin Armstrong said that she lifted the effect out of a classical composition in a bid to carve out a solo place for herself in the band. Later she was surprised to learn that Oliver had put his name on it as composer.

  Armstrong’s solo on Chimes Blues (CD: 1:52–2:27) is his moment to shine in the April sessions. The situation must have been unnerving. As his solo approached, he had to advance from his corner position up to the recording horn, right in the middle of the performance. It is obvious that he had worked up the solo long in advance, getting it just like he wanted in the time-honored New Orleans tradition. He has two blues choruses to cover, but instead of developing the melody to create a sense of expansion, as Oliver did in Dipper Mouth, he simply plays the same theme twice, with slight changes for the endings. The solo feels stiff, and there is no sign of the marvelous imagination that would come to dominate the field of jazz in just a few years. It is certainly not the kind of playing that caused patrons at Lincoln Gardens to throw their hats into the air.6 There are few bluesy effects, though the solo is harmonically precise and well balanced. He is striving for precision and order, a phrase that stays with you.

  Armstrong’s solo shows that he had internalized Oliver’s instructions to stick to a strong lead. Though not exactly singable, it is repetitive and fairly simple. The solo also reveals his command of harmony, as he winds his way precisely through a variety of chords, with carefully chosen pitches. “As a kid it just came natural,” he said about his understanding of chords, which he experimented with in a vocal quartet as a child. There were a few people in his musical community who could show him things about harmony, and cornetist Buddy Petit, who liked to experiment with diminished chords and other advanced formations, was an important influence in the late 1910s.7 With a good ear, a quick mind, and a knack for precision, all the teenage Armstrong needed was strong role models and a few timely tips. Working on riverboat excursions during the summers of 1918–21 gave him a chance to learn more, allowing his natural ability to develop even further.

  In fact, Armstrong’s command of harmony in Chimes Blues distinguishes him from his colleagues. His chorus has more harmonic variety than the others, including the more colorful diminished chord in measure 6. When the same moment comes around in earlier choruses, the other musicians play simpler blues harmonies instead of complex chromatic harmonies. Indeed, one of the earlier choruses is marked by conflict, with some of the musicians playing a major chord and others a minor chord, signaling a bit of confusion about what was called for.

  Armstrong’s command of harmony set him apart, and this would become a key to his success in the later 1920s. The full significance of that observation emerges when it is placed in a broader context. Jazz as it flourished in early New Orleans, as a music made for the blues-loving former residents of the plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana, did not necessarily put a high value on harmonic precision. There was undoubtedly a substantial place for heterophony, with simultaneous variations of the same tune creating random dissonance and without any harmonic thinking whatsoever. That would have been the norm in church congregational singing, and it would have been the norm for vernacular dance music on the plantations (but not the dance music of slave musicians who were trained to play for the people who claimed ownership of them). It is important to realize that slaves and then former slaves on the plantations of the Deep South created a rich and expressive musical culture that did not require any familiarity with Eurocentric harmony.

  When King Oliver and His Creole Jazz Band filled up Lincoln Gardens, they were not playing heterophony, but neither were they overly concerned with harmonic precision. Outsiders often complained about the harmonic funkiness of New Orleans jazz. James “Rosy” McHargue, for example, a white clarinetist active in Chicago, didn’t like the Oliver band because they were “kind of raucous and rough … they weren’t always in tune, there were wrong notes.” White clarinetist Voltaire DeFaut was perplexed by cornetist Fred Keppard, who “had terrific range and good tone and you couldn’t fault him in many ways, but it was the harmony that he played that grated on your nerves … it sounded so funny coming from such a good trumpet.” The first time Lillian Hardin Armstrong sat down to play with the New Orleanians, she asked what key they were about to play in. A snarl came back: “We don’t know what key. When you hear two knocks start playing.” Keys and the harmonic precision that goes along with them were secondary concerns.

  To complain about weak harmonic control in early jazz from New Orleans is to apply foreign terms of evaluation. What we want to understand is why Oliver and his colleagues were so tremendously popular on the South Side of Chicago, in spite of the clinkers that irritated McHargue, DeFaut, Dave Peyton, and others. What was played in the Gennett recording st
udio was not necessarily what was played in Lincoln Gardens, but it is safe to assume, I think, that the thousands of patrons who flocked to hear Oliver and his band week after week for several years were not bothered by occasional conflicts between major and minor chords. The musical style these musicians worked out was a success; it was not trapped by an opaque set of limitations that only those on the outside could see. Oliver’s band flourished for the simple reason that it foregrounded, with more skill than anyone else, a set of musical values that appealed to the South Side population.

  It is essential to recognize how, for the ear-playing specialists in the African-American vernacular from New Orleans, harmony was less important than other things. Their exposure to Western theory was either spotty or nonexistent. What they knew—and they really knew it—were the dynamics of on-the-spot musical interaction, the allure of music that was conceived as an integral part of moving bodies, the deep expression of blue notes and pitch bending, the power and fluidity of speechlike music, the vitality of strong initial attacks and intense vibratos, and the centrality of the fixed and variable model.

  One can sometimes find a sense in historical writings that jazz needed to progress. Jazz musicians themselves spoke about their own individual progress, and they explicitly mention greater harmonic control. The progress of an individual, however, is not the same as the progress of an art form. The point is critical given the intense social pressures that have surrounded jazz from its inception. To say that jazz progressed in the hands of white musicians, or black musicians who were intent on reaching white audiences, puts the discussion on a par with discredited theories of cultural evolution.

  From the point of view of Oliver and the patrons at Lincoln Gardens, harmonic precision was a secondary value that easily yielded to other considerations. Armstrong absorbed the specialized sounds of the Oliver band—some of it more and some of it less, as we shall see—and added his own “natural” sense of harmony. In the next few years, happy rewards would come his way when he developed that sense further. What is notable, then, in Chimes Blues from April 1923, is his slight step away from the stylistic package that made the band what it was.

  Phonograph recordings from 1923 give composer credit for Dipper Mouth Blues to Oliver and Armstrong jointly. The piece probably began as a blues composition by Armstrong—was this “his rendition of the blues,” his first solo at Lincoln Gardens?—and this probably survives as the first strain, to which Oliver added his three choruses and Johnny Dodds another two.8

  Blues as a musical style had a range of possibilities, from Oliver’s full-throated preaching style to the intricately carved phrases of Armstrong’s Chimes Blues. “They were both good but Louis he could get over his trumpet more,” acknowledged cornetist George Mitchell. “Louis he had a different style that was good, very good … but it was different from Joe’s.” The differences extended beyond technique and included emotional ambience. Neither Bolden nor Oliver was limited to the intense preaching style, but each made it his specialty. Armstrong eventually found a way to incorporate blues into a solo idiom that had some speechlike effects without the freak technique and without the preaching persona. The legacy of the African-American vernacular from New Orleans remained central for him, but with a different emotional configuration and with new openings for expression.

  His musical rise depended on superior technical skill, natural musical sense, the late apprenticeship with Oliver, and a lot of hard work. He also had help from an unexpected source, a sort of Trojan horse who had popped up in the Oliver band and would contribute to its undoing—his future wife, Lillian Hardin.

  THREE

  Opposites Attract: Louis and Miss Lil

  But who was I to think that a big high-powered chick like Lillian Hardin, who came to Chicago from Memphis, Tennessee, the year of 1917, right out of Fisk University, the valedictorian of her classes—“Who me?” I thought to myself. I just couldn’t conceive the idea.

  —Louis Armstrong

  After Armstrong got settled in his new town, Oliver offered to take him over to the Dreamland Cabaret (name changed to Dreamland Café in 1924), one of the largest venues on the South Side. “Louis, do you want to go over and meet Lil?” he asked. The reference was clear. Oliver had sent him a photograph of Lillian Hardin as incitement to come to Chicago. “Tell Miss Lil I like her,” Armstrong wrote back. In 1922 at the age of twenty-four, Hardin was easing out of a bad marriage, so it is possible that Oliver was seriously matchmaking, not just teasing his protégé.

  They were not an obvious couple. Lil was slender, weighed around 85 pounds, and was trained to play classical piano. Singer Alberta Hunter knew them both in 1922, and she said that Lil might have been spending as much money on clothes as she herself was—quite a statement since Hunter’s extravagant tastes included an $1,800 tailor-made coat and cape. Hunter described Louis as a “big overgrown kid.” The initial meeting between future husband and wife left Lil unmoved. She didn’t like the secondhand and ill-fitting clothes he was wearing, and his hair was combed in unfashionable bangs that stuck out. “I was very disgusted,” she remembered.

  He responded with understandable shyness, given the dramatic differences between Lil and his previous romantic partners. Around age fifteen in New Orleans he had pimped for a prostitute named Nootsy. Nootsy “wasn’t very much to look at, but she made good money,” he explained. The relationship soured when Nootsy stabbed him in the shoulder; when his mother found out, she tracked down the woman and nearly choked her to death. He married a prostitute named Daisy Parker a few years later, and their relationship was also marked by violence. Daisy pushed him to the edge when she cut up his Stetson hat with a razor, and she eventually discovered a real point of vulnerability: if she attacked his mouth she could jeopardize his musical career. After that, a job that required extended time floating up and down the Mississippi River started to look pretty good.

  Lillian’s band at the Dreamland Cabaret, ca. 1921 (Courtesy of Chris Albertson)

  Once in New Orleans Armstrong had a crush on a light-skinned girl, but he was too shy to talk to her and felt he was not good enough. How much more reluctant he must have been to approach this fancy-dressed pianist who claimed to be valedictorian from legendary Fisk University. In spite of her small size, he thought of her as a “big high-powered chick.” Some of the other musicians were making a play for her, but it took a while before that thought occurred to him. “I just couldn’t conceive the idea,” he later wrote. After their first meeting, he didn’t see her again until she joined Oliver’s band in November 1922.

  Lillian’s point of entry into the musical scene in Chicago had been very different from Armstrong’s. Just after arriving with her mother, Dempsey, in 1917, she got a job at Jones Music Store, at 3409½ South State Street, demonstrating sheet music to customers. This was her reward for years of keyboard lessons in Memphis, beginning with the organ around age six. She won a piano competition at age sixteen, and from there she enrolled in the college preparatory program at Fisk University for 1915–16. That year of study was apparently the extent of her relationship with Fisk.

  In Memphis her musical upbringing was highly focused—“dicty” is the word Armstrong and his friends would have used to describe it. She had little exposure to vernacular music. A cousin sitting on the front porch once played the rag St. Louis Tickle on his guitar, but her grandmother wouldn’t let her near him; “that’s vulgar music, get away,” she said. Lil later purchased a piano-roll version of the piece, and when her mother found out, she beat her with a broomstick. “I hadn’t heard any jazz, no piano players, no bands, anything in Memphis,” she remembered.

  Through practicing and studying in the Eurocentric tradition, she developed skill in sightreading, the ability to sit down and play through printed music on the first reading. This, along with her good looks, made her perfectly suited for the Jones Music Store, where she earned three dollars per week. The proprietors booked jobs on the side, so musicians sometimes hung
out there. She remembered Jelly Roll Morton coming by and playing the piano in a way she had never heard before. Clarinetist Lawrence Duhé brought his band into the store one day for an audition. Jones found them a job at a Chinese restaurant. The venue was known for frequent requests from the audience, so Duhé asked if Jones might recommend a piano player. When Hardin accepted, her career with the improvising New Orleanians began.

  She had memorized a good number of songs—“I just took the job [at the music store] so I could learn all the music,” she said—and her efforts now paid off with Duhé. Pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith emphasized how much demand there was for popular music on request in Chicago around this time, with patrons wanting to hear the music they had purchased on records for their windup phonographs at home. Requests ranged through popular songs of the day, tunes like Love Will Find a Way from the Broadway show Shuffle Along, by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. In New Orleans, there had been some incentive to keep up with current repertories, but in Chicago that demand was extended considerably.

  Given Lil’s lack of exposure to vernacular music, she was rather brave to take the job with Duhé. When she sat down to rehearse, she asked what key the piece would be in and the response assured her that the question was irrelevant. It didn’t take long for her to find her way. The repertory had a limited range of chords, which she could easily identify by ear. Besides, as we have seen in Chapter 2, harmonic precision was not the highest priority for the uptown, ear-playing musicians from New Orleans.