Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Rhythmically, her job was simple. When not leading the band in a tune requested from the audience, her role was to play a chord on every beat with no variation whatsoever—four beats per measure, with the chords usually changing every measure. The chords helped hold the texture together, and the steady beat was part of the rhythmic foundation upon which melody players could spring vigorous counterrhythms.

  Hardin managed to hide the situation for a while from her mother, telling her that she was working late at a dance studio. The nice pile of cash she was bringing home must have helped bring her mother around when she eventually found out. At first her mother insisted on meeting her every night at closing, at the exit door of the cabaret, but eventually she let Lil come home at one o’clock, accompanied by drummer Tubby Hall, with mother waiting at the door to greet them.

  When Oliver took over Duhé’s band and they moved to Royal Gardens, Lil went along. She accompanied the band to California in May 1921, while Royal Gardens was being remodeled and transformed into Lincoln Gardens. In September she returned to Chicago without the others to take the job at the Dreamland. Oliver returned to Chicago in late spring of 1922, and with the departure of pianist Bertha Gonsoulin in November, he persuaded Lil to rejoin. She chorded on the beat and taught the band new pieces from sheet music.

  Her engagement with the music was minimal. The improvising New Orleanians failed to excite her. “From a musical standpoint jazz didn’t mean too much to me,” she later admitted. The terms of expression were so different from the music she had been immersed in that she had no context for appreciating quality. She ignored Armstrong’s cornet work, which was, after all, in second place, not first. “I was interested in the money,” she explained. “You tell me he was good or that one was good, it wouldn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t know any difference, you know?”

  But she perked up when Oliver, in a quiet aside, mentioned that Louis was a better player than he was. Then came the reckless follow-up that has since been repeated many times by many musicians, including Louis himself: “But as long as I keep him with me he won’t be able to get ahead of me.” The immediate effect of this startling confession was that Lil began to notice the pudgy second cornetist. The two grew closer on the spring 1923 tour that brought the band to the Gennett studios in Indiana. As she watched the shuffling around in the studio, with Louis being positioned further away from the recording horn, she thought that this, too, must be an indication of superior ability. He looked sad, and she flashed a reassuring smile. Louis was now more than simply another one of the home boys.

  He was certainly a bit of a rube, and it is hardly surprising that it took her a while to warm up to him. One night he came to work with a new fragrance sprinkled on his clothes, something a friend from the rooming house had given him. Bud Redd, the manager at Lincoln Gardens, noticed the cheap scent right away and gave him a hard time. As it turned out, the boarder worked at the stockyards and the perfume was made from fertilizer. The ingredients were explained to Louis and “that ended the smelling session,” he said.

  In spite of their differences, the two musicians started to have long conversations during down time at Lincoln Gardens. This led to nighttime wanderings on the “stroll,” the main thoroughfare for entertainment on the South Side, a stretch of State Street that had its center between 31st and 39th Streets.

  The stroll offered round-the-clock sociability and excitement that few American cities today come anywhere close to matching. “You could stand on 35th and State and see just about anybody you wanted to see in Chicago,” said clarinetist Darnell Howard. Stores, barbershops, and restaurants stayed open 24 hours a day. Nighttime service was enhanced by the installation of electric streetlights in 1922. “I made it my business to go out for a daily stroll and look this ‘heaven’ over,” said Lil. “Chicago meant just that to me—its beautiful brick and stone buildings, excitement, people moving swiftly, and things happening.”

  The dense concentration of black-owned businesses ranged from small shops to illustrious enterprises like Anthony Overton’s Victory Life Insurance Company, Half Century Magazine, and the Columbia Hotel, where visiting black musicians often stayed. Here also was the bank owned by Jesse Binga, who had risen from the humble position of Pullman porter many years ago. The stroll was “Wall Street and Broadway,” a “Bohemia of the Colored Folks,” a “Mecca for Pleasure,” where, according to the Defender, there was no threat of “racial embarrassment.”

  Black musicians never “even thought about going downtown, we had too much in our own neighborhood,” said Earl Hines, recently arrived from Pittsburgh. “You’d start out in the afternoon by making your first stop at a barber shop near the hotel,” said Willie “The Lion” Smith. “They would give you a relaxing shave, and it was the policy of the shop to give each customer a half pint of gin to sip on. It got you off to a nice start. And then you went on, down the stroll.” Inevitably, the stroll would be the main scene for the courtship of these two young musicians, with Lil leading the way since, in Louis’s estimation, she “knew Chicago like a book.”

  At first, Armstrong started dropping by to see her at Edelweiss Gardens, at 41st and State Streets, where she kept an after-hours job. Fred Keppard, Oliver’s rival from New Orleans, played there, too. This may have been Armstrong’s first sight of Keppard, though he had heard him from a distance in New Orleans. Trumpeter Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham thought that Keppard was a cruder musician than Oliver, “but good.” Lil’s opinion was that Keppard had better tone.

  Louis’s first encounter with Keppard was a letdown. Keppard directed him to the bandstand and gruffly ordered him to play, which Louis cautiously did. He was put off by what he perceived as a lack of seriousness on Keppard’s part. Keppard enjoyed bantering with the customers, and on this night an attractive blonde walked by the bandstand. “‘Oh Hello,’ he said in a real high voice,” Armstrong recalled. The woman smiled and returned the greeting in a very heavy voice, which caused everyone to break up in uncontrollable laughter, especially Lil. Keppard liked to create an air of intrigue by covering his cornet-playing fingers with a handkerchief.

  Louis and Lil started dropping by cabarets and after-hour spots after their 1:00 a.m. finish at Lincoln Gardens. His personal preference was a toss-up between Edelweiss Gardens and the Fiume Italian Café and Restaurant, at 3440 South State Street. The Fiume sometimes featured a combination that astonished him: white musicians playing for black patrons.9 “I had just come up from the South, where there weren’t anything as near beautiful as that happening,” he wrote. “White musicians, playing all of that good ‘Jump’ music, making those Colored people (mostly colored) swing like mad.” Willie “The Lion” Smith played at the Fiume Café around this time and described a visit from the white cast of a musical who, after they finished their show downtown, requested songs and gathered around the piano, “singing like a choir.”

  A little further down State Street at 27th Street was the Pekin Café, another after-hours place. Here, too, the crowd was racially mixed, with gangsters and prostitutes heavily represented; the Defender referred to the Pekin as “the house of a thousand crimes.” A report on a dance act performed while Oliver was playing there, a year or so earlier, describes an African-American shimmy dancer who kept her feet perfectly still while vibrating her hips and breasts, “much to the amazement of the audience.” “Lawless liquor, sensuous shimmy, solicitous sirens, wrangling waiters, all the tints of the racial rainbow, black and tan and white, dancing, drinking, singing, early Sunday morning at the Pekin café,” ran a horrified review in a white newspaper. “At one o’clock the place was crowded. Meanwhile a syncopating colored man had been vamping cotton field blues on the piano. A brown girl sang… . Black men with white girls, white men with yellow girls, old, young, all filled with the abandon brought about by illicit whisky and liquor music.”

  One day in late 1922 Armstrong and Bill Johnson bought tickets for a matinee performance at the Erlanger Theater, where Bill
Bojangles Robinson was the headliner. Armstrong had heard a lot about Robinson, and the famous entertainer did not disappoint on this Sunday afternoon. A spotlight flashed as he entered from the side of the stage, dressed in a light-tan gabardine summer suit and brown derby hat—“so sharp he was bleeding,” Armstrong wrote. After the long applause died down, Robinson called out, “Give me a light my color,” causing every light in the house to go dark and the audience to roar with laughter. Louis laughed so hard that Johnson thought he would have to take him home. Robinson imitated a trombone with his walking cane, told a few jokes, and then shifted into his famous tap dance. He ended the performance with a silent skating routine. Until the last days of his life, Armstrong felt that Robinson was “the greatest showman that we’ve ever had in our Race.”

  Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  The musical couple’s favorite place was the Dreamland Cabaret at 3520 South State Street. Bill Bottoms, the proprietor, was one of the few African-American owners of entertainment spots on the South Side. The dance floor was laid out with floor boards in a circle, big enough to hold 800 people. A large dome dominated the ceiling, with red, white, and blue electric lights mixed into green foliage dangling down, and hanging lights on the edge of the dome forming the letter D. In the middle of the dance floor was a patch of glass flooring brightly lit from below. The musicians played from a balcony on the west end of the building and electric lamps brightened every table.

  Each solo entertainer took a turn with an “up,” which meant first performing on the stage and then circulating through the crowd, responding to requests. Letha Hill’s specialty was a shimmy routine that she delivered on the glass spot in the middle. Two of the featured entertainers at the Dreamland would play a role in Louis’s future. Ollie Powers had very light skin (“looked like an ofay boy,” said Alberta Hunter) and was rather large. He sang in a high, sweet voice that carried a tremendous distance, a requirement for these large and boisterous venues. Armstrong remembered him “rocking the whole house” with Irving Berlin’s What’ll I Do in “fox-trot time.” Mae Alix, another singer with very light skin (“an attractive, high yellow gal,” according to Armstrong), had a routine that included splits for every dollar bill thrown by a tipping customer. Some patrons got a kick out of lining up dollars across the floor, challenging her to pick up all the bills in one running split. During one visit when the hall was not very crowded, Lil invited Ollie and Mae over to their table to meet Louis. Louis shyly asked her if it would be okay for him to give them each a dollar if they sang his requested song. She said, “Sure, it is perfectly all right.” He later told the story to Oliver, who just snorted at Louis’s lack of sophistication.

  The turning point in their relationship came during an unexpected intervention. “We did not really get together until my Mother came to Chicago,” Armstrong wrote. During the summer of 1923, Armstrong looked up one night from his chair at Lincoln Gardens and was stunned to see his mother, May Ann Albert, fervently advancing through the crowd toward the bandstand. He had no idea why she was there. “How is my boy, how are you doing?” she asked anxiously. He stared at her, mouth open, and the show was delayed for 20 minutes while she greeted him with obvious relief and met his colleagues.

  Someone back home had mischievously told her that Louis was out of work, out of money, hungry, and sick. Even though he had been writing regularly (though any son might make that claim, Armstrong was so fond of letter writing that it is hard to doubt him), she panicked and took off on a rescue mission. It was the first time she met Joe Oliver. At intermission Armstrong started teasing his mentor about how he had been joking that he was actually Louis’s father. “Shall I tell her what you’ve been saying?” Louis whispered, and Oliver blushed. After the show the two of them took her to the Arlington Restaurant, at 35th and State Streets, for a “good Southern cooked breakfast.” Louis was so happy that he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  It was clear that Louis was thriving, so the next day May Ann started talking about returning home. She was nervous and kept referring to all the “new fangled gadgets” of the modern city. But Louis wanted her to stay for a while, and he enlisted Lil to persuade her. They located an apartment at 43rd and St. Lawrence Streets. He had the feeling that this was the first opportunity in his life to treat his mother well. “Now was my turn to prove how thankful I was for the sacrifices she had made for me,” he wrote.

  He and Lil met the realtor to check out the three-room apartment, and as the other two talked, Louis slipped into a daydream—he called it a “trance”—about the old days in New Orleans and Nootsy, how she had stabbed him in the shoulder with her “chib,” and how May Ann had defended him. Not having seen May Ann for a year and suddenly having her here in Chicago, at the same time that he and Lil were deepening their relationship—the whole conflation of emotions overwhelmed him. Whether he thought about it or not, the dramatic vectors of the scene were symbolic of the Great Migration. It was a clarified moment of transition in the twenty-two-year-old’s life. Just a few years earlier he had fully embraced the image of a “low-class hustler” (“that’s what Louis wanted to be in those days,” said Baby Dodds). Now a completely different set of possibilities was coming into view, a world of class and money and fast-paced fancy entertainment with a woman who seemed far above him, yet increasingly within reach. The distance from New Orleans to Chicago could be measured in many ways, and the contrast between May Ann and Lil was one of them.

  It didn’t really matter that Lil had exaggerated her credentials. What mattered was that she knew things he didn’t know and was willing to bring him into her world. One could say that their relationship emerged from the possibilities of the Great Migration, a set of interactions that made it possible for a home boy from New Orleans, one of the leading experts in the African-American musical vernacular from the Deep South, to mingle with a savvy pianist who had been hanging around Fisk University. The Great Migration brought them together in a city lit up by electric lights, where wealth and celebrity were flaunted, with dollar bills spilling across the floor. It was a new world fresh in the making, heaven indeed.

  What was possible for him? What was possible for dark-skinned people, generally? How could African-American music be developed and where would his musical imagination lead? Whether Armstrong was aware of it or not, these were the questions that lay before him in Chicago in the autumn of 1923.

  Staying Under: The Rupture of the Break

  While he was courting Lillian, he continued to hang out with his musical buddies, of course, including Oliver. Oliver had an authoritative manner, and with Armstrong especially he liked to strike a paternal pose. The two of them occasionally made the rounds of after-hours clubs, and Oliver continued to shape his apprentice’s thinking, musical and otherwise. “It was real kicks—listening to music, diggin’ his thoughts, comments,” Armstrong wrote. “His conception of things—life, music, people in general, were really wonderful… . All Joe Oliver had to do was to just talk to me, and I’d feel just like I had one of those good old music lessons of his.”

  We don’t have a lot of details about what Oliver expected from him on the bandstand, but stray remarks and the evidence of recordings make it possible to speculate. Armstrong was brought to Chicago to bolster his mentor’s failing chops, and that is precisely what he did. His role was to support and “stay under” the lead, as musicians sometimes phrase it.

  The problem of identifying precisely what Armstrong played on the 1923 recordings cannot be blamed solely on inferior recording technology. The situation was created by design. Oliver wanted to channel Armstrong’s strength through a particular vision of how the band should sound, a vision that included Oliver as the featured cornetist. As someone trained to be deferential to older people, especially older musicians, and as the only student Oliver ever took, Armstrong understood this better than anyone. When we strain to hear him, we are right in the midst of where he was in 1923—under the protecti
ve arm of his mentor, and doing whatever he could to boost Oliver’s success. “I felt that any glory that should come to me must go to him—I wanted him to have all the praise,” he plainly wrote.

  Professional musicians know what it means to support a featured soloist. Earl Hines described his strategy for accompanying Ethel Waters in Chicago around this time: “When a person’s in the spotlight, and you’re accompanying, you’re always supposed to be under what the artist is doing,” he said. “I’d always listen to what she did, and listen to the changes she made, so that the next time I could really follow the channel she was in.” Armstrong brought that same spirit to his work with Oliver. Staying under had a literal meaning—playing with less volume and lower in range. And it also meant the kind of sensitivity described by Hines, so that the creative energy of the musician who is under follows the one who is above.

  “I was so wrapped up in him and lived his music that I could take second to his lead in a split second,” wrote Armstrong. Usually that meant matching Oliver’s melodic contour and rhythm in a lower range so that the two harmonized. With the two cornets in close synchrony, they sounded like one voice, a voice that the public identified as Oliver’s. Snake Rag, from their first trip to the Gennett studio in April 1923, shows the two of them in tandem, as do many other recordings.

  They became famous for using this blended approach in the phrase-ending “breaks” that are ubiquitous in early jazz. A break is a brief solo passage, usually one or two measures (four or eight beats) at the end of a phrase, in which all accompaniment stops while a designated player spins out a brief and lively musical idea. The regular pulse and phrasing are suspended, and the soloist inserts a moment of intensity and surprise. The effect is like winding up a coiled spring, which then releases its energy to launch the next phrase for the full ensemble.