Oliver started to loosen his hold on his protégé: “he decided to let me do everything and anything that I choosed,” wrote Armstrong. Feeling, perhaps, that Armstrong was less of a threat on the road, or perhaps needing more help to carry the show, Oliver let him sing and do a little comedy dance in which he pretended to fall and hurt himself. It was probably Louis’s first appearance on a vaudeville stage since a talent contest in his early teens. He took some solos to “help the ol’ man out,” he said; “the customers really went for it in a big way.” Oliver got in the habit of disappearing for a stretch during the middle of a performance.
Rudy Jackson remembered how word of Armstrong’s appeal got around, with some managers insisting, to Oliver’s great irritation, that Armstrong’s featured participation be designated in advance. But Jackson also remembered how Armstrong was devoted to his mentor and credited Oliver with all of his own success. Oliver liked to pose as the star, making his entrance only after everyone else was seated, with the expectation of special applause. When he grew ill-tempered over the growing interest in Armstrong, his student toned things down. In Armstrong’s memory the tour was a big success, with shorter hours, more money, and lots of fun. When the band returned to Lincoln Gardens, they were wildly popular once again.
The tour made it clear that Louis was no longer a second cornetist. Lil made a direct appeal: Oliver was holding him back, she said, and his “ego and wounded vanity may hurt you.” He listened in shocked silence. “I told him I didn’t want to be married to a second trumpet player,” she remembered. “I wanted to be married to a first trumpet player. I told him he had to get out of Oliver’s band.”
Finally, on a train ride back to Chicago after one out-of-town gig, Lil and Rudy Jackson convinced him that it was time to leave. He agreed and asked Jackson to break the news to the King. Jackson expected Oliver to be furious, but he merely shrugged and said that he had been lucky that Louis had stayed with him this long. Armstrong left at the end of June without saying a word.
Oliver had invited Louis to join him because he desperately needed support, but for Armstrong the nearly two years of playing second were crucial in shaping his rapidly maturing talent. “Sitting by [Oliver] every night I had to pick up a lot of little tactics he made,” he acknowledged. Those tactics would have included the most important aspects of Armstrong’s mature style: blues phrasing, a vigorous initial attack that communicates vitality, vibrato that expresses passion, the ability to invent a phrase that stays with you, and various ways of creating rhythmic drive, including commitment to the fixed and variable model. It was a thorough and deep transmission of one man’s vision to a worthy disciple, the kind of relationship all teachers hope for. The relationship produced the greatest representative of the New Orleans tradition, the musician who carried the uptown vernacular around the globe.
Oliver wrote to friends at home, asking who the best young cornetists were. Eventually Lee Collins was identified, brought to Chicago, and installed as second cornetist at Lincoln Gardens. Someone from the audience requested High Society, but Oliver said they couldn’t play it since they didn’t have a clarinet player from New Orleans. Collins stepped up and offered to play the part on his cornet, just as Armstrong used to do. At the end of the evening the bouncer turned to Oliver and said, “Joe, this is the first time I seen you smile since your boy Louis left the band.” Lee was invited to the Oliver home for a late dinner prepared by Stella.
Lillian didn’t want to make it obvious that she had prompted Louis to leave, so she stayed in Oliver’s band. “One of us is gonna have to be working,” she quipped. Oliver was skeptical about Louis’s chances and predicted he would come back. Still a bit shy, Armstrong had trouble figuring out what to do. He heard that Sammy Stewart was putting together a band, so he approached him to see if he needed a cornet player. It turned out to be an unfortunate choice.
In the summer of 1924, Stewart, a classically trained pianist from Ohio, was beginning to make a place for himself in the musical networks of Chicago. He dazzled audiences by playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue without missing a note. Featuring complex arrangements with a strong string section, the group’s arrival was hailed by the Defender as a “group of ten young men … from the best families of Ohio, well educated and highly trained musicians.” The writer predicted that it wouldn’t be long before Stewart reached a level of popularity now enjoyed by Paul Whiteman. Stewart and his musicians stopped by Lincoln Gardens to see Oliver’s band and laughed out loud; we “thought they were funny,” one of them admitted.
Armstrong gathered his courage to ask for a job, but Stewart brushed him away with barely a word. He slinked back to Lil, his confidence crushed. Stewart looked at Armstrong and understood immediately that he was not a well-educated musician, and he probably even sensed that he was not from one of the best families. According to Earl Hines, Stewart’s band was made up of light-skinned musicians, which presented a barrier that neither he nor Armstrong could hope to overcome. Armstrong was familiar with this kind of discrimination, which was common in New Orleans, but it must have felt like a real downer to be slapped by it on his first attempt to step out of his hometown circle in search of a position equal to his abilities. “I wasn’t up to his society,” Armstrong remembered about Stewart, bitterly.
Lil suggested Ollie Powers, the singer to whom she had introduced him at the Dreamland. A large person with a lovely tenor voice, Powers was warm, friendly, and well liked. He gave Armstrong a place in his new band at the Dreamland. It was a small band, with only one cornetist, so there were solo opportunities. “That’s when Louis started playing and showing what he had in himself,” Lillian reported (the comment reaffirms the likelihood that the solo opportunities he had with Oliver were limited). Now was his chance to shine.
Word of his ability reached Fletcher Henderson in New York City. Henderson first heard him while touring through New Orleans, in April 1922, and when he got back to New York he telegrammed an offer. Armstrong responded that he would only leave if Henderson hired his buddy, drummer Zutty Singleton, as well. Now, in 1924, Armstrong was more confident. Henderson offered $55 a week to come to join his orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom, on Broadway. Armstrong accepted, thus making a break with Chicago and putting the Oliver years behind.
Interestingly, Lillian stayed in Chicago. She apparently accompanied Louis on the initial trip in September, but did not stay long. Her mother needed help, but there was probably more to it than that. The mutual passion of the down-home hustler from New Orleans and the high-powered chick from Fisk University did not fully compensate for their imposing differences. As long as Lillian was dedicated to the task of holding a ladder for her husband to climb, they were working in synchrony, but that kind of energy can also be difficult to manage. She told him how to tip, how to dress, how to eat properly, how to manage his money, how to notate music, how to play the classics, where to go to church, when to leave Oliver, and what to do next. Musicians teased him about being henpecked, but Armstrong dismissed it as jealousy. “They were broke all the time and I always had a pocket full of money,” he chortled.
The friction between Louis and Lillian was sparked by differences in class as well as personality. He disdained people who put on airs, while she had been taught to do precisely that. So it is easy to imagine that there was already, barely eight months after their wedding, a degree of discomfort that made the move attractive. Armstrong’s experience with the stress of conflicting class positions in both New Orleans and Chicago prepared him for similar tensions with the Henderson Orchestra in New York. During the period 1918–21, he played with riverboat orchestras in the summers, learning a Eurocentric way of making music, while extending his command of the vernacular in New Orleans the rest of the year. In Chicago this balancing act played out in a different way as Louis navigated between performing with Oliver’s band every night and hanging out with Lillian. His later career would be closely bound up with his ability to deal productively with social t
ensions like these.
His first rehearsal with Henderson is another landmark moment in the Armstrong biography, right up there with his first night at Lincoln Gardens. The differences between the Henderson and Oliver bands were dramatic. Henderson’s orchestra worked in sections, with several instruments of the same kind playing written arrangements. Armstrong’s main job was to play improvised solos, and when he wasn’t doing that, to play the third cornet part. “I had just left Chicago,” he remembered, “where the way we used to do it was just take the wind in, and take what’s left of it and blow out—and now I got to watch this part.” He had done that on the riverboat bands, too, but with Henderson it may have become clear that this would be the way of the future. Indeed, for the next two decades or so he would primarily make his living in an orchestra with sections, reading written arrangements, with important but limited excursions, almost exclusively in recording studios, into smaller, one-on-a part, ear-playing ensembles.
After arriving in New York, Armstrong found his way to the rehearsal at 143rd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and introduced himself to the leader, who greeted the nervous twenty-three-year-old with a gruff “Your part’s up there.” He remembered the piece as By the Waters of Minnetonka, a light classical composition by Thurlow Lieurance from the mid-1910s. Paul Whiteman had recently made a big splash with Minnetonka, turning it into a fox trot arranged by Ferde Grofé. Whiteman’s June 1924 recording was probably released in time for Henderson to get the piece ready for this October rehearsal. In his 1926 book So This Is Jazz, Henry Osgood touted Grofé’s arrangement as a model worth imitating. The high-toned pedigree, combining light classic status with the glamour of Whiteman and Grofé, made Minnetonka an appealing number for Henderson.
Later in the rehearsal, Henderson called for a medley of Irish waltzes. The arrangement included dynamic markings for playing loud and soft. By this time, Armstrong had considerable experience reading music, but it is quite possible that he had never seen this range of dynamics before, from fortissimo to pianissimo. When the band came to a very soft passage, signaled by the standard abbreviation pp, everyone quieted down except him. “In this band we read the marks as well as the notes,” Henderson scolded him. Armstrong quipped that he thought pp meant “pound plenty.” (My guess is that this was not simply a joke on Armstrong’s part. As trombonist Preston Jackson explained, “pound plenty” was musician slang: “When you was playing shows you had to, what we called pound plenty.”)
For the most part it was a miserable day. Armstrong sat bent over, nervous and self-conscious, painfully aware that everyone was checking him out. He got frustrated reading the arrangements and yelled out impulsively, “Man, what is that thing?” The other players mostly ignored him, and he kept to himself. “I’m saying to myself,” he remembered, “‘This bunch of old stuck up …’” The fringes of his long underwear stuck out below his pants, he carried a cardboard suitcase, and his stomach protruded out of his poorly fitted clothes. Drummer Kaiser Marshall teased him about his clunky shoes.
Things would improve with the Henderson band, but he never really settled in completely, in spite of the professional success that came his way. In public statements he avoided negatives, but near the end of his life he sometimes cut loose, especially in the privacy of his home, getting things straight for his posterity, as he liked to say, via pen, typewriter, and tape recorder. On several occasions he lashed out bitterly at Henderson and his musicians, as if trying to heal a long-festering wound. “The fellas in Fletcher’s band had such big heads,” he grumbled. Henderson was condescending and told him he could be good if he would only take some lessons—“but in my head I’m saying, ‘You can go fuck yourself.’” Above all, he couldn’t stand the pretension. “Fletcher was so carried away with that society shit and his education,” he wrote bluntly.
In the end, he successfully negotiated the social and musical challenges and moved up another step on the ladder of his career. New York was more challenging than Chicago, where it had been easy for him to adjust with the help of the large community of New Orleanians. Milt Hinton thought that people in New York were less friendly than those in Chicago. There were fewer black-owned businesses, and Harlem “was more high class and cold blooded” in his experience. Danny Barker, the candid banjo player from New Orleans, described New York City as “a machine town, like everything is in a hurry … very cold black people and very cold white people.” The dancing was different, Barker insisted, less sensuous and with the partners not as close together. Issues like these undoubtedly affected Armstrong, but his main challenge with the job was Henderson. In place of the familiar ways of New Orleans, he found a scene where music was used relentlessly as a source of elite social distinction. The leader staring him down from the front of the band was an imposing personification of that.
The Talented Tenth
In the spring of 1924, Armstrong received a more extensive introduction to the Harlem elite. Very few social occasions in Harlem attained the splendid heights—the “pinnacle of posh,” as the journalist and novelist George Schuyler described it—of the annual NAACP ball, hosted by the Women’s Auxiliary of the New York branch. The third ball, on March 27, 1925, was held at the spacious New Manhattan Casino, 155th Street and 8th Avenue, with music provided by Fletcher Henderson. The Interstate Tattler called it the “foremost social event of the year.” General admission was $1, loges $3, and boxes $6. Music for dancing was provided first by Henderson’s Rainbow Orchestra, which made its inaugural appearance at nine o’clock. Then at midnight followed the celebrated Roseland Orchestra, with Armstrong on third cornet.
Guests with reserved boxes were escorted by one of 12 beautiful sub-debs, carefully selected from their club of 50 supervised by Dr. Ardelle Mitchell Dabney. Interest was so strong that additional loges and boxes were constructed at the last minute. In spite of bad weather, society people arrived from as far away as Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Toledo, the gathering swelling to an estimated 4,000. The Green Room on the balcony floor, artistically decorated by Mrs. Le Tang, provided a quiet space for light dining, with salads and sandwiches.
On the main floor sat Mrs. Binga Desmond in a flame tulle over satin, trimmed with gold cloth. Prominent physicians, including Dr. Edward Best, Dr. Leo Fitz Nearon, podiatrist William J. Carter, and the well-known (and somewhat scandalized) surgeon Dr. U. Conrad Vincent, gathered with their wives, as did society musicians Ford Dabney; David Martin, a violinist, music educator, and president of the New York local chapter of the National Association of Negro Musicians; and Robert F. Douge, trustee of the Martin-Smith Music School. Mrs. Fletcher Henderson served on the reception committee that organized the event, as did Addie W. Hunton, a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women. Politicians included Charles W. Anderson, collector of Internal Revenue for the third district of New York City, State Assemblyman Pope Billups, and Dr. George F. Haynes, secretary of Race Relations to the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, with his wife Elizabeth, the first Negro woman ever appointed to the national board of the YWCA. Everyone was delighted to see famed military veteran Capt. Alonzo Myers, as well as the successful real estate entrepreneur W. H. Roach and John Nail, president of the Association of Trade and Commerce.
From the NAACP there were Rev. Robert W. Bagnall, accomplished orator and director of branches for the organization; Walter White, author of The Fire in the Flint and assistant secretary; Augustus Granville Dill, business manager of the Crisis (he was also a musician who played pipe organ and “piano forte,” as he liked to call it); and, of course, Mr. and Mrs. W. E. B. Du Bois. Alain Locke, the first African-American Rhodes scholar, sat near the legendary James Weldon Johnson, accompanied by his wife and Wilhelmina Adams, their goddaughter. The distinguished writer Jean Toomer and the vivacious poet Countee Cullen circulated pleasantly. The Baltimore Afro-American noted that there were so many illustrious names that it was impossible to mention them all, though one who couldn�
��t be overlooked was A’Lelia Walker, heiress to an immense fortune built on hair-straightening products, whose every social move was the subject of intense interest.
In short, the box holders were a cross-section of the “talented tenth”—W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase for the top layer of African-American society. He argued that the race would advance most directly through the leadership of members possessing higher education and cultural refinement, in contrast to Booker T. Washington’s vision of race progress through industrial education. In mid-1920s Harlem, Du Bois’s position was ascendant.
Fletcher Henderson was drawn to this crowd like a cold hand to a kid glove. As Sy Oliver, the great swing-band arranger from the 1930s, observed, “Keep in mind that when I was born in 1910, the only salvation for a Negro was education and of course there were two societies in the black community: the educated on one side and the uneducated on the other. They led totally different lives.” There was no doubt about where Henderson and Armstrong stood.
Henderson (b. 1897) grew up in Cuthbert, Georgia, a little town where his father, Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, was an administrator and teacher of Latin at the Howard Normal School for many years. Fletcher Sr. had attended Atlanta University, where he was mentored by the school’s president, Edmund A. Ware. That connection led directly to the position of principal in Cuthbert, where he became a regional leader. He was the deacon and superintendent of Sunday school at the AME Church, which undoubtedly followed the vision of that denomination to eliminate the vernacular practices of ecstatic worship that had been so closely identified with slavery. Fletcher Sr. was eventually honored as “State Education Evangelist” by the statewide AME.
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism Page 14
