Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  In his classroom at the Howard Normal School, Fletcher Sr. liked to demonstrate his ability to speak Latin fluently. He made sure that all three of his children had extensive music lessons. One detail about Fletcher Jr.’s piano studies is telling and hardly surprising: at daily practice time, the six-year-old was locked in the living room with instructions to produce a steady flow of sound that could be monitored in other parts of the house. His childhood training resembled Lillian Hardin’s in that vernacular music was simply out of the question. Even after Fletcher Jr. became famous as a jazz musician, his father continued to prohibit that kind of music in his home. Located at opposite ends of the African-American cultural spectrum in the early twentieth century, the childhoods of Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong could not have been more dissimilar.

  In 1916 Fletcher Jr. followed his father’s example and matriculated at Atlanta University, majoring in chemistry and serving as university organist. An admiring classmate predicted that he was destined to be “classed with Rachmaninoff and other noted musicians.” Atlanta University was in some ways the heart of the talented-tenth vision. Du Bois taught there from 1897 to 1910, while he was making a name for himself nationally. Walter White was a graduate of Atlanta and regarded by Du Bois as the perfect talented-tenth model. When Henderson took the train to New York in the summer of 1920, degree in hand and full of promise, he must have realized that his background and connections put him in a strong position. He was one of only around 2,000 African Americans attending higher-level colleges and universities in the entire country during the late 1910s, an elite group that deserved protection and encouragement. Nowhere was that protection stronger than in Harlem.

  Henderson took the trip with the intention of studying at Columbia University, but he quickly dropped those plans and plugged into Harlem’s expanding musical scene. One thing led to another, and before he knew it he was sitting in the offices of the Pace and Handy Music Company, run by W. C. Handy, the famous composer, and Harry Pace, who happened to be class of 1903 valedictorian of Atlanta University, where he had studied with Du Bois and became proficient in Latin and Greek.

  Fletcher Henderson Sr. and Jr., New York, ca. 1923 (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  The great commercial explosion of blues sold through sheet music had brought Pace and Handy together fortuitously in the mid-1910s, but in January 1921 Pace broke away to form Black Swan Records. He positioned his new phonograph company in a market niche quite different from that of OKeh and the other race record catalogues. Backed by capital investment from his talented-tenth acquaintances, Pace’s company veered toward highbrow classical recordings. Luminaries like Jack Nail and James Weldon Johnson served on the Black Swan board of directors, and the Crisis, the mouthpiece of Du Bois and the NAACP, invested its profits there. Henderson became “musical director” and “recording manager” of the new company.

  Why were Du Bois and the talented tenth investing in phonograph records? Because they realized how powerfully the technology could define black identity and thus shape the future of the race. Their interest followed a cultural vision that Du Bois had articulated as early as 1903: “Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward?” he wrote. “Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.” The talented tenth were not inclined to think of the black vernacular as a positive resource. They simply could not imagine what we today, a century later, take for granted, after the breathtaking achievements in black vernacular music throughout the twentieth century, as the tradition intersected in so many different ways with commercial structures in the United States: it is precisely “bottom-up” motion that has produced the deepest and farthest-reaching results.

  But for Du Bois and his powerful followers it had to be top-down, and Pace gave them a chance to put their money where their mouths were. The poet Langston Hughes, walking into this elite Harlem scene a couple of years after Henderson did, understood their motivations. In order to gain white acceptance, the talented tenth had to promote a black culture that whites would respect. “They wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot,” Hughes wrote.

  But of course there was more to it than that. The existence of a talented tenth depended on a distinctly untalented nine-tenths. It could be useful, on a personal level, to highlight the differences. Danny Barker arrived in Harlem a few years after Hughes did, and his assessment was harsher. “I had seen many of the important men and women [in the Harlem Renaissance] and I noticed the way they moved about with a straight-faced solemn attitude: an attitude of superior surveillance and a deep inside disgust—a defeat, or helplessness,” he wrote. “They would smile at nothing … [like] defeated wounded soldiers trudging back from the battlefront.”

  When Henderson settled in and figured out what was going on, he must have turned a slight, sheepish smile. The son of a Latin teacher who majored in chemistry at Atlanta University was in a good position to know about privileged leadership and its advantages. He proved to be a quick learner, and it would not be long before he was gathering praise for his status, not just for his musical achievement.

  Pace quickly realized that, for purely practical reasons, it was best not to exclude blues and jazz from the Black Swan catalogue, and Henderson became the default piano man for accompanying blues singers on their recordings. It was not an obvious use of his abilities. Yet, as it turned out, he found a way to offer the right mix of reliability, professionalism, and adaptability. A young Ethel Waters walked into the company offices in 1921 and met Henderson, looking “very prissy and important.” He asked her if she would rather record a popular song or a “cultural” song. Her Down Home Blues (May 1921) was the commercial success that “got Black Swan out of the red,” according to Waters. She and Henderson later went on a tour that included a stop in New Orleans, where Henderson first heard Armstrong. Waters told a story that sums up Henderson’s awkward transition from university organist to blues accompanist. In Chicago she purchased some piano rolls made by James P. Johnson and asked Henderson to study them. He listened closely and practiced placing his fingers in the depressed keys as the machine cranked along. “He began to be identified with that kind of music, which isn’t his kind at all,” Waters remembered.

  In summer 1922 Henderson landed an opportunity to head up his own dance band, and with that he arrived at the position in which he would thrive for the next decade or so, one that made good use of his talented-tenth skill set of selecting repertory, shaping musical arrangements, managing employees, rehearsing, holding up standards, and dealing with white employers. It must have been a relief to no longer be chasing James P. Johnson’s fingerings around the player piano. He continued to accompany blues singers in recording studios for a couple of years, since the easy and lucrative gigs empowered him with extra work to offer his employees. But his future success would unfold in a very different direction.

  At a white Manhattan dance hall called Terrace Gardens, Henderson’s group played opposite a white orchestra, the two taking turns throughout the evening. An excited write-up in the black press bragged how the dancers rested while the white orchestra played, only to jump up and dance when Henderson and his “masters of the art of playing modern dance rhythms” took the stage. By January 1924 he was heading a band hired for dancing and floor shows at Club Alabam, an upscale white cabaret on West 44th Street, near Times Square. Violinist Allie Ross conducted, but the musicians decided to make Henderson the leader, since he “made a nice appearance and was well-educated,” as Don Redman put it. By February, “Fletcher Henderson and His Famous Club Alabam Orchestra” were being promoted weekly in prominent advertisements in the New York Times, and ads were soon trumpeting them as the “Greatest Colored Orchestra in the World.” Vocalion recorded and promoted the band in white newspapers alongside Ben Selvin’s Famous Moulin Rouge Orchestra; this set Henderson apart from black bands who recorded for race labels (though Voc
alion did put “Colored” in parentheses under Henderson’s name). The group took a step forward by signing with Columbia, which released its records on the company’s general label, marketed to whites. The large number of recordings produced by this band indicates the success of this strategy. Just as Armstrong used his contacts from New Orleans to enter the preeminent band on the South Side of Chicago, so did Henderson use his talented-tenth connections to enter into good-paying recording contracts and venues in white Manhattan.

  In July 1924 Henderson took his band into the whites-only Roseland Ballroom, on Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets, described by Variety as the “‘class’ dance place on Broadway.” As the Amsterdam News put it, the job itself was “proof of [the orchestra’s] greatness.” The Roseland would remain his home base for almost a decade. Like most large ballrooms, the Roseland hired two (and sometimes more) orchestras every night, alternating on separate bandstands to provide continuous music for dancing. Less typical was the Roseland’s format of having a white orchestra going head to head with a black one. During his first year there, Henderson played opposite the Sam Lanin Orchestra, Phil Romano and His Rainbow Orchestra, and Vincent Lopez’s orchestra. Music columnist Dave Peyton, writing in the Defender, insisted that the key to Henderson’s success was polished ensemble work. “Each section of this band is molded into one player, it seemed,” he wrote. “The rhythm of the band was perfect, the color and attack excellent. Continuity of playing with one another has made this organization a stand out.” This kind of quality control—based on standards set by the elite white bands and, in the minds of many, set in clear opposition to collectively improvising bands from New Orleans—proved to be Henderson’s strength.

  In spite of the fact that the Roseland was a segregated dance hall, the job helped Henderson attract attention in the black community, partly through far-reaching radio broadcasts and recordings, but also simply because it put him in a class with elite white orchestras. With Henderson, Armstrong played opposite Lanin, Lopez, Isham Jones and His Orchestra, Ray Miller and His Orchestra, and the Benson Orchestra of Chicago (“le plus ultra of society dance music,” according to cornetist Rex Stewart). In November 1924 the Pittsburgh Courier encouraged its black readership to vote for Henderson’s band in a contest conducted by the New York Daily Mirror for most popular radio artist. “He ranks with the best white offerings of his kind,” bragged the Courier; that statement could be supported by the fact that few other black bands could be heard on the radio. In winter 1925 Henderson purchased a house on “Striver’s Row,” the elite section of West 139th Street in Harlem. In May the New York Age reported that he was raking in $1,200 for a six-night work week. In September, Harlem papers announced a musical victory by the Henderson Orchestra over Lopez—no small claim since Lopez was about to play at the Metropolitan Opera House, giving jazz, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the most ceremonious recognition it has yet received in America or anywhere else.”

  Armstrong’s leap from Oliver to Henderson could not have been more dramatic. One had come up through the shouting Baptist and rough blues traditions of the plantations to lead the most successful black band on the South Side of Chicago; the other was raised with classical music and talented-tenth grooming, which put him in a position to form the most successful black band playing for whites in midtown Manhattan. The key to Oliver’s ascent was his cultivation of the bluesy vernacular; the key to Henderson’s was his ability to mimic the likes of Lopez, Lanin, and Whiteman. The binary opposition—defined musically, racially, and in terms of social class—could not have been more firmly drawn. One thing is obvious: each audience got the kind of music it was looking for. Another thing was less obvious, and needs to be fleshed out: what each audience wanted was heavily shaped by attitudes about race.

  The Roseland Ballroom: “Jazz Bands Will Not Be Considered”

  Jazz fans today may be surprised to learn that Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, when Armstrong joined it in the fall of 1924, was actually not a jazz band. Henderson’s band has a firm place in modern history as the prototypical jazz orchestra with multiple instruments forming sections. But to understand what was happening during Armstrong’s year in New York, we need to put that point of view aside and think about the period’s understanding of the word “jazz.” The definition most people think of today is the result of intense effort over many decades to police the boundaries of what jazz is and what it is not. Usage in the mid-1920s was contentious, pluralistic, and unstable, and it was inevitably inflected with racial and social dynamics.

  An advertisement in the New York Clipper for the job at the Roseland Ballroom that Henderson eventually landed included this:

  We have an opening for TWO VERSATILE BANDS. Two high grade Dance-Orchestras (five to seven men each) wanted by a high-class New York ballroom to play for the evening sessions. Jazz bands will not be considered… . Apply by letter only to … Roseland, Broadway at 51st Street, The Home of Refined Dancing.

  The Roseland was not looking for jazz, and with Henderson it got what it wanted. The confusing thing is that Henderson’s group was gradually and indirectly becoming a jazz band, simply by being swept up in the currents of the day. This movement had little to do with Armstrong, or even with any spark of inspiration from Henderson himself. Instead, what drove it was Henderson’s keen sense of how to place his unit in competition with leading white bands.

  Roseland Ballroom interior, ca. 1926 (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  There were at least five different usages of “jazz” in broad circulation during the 1920s.25 There was room for overlap, for ambiguity was part of the strength of this surprisingly durable little word. Some found it easy to throw up their hands and accept vague and inclusive definitions, but that does not mean that ideologically driven usage ever drifted completely out of play.

  Jazz was black music from New Orleans that featured bluesy effects and collective improvisation. This was King Oliver’s specialty at Lincoln Gardens and the 1920s definition that lines up best with modern understandings of “jazz.” This is the social-musical configuration that Isham Jones, the white orchestra leader, was thinking of when he said, in 1924, that his own band did not play jazz, which was, instead, a “down South Negro type” of blues. The main audience base was African Americans in New Orleans and Chicago, but it was expanding through race recordings and tours. That the musicians did not use notation but played by ear was part of the music’s identity. African-American associations with blues and church music were recognized and appreciated. Insiders heard the music as sophisticated and profound, outsiders as raucous, immoral, and primitive. Dave Peyton, the most prolific writer on African-American music during the mid-1920s, wrote scornfully about “New Orleans hokum” and “clown music.”

  Jazz was a white version of that tradition. The key intervention here was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band from New Orleans, which came to the world’s attention in 1917 through phonograph recordings that spawned many imitators. For some years this must have been the music most people in the United States thought of when they heard the word “jazz.” It is impossible to know how many understood the music’s black origins. Some who did regarded this kind of jazz as cultural miscegenation on a dangerous level. Some may have suspected black origins but didn’t know the details, others denied those origins (an attitude that is still current today, though in very small circles), and others simply found it useful to ignore the issue altogether.

  This music was understood as either uncivilized and dangerous or uncivilized and refreshing, depending on one’s point of view. But even whites who were aware of the music’s black origins did not understand the connection between collective improvisation and African-American communal singing. They did not hear that practice as African Americans from the Deep South heard it: as a music of social balance and interconnectedness. To outsiders, collective improvisation could be cast as anarchy and the rule of base impulse, music that appealed “to the vile instincts in human beings,�
�� in the words of contemporary composer John Alden Carpenter, rather than the achievement of social harmony.

  Jazz was composed music, syncopated and/or bluesy. This definition helped “jazz” enjoy open-ended success across the sprawling landscape of popular songs and dance music, from W. C. Handy’s blues songs to catchy Broadway tunes. The key step was a shift in focus from music that embraced the impossibility of musical notation (collective improvisation and blues), signaling the black vernacular, to stylistic markers that could be easily captured in notation. For example, Irving Berlin’s Everybody Step, the big song hit of 1921, has simple blue notes, an extended passage of additive rhythm, a simplified bass pattern associated with blues, and allusions to blues harmonies. It was all written out and it sounds like it was.

  Music that could be captured in notation would automatically be less “black” than jazz as practiced in the first two positions described above. Notatable jazz featured syncopation and additive rhythm but not collective improvisation, and for blue notes it used specific flattened intervals rather than less definite bending of pitch. Again, from a white point of view these transformations could be either bad, meaning that civilization was under siege, or good, meaning that jazz was now in the hands of composers who knew what they were doing, as opposed to primitives who did not. A writer in Etude (March 1924) ranked Everybody Step among the ten greatest masterpieces in music history, right up there with Bach’s B-Minor Mass and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. A 1925 biographer of Berlin half-lamented “the preposterous fashion of using the word ‘jazz’ and the word ‘Berlin’ as interchangeable terms.”

  The large Jewish presence in the popular-song industry—and the talents of Berlin and Gershwin—provided an opening for another dimension of American racial logic: Jews could be regarded as mediators between primitive Africa and advanced Europe. Some imagined that Jews had darker skin in the past. “The simple fact is that the Jew responds naturally to the deeper implications of jazz, and that as a Jewish-American he partakes of the impulse at both its Oriental and its Occidental end,” wrote one observer.