Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  When Armstrong said, “Harlem saved my life,” concerning his year with Henderson, he was probably thinking of a few musicians from New Orleans who lived there. He began making records with two of them, Clarence Williams and Sidney Bechet, almost immediately. He also did a lot of studio work with blues singers who stopped in the city on tours. These race-label recordings count out to some 33 issues. They present a musical world far removed from the Henderson band, a place to relax in a loose atmosphere of pick-up bands, no rehearsals, and a lot of blues. “I knew what I could do with my horn and I proved it when I played with Bessie Smith and them people,” he later grumbled, recalling his dissatisfaction with Henderson.

  If the recordings with Henderson stand at the talented-tenth nexus with upscale dance music on Broadway, these sessions document the commercial production of the vernacular as it was processed in New York City. The Henderson enterprise was conceived for whites, but these pick-up sessions were distinctly pitched to blacks, as marketed through the race labels.

  Just a week or so after he arrived in town, Henderson hired him for a studio session with blues singer Ma Rainey (around October 16, 1924). Henderson had been putting together sessions like this since his days with Pace and Handy, as a way to make easy dollars for him and selected members of his orchestra. Coleman Hawkins, who grew up in a middle-class home taking cello and piano lessons, described these assignments as “playing the cotton mood.” Henderson told Rainey’s representative that his first trumpeter, Joe Smith, would not, unfortunately, be available for this particular session (Smith was not currently in the orchestra, but he had recorded with Henderson on pick-up gigs like this as recently as September), so he would have to bring along his second trumpeter. Bailey and Green were also invited, giving Rainey Henderson’s three bluesiest players.

  If Mamie Smith’s singing on Crazy Blues was the prevailing style in Harlem in 1920, by 1924 the scene had expanded dramatically with the ascent of the southern style represented by Rainey and Bessie Smith; this featured extended blue notes, pronounced southern accent, and tempos so slow, quipped bandleader Sam Wooding, that you could scoot to the bathroom at the beginning of a verse and come back in time to catch its end. Tellingly, not everyone in the Henderson band enjoyed this kind of music. Howard Scott, who sat next to Armstrong in the trumpet section, candidly offered an opinion that must have been shared by others: “I had to make records of blues, and well, I got sick of them. Because you know when you get down to fundamentals, the blues are nothing but the blues… . I preferred to play popular music.”

  This view was definitely not shared by Armstrong. For him, the 1924–25 sessions with Rainey, Smith, Margaret Johnson, Maggie Jones, Alberta Hunter, Eva Taylor, Sippie Wallace, Clara Smith, and Trixie Smith recalled the music he was surrounded by for the first 21 years of his life. In turn, these sessions became the primary way that his playing first got known in the African-American community, beyond those who were able to hear him in person.

  Trumpeter Bunny Berigan, a close follower of Armstrong, described his own practice of accompanying blues singers. “Your best bet is to keep your fillins rather simple… . By all means be careful to avoid playing anything that will conflict with the voice, or attract too much attention from it. In other words the voice must hold the spotlight.” This describes well Armstrong’s playing on the Rainey session, though it is startling how much more assertive he became in just a few months.

  The session with Rainey left no room for instrumental solos, only brief moments to shine in introductions and conclusions. Things would be different the next day, in his first session with Clarence Williams. In July 1923, Williams had introduced a studio band he called “Clarence Williams’s Blue Five,” following the success of the King Oliver recordings in a low-budget effort to explore the market for blues-oriented instrumental music. Williams’s concept, in turn, would be the direct model for Armstrong’s celebrated Hot Five series. On his first date with Williams (October 17, 1924), Armstrong recorded Texas Moaner Blues alongside Sidney Bechet.

  Williams had known Armstrong from the mid-1910s, when he and Armand Piron purchased (or stole, depending on how the story was told) a song Armstrong had written called Take Your Feet off Katie’s Head, which they tweaked into the bestselling I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate. Williams’s entrepreneurial ambitions led him into more and more contacts for recording, publishing, and managing African-American musicians. In the fall of 1924 he was leasing office space at 1547 Broadway, five blocks south of the Roseland, in the Gaiety Theater Building, a focal point for blacks in the music business, with Perry Bradford, Bill Robinson, Eubie Blake, Shelton Brooks, W. C. Handy, and others renting offices there. George M. Cohan wickedly nicknamed the building “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

  Williams is credited as the composer of Texas Moaner Blues, which, as a composition, is nothing more than a simple succession of blues choruses, with an arranged one at the end. It is the kind of thing middlemen associated with race labels routinely cranked out. In this case the banality of the piece was an asset, since the simple blues form inspired stunning performances from the two principals, Armstrong and Bechet.

  Trumpeter Mutt Carey remembered the first time he heard Armstrong, back in New Orleans around 1916 or so. Carey was a successful blues player, but the introduction shocked him. “He played more blues than I ever heard in my life,” he said. “It never did strike my mind that blues could be interpreted in so many ways.” Armstrong and Bechet grew up surrounded by the first generation of wind players who specialized in blues; as they reached maturity they followed the next generation, musicians like Buddy Petit, who were putting their own stamp on the idiom. Blues was expanding in New Orleans, becoming fancier and more creatively daring, and they took it all in.

  The October session with Williams was the first chance Armstrong had to put this kind of playing on record. Bechet, however, had been recording blues like this since his July 1923 Kansas City Man Blues, his first session with Williams. We know nothing about the relationship at this time between Armstrong and Bechet, who had known each other slightly in New Orleans. Years later there was tension between them, but there is no reason to suspect it at this point. In Texas Moaner Blues the two of them produce vigorous collective improvisation and even share a break—not simultaneously, the way Armstrong and Oliver used to, but successively, with Bechet starting the break and Armstrong finishing it (CD 0:57). It is a touching detail, a rare collaborative event that may have been unprecedented.

  Blues had always been relatively free of harmonic constraints, which encouraged melodic invention. Slow southern tempos invited the expressive power of blue notes, growls, ornaments, vibrato, rhythmic displacement, speechlike phrasing, and freak playing. Three chords defined the conventional blues pattern: the “one chord” built on the main pitch that organizes the performance; the “four chord,” four steps up the scale from one; and the “five chord.” The kind of popular music preferred by Howard Scott used a greater variety of chords and demanded precision in matching them, but with blues it has always been perfectly acceptable for soloists to disregard the chords and organize around the basic scale or even the basic pitch—we could speak of the “ubiquitous one.” That is what made blues such a perfect training ground: aspiring musicians who had no understanding of chords were free to work on melodic invention and performer-centered means of expression.

  The two solos that distinguish Texas Moaner Blues each show a mix of ubiquitous one and more meticulous reckoning of the chords. Most impressive, in each case, is the tremendous precision of the filigree, with leaps, rhythmic complexity, and blue notes all neatly placed in a melodic flow that is confident and varied. Armstrong and Bechet both follow the archetypal sawtooth design of a vigorous leap up followed by irregular descent. Armstrong seems a little nervous: he rushes his double-time break. Bechet poignantly descends from his intense, vibrato-packed peaks with an air of complete control and perfect relaxation; these descents remind me of Armstrong’s West E
nd Blues, recorded four years later. The connection is obscured by the step forward in recording technology during those years, from acoustic to electronic, and also by the trend toward greater isolation of the soloist, which was standard practice by 1928. But the comparison makes you realize how jazz history might have been different had Bechet not moved to Europe for most of the 1920s but stayed in the United States. He might have continued to develop in tandem with Armstrong, and he certainly would have left a more substantial legacy of recordings.

  But in late 1924, Bechet was tough to beat. A few years older than Armstrong, he was perhaps a step ahead, and that must have been a spur for the maturing cornetist, a challenge to set alongside the paraphrase project he was locked into with Henderson. Armstrong and Bechet “were two of a kind,” said Pops Foster. “You didn’t make any showing when you played with them.” Suddenly the two best musicians New Orleans ever produced were joined in a recording studio in the capital of the entertainment industry.

  Clarence Williams’s Blue Five was not a working band and there were no rehearsals, so the nature of the whole enterprise was spontaneous. That was fine for blues, but for other songs the situation presented a challenge. Armstrong’s solos with the Henderson band usually stay the same with repeated takes, indicating that he has worked on the solo in rehearsals and performances. Many writers have marveled at his ability to create beautiful melodies on the spot, but, as discussed in Chapter 2, the New Orleans approach was to work on a solo until it was the way you wanted it, then keep it. One limitation, then, of the race-label recordings Armstrong did in New York is that there was no opportunity to work out solos in advance. Sometimes he simply plays a straight lead and sometimes he embellishes lightly; both can be heard in Of All the Wrongs You Done to Me (November 6, 1924).

  One piece he got to know very well, however, was Everybody Loves My Baby (but My Baby Don’t Love Nobody but Me), the song that won a vaudeville contest for him at the Roseland. In early November he recorded the tune twice with Williams and with two different ensembles. (Lillian was in town to play on one of them.) The Henderson band recorded the tune by the end of the month, and the differences in tempo, rhythm, and prissiness compared with the Blue Five illustrate well the two worlds between which Armstrong was moving back and forth. Armstrong’s solos on this tune are extended and well planned, indicating that he had time to work them out in advance. Clarinetist Paul Barnes, back in New Orleans, remembered listening to the Blue Five issue when it first came out.

  The cotton-mood sessions continued with Armstrong backing up Margaret Johnson (November 25), Sippie Wallace (November 28), Maggie Jones (December 9, 10, and 17), and Josephine Beatty, aka Alberta Hunter (December 22). Highlights include a blistering break on Changeable Daddy of Mine (CD 2:12) that hints at his famous introduction to West End Blues. He has extended solos on the Maggie Jones sessions, which were done with reduced accompaniment, just him and Henderson. For Fats Waller’s Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage, he produces a number of quality licks, including one borrowed from the patter section in Cornet Chop Suey (CD 1:07); he then makes a nice little answer to his own lick in his next fill-in. Screamin’ the Blues inspires an overwhelming flood of musical invention, with varied and arabesque fillins.

  One of his personal favorites was Good Time Flat Blues, where he offers a lovely solo, full of intricate twists, rhythmic displacements, and rapid, double-time figuration. The density of varied ideas may have been unprecedented for a 20-second solo. Oliver would have mumbled something about too many snakes, too much figuration, not enough lead, but, more to the point, the solo successfully distinguishes Armstrong from Bechet. When these recordings with blues singers in 1924–25 reached Texas, pianist Sammy Price felt that Armstrong had “emancipated the jazz musician.”

  The uptempo Cake Walking Babies from Home is the most famous of the December recordings, and the most famous collaboration by Armstrong and Bechet. The vocal duet from Alberta Hunter and Clarence Todd is a token, barely 40 seconds of the three-minute performance; the rest is instrumental. Armstrong plays lead with tremendous drive, embellishing with rhythmic intensity while not getting too fancy and still anchoring the texture, very much in the New Orleans tradition. Bechet’s obbligato is outstanding. Commentators have cast the performance as a competition, a studio version of the cutting contests from New Orleans, where two bands on horse-drawn wagons, wheels tied together, battled for the crowd’s endorsement. But Bechet’s domination is simply the result of engineering imbalance, no more indicative of competition than is Armstrong’s second playing, close to the acoustic horn, on Mabel’s Dream with Oliver, from October 1923. Williams brought Bechet and Armstrong into the OKeh studios in early January to record the piece again with much better balance. It is true that Bechet plays a lot of notes and with tremendous assertion, but that is simply how he liked to play.

  January 14, 1925, was another momentous day in music history: in Columbia’s recording studios on Columbus Circle (near the current home of Jazz at Lincoln Center), Armstrong joined Bessie Smith. With pianist and harmonium player Fred Longshaw they recorded five tunes, then another four in May. These legendary pairings, first with Bechet and then with Smith, are part of the magic of Armstrong’s year in New York. They document the collaborations of the three greatest musicians in the African-American vernacular from the 1920s. In a very specific way, these meetings stand as markers in the city’s history: they indicate the increasing entanglement of the African-American vernacular with the nationally organized music industry. New York had long been the industry center, but it would be several years before it became the center for jazz, while it never became a center for blues. Thus these collaborations do not follow from any changes in New York per se; rather, they show the increasing commercial organization of diva blues and African-American jazz, with the inevitable role of New York following from that.

  Armstrong said that he didn’t get to know Smith very well and never saw her outside of the studio. He knew her well enough to ask for change for a $100 bill, though, and he was astonished when she cheerfully lifted her dress and pulled a fistful of bills out of an apron tied around her waist, “like a carpenter carries his nails.” “Louie, I’ll give you change for a thousand dollars,” she quipped. The two shared a distaste for people who put on airs. “There was never anything hoity-toity about Bessie,” said her niece, Ruby Walker. “She never forgot where she came from, and she hated to see black people get all fancy and try to act white—she had no use for that.” Those words apply perfectly to Armstrong, as well.

  In 1925 Smith was at the top of the world of blues singers, a celebrity with her own train car for touring and huge record sales. The stylistic basis for her success was very different from Armstrong’s. While Armstrong was expanding his range from high to low, Smith’s strategy was to reduce melodies very narrowly. His lines were full of clever dips, dives, and variety, while she got rid of all melodic distractions, leaving the listener with the sense of a deep, heartfelt core. He presented dexterity, she solidity. She was the ultimate example of the blues diva as preacher, commanding the attention of her audience with a theatrical presence and delivering the goods with emotional intensity that, if it did not duplicate church expression, somehow drew on the same energy.

  The traditional fillins of the cotton-mood accompanists could be heard as something like a congregational response, though this equivalence was not straightforward. A preacher aims to incite congregants to more and more emotional involvement. Fillins around a blues singer cannot follow that model without the risk of overshadowing the diva preacher. Smith did not make her millions being overshadowed by fillins.

  Ruby Walker said that Smith’s preferred cornetist was Joe Smith, whose name keeps popping up as Armstrong’s rival during this year in New York City.33 Smith’s fillins are usually more reserved than Armstrong’s, which may explain the preference. It seems unlikely that she actually disliked Armstrong’s playing, however, since she went back to him again in May, after th
eir first session in January.

  Generally, however, Armstrong is not too showy on the January 14 date. The only extended solo he has comes in Cold in Hand Blues, and it is subdued compared to the flashy one on Good Time Flat Blues, recorded a month before with Maggie Jones. His solo on Cold in Hand Blues was one that trombonist Jack Teagarden and his musical friends listened to over and over again in Texas. (Armstrong would use the main ideas in the first session of the Hot Five recordings, in Gut Bucket Blues, which was quickly put together when the studio requested an extra number.) But as soon as he has finished his solo in Cold in Hand Blues, he turns to more active, even-note, and double-time filigree for his fillins (CD: 2:41), as a way to differentiate the last section of the tune. The effect is jarring, and shows his increasing attraction toward the principle of variety.

  Bessie Smith (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09571)

  St. Louis Blues, on the other hand, was not one of the tunes thrown in front of him just before the recording light flashed on. Smith, Armstrong, and Longshaw lift the famous tune to a higher plane to create one of the most beloved performances from the period. Someone had the striking idea of using a harmonium, a folksy reed organ with foot pedals, instead of piano. (Longshaw also plays harmonium on Reckless Blues, in the same session.) The sustained organ chords automatically distinguish the performance and provide a lofty, almost contemplative atmosphere. Smith’s tempos from this period usually clock in around a very slow 78–84 beats per minute; here the tempo is slowed down even further, to about 70, enhancing the sense that this is a singular statement. The recording begins not with the typical cornet flourish but with a simple held chord, played by Armstrong and Longshaw.