Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  “Never [before] played any classical music—Cavalleria Rusticana, reading music, turning sheets and all that,” Armstrong observed as he tried to describe what a leap it was to join Tate.40 In New York he learned the hard way what the abbreviation pp meant; at the Vendome he would be confronting classical terms like “segue” and “tacet.” What theater musicians did better than musicians in dance halls and cabarets was to read notated music, precisely and quickly. They had to, since a lot of new music, written at considerable levels of difficulty, was thrown at them every week or even every few days. In 1918 Armstrong was motivated to take a job with Fate Marable’s riverboat orchestra because he realized that it would develop his reading skills, which would in turn expand his job opportunities. Marable took him on fully aware of his limitations, and the situation at the Vendome was similar. “I really did sharpen up on my reading there, man, especially when we played for those silent pictures,” he remembered. “I couldn’t read music like a lot of them cats, but I never was embarrassed in music with bands ’cause I’d state my case. I’d say, ‘Now I can blow—and you give me elbow room, you going to have a nice time. But don’t put me to no tests.’” At the Vendome he advanced to the point where he could read fluently. There was no room for faking. “Anyone that wasn’t familiar with reading music, why there was no place for him,” said Omer Simeon, who played with Tate later. “So if a musician couldn’t read there he was lost. Didn’t have any job.”

  In his later career Armstrong never flaunted his ability to read music, and he even kept it somewhat hidden, as did other African-American musicians who understood that white audiences liked to think of them as primitive and illiterate. Zilner Randolph performed with him in the early 1930s and recalled how word was going around that Armstrong could not read music. Randolph was astonished when he put a new and challenging arrangement in front of Armstrong, who promptly sang it, complete with solfège syllables, flawlessly and effortlessly.41

  Theaters that tried to make their mark with fancy dress, lofty repertory, impressive orchestras, and classical overtures had gotten to a point by the late 1910s where their superior status was no longer in doubt. This allowed them to backtrack a little and factor popular music into their programs, with an eye toward even more robust competition against lower-cost theaters. The goal was to appeal to as many people as possible without compromising the toniness of the enterprise. Thus, in the late 1910s, theaters like the Rivoli and Rialto began to embrace the principle of variety while keeping a distinctly classical spin. Riesenfeld even featured “classical jazz,” which meant syncopated versions of melodies by Chopin, Gounod, and Puccini, scored for his conservatory-trained musicians.

  By the end of 1925, Tate likewise understood the potential of symphonic jazz to broaden his appeal and keep enough people happy to fill up the Vendome.42 “Select a variety program, giving all classes of the patronage what they want,” was Peyton’s advice to Chicago conductors, and he cited Tate as the one who was getting it right. It seemed logical to add get-off men who could improvise solos. “That’s what they hired me for, anyway, them hot numbers,” said Armstrong. Saxophonist Ralph Brown explained that by hiring get-off men, Tate was trying to bring in younger people. Interested in producing jazz and popular songs in a classy way, Tate found the perfect solution in Armstrong. The Vendome was tailor-made for the cornet player turned trumpeter, who stepped in at the right time, with the right preparation, the right abilities, and the right ambition.

  A typical program of live entertainment for a movie theater around this time included five to eight performing units; the movie and the program were repeated in alternation, four times a day. The best source for details about the Vendome is a rare South Side weekly called Heebie Jeebies, from which Lillian clipped articles, gluing them into scrapbooks to document Louis’s career.43 In one of these clippings the magazine boasts that Armstrong himself was a “pet writer” for Heebie Jeebies.

  Three of Lillian’s clippings describe programs at the Vendome, one with some precision in the sequence of events. After the movie, the orchestra played its overture. Then Walter Richardson, a regular in South Side cabarets and theaters, sang two songs, Ten Commandments of Love and Say It Again, in an “up-to-date manner.” After Richardson came Armstrong singing Little Ida. “My how we wondered who little Ida was, as he seemed to have put the feeling of his soul in the music,” joked the reviewer. This was followed with a cornet solo from James Tate and several numbers from the orchestra. Next up was Leroy Broomfield, a singer-dancer from Omaha, who started his rendition of At Dawning with the stage in darkness; after that he performed Talking to the Moon and I Want to Be Happy, concluding with a recap of At Dawning. The title of the entire program was Mid-Summer Frolics. A different program included Cole and Man, “two neat dancing chaps hardly out of the ‘teens,’” offering “real hot steps of the terpsichore, including the Charleston, Waltz Clog, kneefalls, and everything imaginable.” On another occasion the Vendome featured “Racehorse” Mamie Smith’s dancing-comedy versions of Where Did You Get Those Eyes and Baby Face, both “riotously applauded.”

  It is easy to see how, in a theater like the Vendome, African-American entertainers had special value for the simple reason that the movies themselves were hardly made with African Americans in mind. Movies rarely included African-American actors, and when they did, the characters were usually treated with condescension and contempt. How much better to see a flashy dancer, a smooth singer, a fancy cornet solo, a great comedian, and the finest race orchestra in the country—all of it black, all of it classy. Even if the movie was racist and degrading, the live program reassured the audience that the race was doing just fine.

  Tate’s orchestra became, in Peyton’s words, the “pride of the Race and the pets of Chicago’s music lovers.” The Vendome was all about status, but that didn’t mean you had to be rich to buy a ticket. Prestigious theaters in New York City typically charged 10 to 50 cents for admission, and the Vendome offered a similar range of prices. It only took a little bit of money to enter a lovely theater where everyone was dressed up and intent on enjoying first-rate music, comedy, and dancing, with a movie and newsreel to boot.

  Milt Hinton, the bass player whose move from Mississippi we tracked in Chapter 2, attended every Sunday afternoon with his mother, the two of them dressed in their finest clothes. His mother was buying violin lessons for him with the goal of turning him into a classical musician, perhaps to play in a theater orchestra or to work as a choir director at a nice church. “This was high class for us,” Hinton remembered. “We couldn’t go downtown, but we could to go a high class theater in our neighborhood… . People of any kind of stature at all would try to get down to the Vendome Theater on a Sunday, to see this marvelous show.” The high culture, large size, and range of ticket prices confirm an observation made by sociologists Drake and Cayton: some symbols of respectability and success were available even to members of the working class, to people “of any kind of stature at all,” as Hinton put it.

  There was apparently little overlap between the Vendome and Dreamland audiences, the two venues drawing from different parts of the African-American community. Trumpeter William Samuels explained how his parents would never have entered one of the cabarets just a few steps from their front door, but they often went to theaters. “Back in those days there were two sets of society,” he said. Doubling up at the Vendome and the Dreamland turned out to be more than a way for Armstrong to earn more money: it extended the range of his reputation. With 1,500 seats and multiple shows every day, the Vendome brought in more people than he could reach anywhere else. And as classy as the Dreamland was, it was simply not in the same musical league as the Vendome. It turned out to be the Vendome, more than any other place, where he made his reputation in South Side Chicago.

  The Movie

  Orchestras were obliged to enhance the featured presentation with music, but critics constantly complained that the musicians didn’t take the job seriously. Some white
musicians working in a Chicago theater in 1927, for example, joked about playing Clarinet Marmalade while a French general placed a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “It became a regular gag with the band to tear into Hold That Tiger whenever a heart rending scene was in progress,” one of them remembered.

  It was a lot easier to have a single keyboardist accompany the movie, which is what many theaters did. A pianist or organist can improvise or spontaneously dish out any number of standard tricks without having to coordinate with anyone else. One reviewer enjoyed how an organist “shouts vengeance, frantically claws the enemy, wails with impassioned grief, screams with victory, sobs thickly with love, moans with remorse, cries like a baby, giggles like a young girl, does a Charleston, barks like a dog, and finally shoots itself with a bass drum.” Fats Waller briefly played organ at the Vendome alongside Armstrong in April 1927, and he was praised for his witty cueing of the movie and his “eccentric stop coupling.” His tenure was cut short when domestic troubles led to his arrest and forced return to New York City. “The old organ is dull at the Vendome since the strong arm of the law took ‘Fats’ away,” wrote Peyton on May 14.

  Tate’s orchestra was praised for taking movie accompaniment seriously. “They characterize [the film],” wrote Peyton; “nothing is missed by the well trained Tate in the picture.” Tate used cue sheets, the standard way to put together accompaniment. Cue sheets were published for every picture, with a series of visual cues (for example, “boy upsets glass of wine”) indicating to the conductor each musical change, which he then cued to the musicians. It was probably the first time Armstrong had ever played for a conductor using a baton. “Watching [Tate] was how I learned to conduct an orchestra,” said Earl Hines. “His arm and finger movements, his concentration—he was terrific and it was beautiful to watch him.”

  Music matched to the changing emotions of the narrative—the funeral, the love scene, the rescue, and so on—was often drawn from the familiar repertory of overtures. The conductor could put a lot of effort into making good transitions from one mood to another, modulating between different levels of loud and soft and different tempos. There were no pauses: “had music in front for everything that happened,” wrote Armstrong. A little collection of themes, one or two phrases long, was constantly used for scene changes and other transitions. Tate had a set of signals. His fourth finger, for example, meant music for a rough passage in the narrative, cued, perhaps, by ominous clouds on the screen. Crossed fingers meant turn back four pages, and so forth. The musicians had to be alert and in control of their reading. Armstrong liked to tell a story about playing for The Sea Beast, based on Moby Dick and starring John Barrymore as Captain Ahab (May 6, 7, and 8, 1926, at the Vendome). When the climactic scene came around, with the great white whale attacking the captain and biting off his leg, Armstrong couldn’t take his eyes off the screen and lost his place in the score. “Erskine Tate was swinging his arms everywhere and he turned to me and said—‘Come on you.’” But he was lost: “I had sixty measures to count—I missed my count.”

  The newsreel gave the improvisers in the group a chance to shine. Armstrong remembered improvising for a Pathé newsreel about an Indian reservation. When the Indians did a war dance, the band settled into a lively accompaniment that got everybody’s attention. “The audience were still applauding for that same scene” five scenes later, he wrote.

  Today we tend to think of silent pictures as lacking something essential, but audiences loved the Vendome productions. “You enjoyed looking at the fine pictures, those fine actors, and hearing that fine music,” said Ralph Brown. “Nobody wants to go back to silent pictures, but I mean, in that day people enjoyed it much more than people do nowadays. I’m telling you. Beautiful music, soft music. You could close your eyes and hear that music playing, and this is a love scene, you could tell what was going on if you closed your eyes. I’m telling you, you could do it.” For those eye-closing love scenes, Tate often relied on a little piece composed specifically for the purpose by one Minnie T. Wright. It was entitled simply Love-Song. Armstrong played it so many times that he was able to reproduce it, presumably from memory, in the goofy recording Laughin’ Louie from 1933.

  The Overture

  The overture was the orchestra’s moment to shine. Though in some theaters the overture came before the featured film, in the manner of an opera overture, the Vendome played it after the movie, which suggests that at least one and probably two showings of the film were given before the orchestra even arrived.

  The repertory had nothing whatsoever to do with the feature film; it was chosen to allow the high-class orchestra to play high-class music. Documented overtures at the Vendome included light classics that were popular everywhere, such as the overtures to Poet and Peasant by Franz von Suppé and William Tell by Gioachino Rossini. Heebie Jeebies praised a rendition of Léo Delibes’s ballet Naila. The overture might be nothing more than an arrangement of the main melodies from a piece, casually strung together. The music was not necessarily difficult, for either the performers or the listeners, but it served the needs of South Side audiences. “Everybody’s sitting there like we were at the opera,” remembered Hinton.

  Tate’s interpretive abilities were praised. Theater conductors often made their own arrangements or tinkered with published versions. Special features would have required Tate’s intervention, as indicated in this review from Peyton: “Jimmy Bertram, the hot little drummer in the Vendome orchestra, stopped the overture with his xylophone specialty.” It seems to have been common to arrange overtures so that they featured a soloist. “When mine came around, mine was Cavalleria Rusticana,” remembered Armstrong.

  Cavalleria rusticana, the much-loved opera by Pietro Mascagni—Peyton called it a “soul stirring masterpiece”—was one of the true workhorses of theater orchestras. When the assignment was made, Armstrong was initially reluctant to leave his seat in the orchestra pit and mount the stage to play his solo. Management offered him more money, but he still resisted, and we can sense here the same hesitation that surfaced in his embarrassment at seeing his name on the Dreamland marquee. Somehow he was persuaded, and his solo from Cavalleria rusticana contributed to his expanding reputation.

  Dave Peyton, from The Light, January 14, 1928 (Chicago History Museum, ICHi-67129)

  Melodies from the light classics were used in vaudeville, but the Vendome provided Armstrong with his first extended contact with the repertory. Constant exposure to a core repertory is part of any kind of musical training, as, for example, when Armstrong memorized Oliver’s solos as a teenager. Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, played in theater orchestras early in his career and credited the experience as an important part of his education. “Works were played by the week, and this meant that each one got performed twenty-eight times,” Ormandy explained. “Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Beethoven’s Fifth, or whatever. By the end of the last show on Saturday night you knew the music.” Ralph Brown memorized the William Tell overture by playing it at the Vendome, and Armstrong memorized his solo from Cavalleria rusticana.44 Years later he liked to run through it as part of his warm-up routine in dressing rooms. He also memorized a couple of other classical pieces that he undoubtedly learned at the Vendome.

  The Vendome put musical figures from the middle-brow classics under his fingertips, though we should be careful about exaggerating the significance of that connection. Virtually any repertory he played, from trumpet exercise books to Home Sweet Home, was a source for his ongoing interest in ordering pitches logically. The light classics probably had no more impact on his emerging solo style than the dexterity exercises he was memorizing. (It is possible that he was continuing lessons at Kimball Hall during this period, or even just beginning them.)

  We should take note of his first-rate work ethic. Around these years his former wife, Daisy, visited from New Orleans, and he brushed her off—“no more boisterous, barrel house stuff,” he said, “am trying to cultivate myself.” This
was the classic immigrant attitude, which, in his case, matched up splendidly with talent, training, ambition, and patronage. The difference between Daisy and Lil was one measure of how far he had traveled in just a few years; Cavalleria rusticana was another. It would be fascinating to know what he sounded like, playing it from the stage. Did Tate flash a discreet wink at the oboe player while Armstrong belted it out with his percussive, driving attack?

  It is easy to imagine that he did. It is true that opera had a long history in New Orleans, but it was located in a social realm far removed from the streets, store-front churches, honky tonks, and dirt-floor dance halls where Armstrong spent his time.45 Listen to any performance of Cavalleria rusticana and the dramatic contrast of performing style, compared with the African-American vernacular, will be readily apparent. Armstrong’s mature solo style of the mid-1920s is made up of short, irregular phrases that constantly dart in and out of synchrony with the fixed patterns of beats and chord changes. The flow of melody is very different from the expansive unfolding of long phrases of opera. In opera the accompaniment is a fluffy bed of feathers that supports a passionate melody in every possible way; Armstrong’s solos depend on tension between melody and accompaniment. He regularly peppers his phrasing with the accents of a hard-edged initial attack, communicating vigor and assertiveness to produce an emotional undertone that is the opposite of the legato effortlessness of bel canto singing. His microscopic level of blues phrasing, with constant shadings of pitch and dynamics and quick flashes of irregular rhythmic patterning, belongs to a world quite different from the elegant swells of dramatic tension in opera.

  Armstrong’s late-life persona as Ambassador Satch includes the image of him as exceptionally openminded; there is a temptation to regard his interest in opera and other kinds of music as a manifestation of that mindset. There is some truth to that transcendent, openminded image, which suited the cultural position he occupied so well in the segregated America of the 1950s. But it must not be allowed to eclipse the Armstrong who was one of the greatest products of the African-American vernacular and one of its most modern representatives during the decade 1925–35. The idea of a transcendent Armstrong carries the subtext that his soaring solos represent a social transcendence that was waiting for the rest of the country to catch up with him, blossoming fully in the 1950s, when the dark-skinned and disadvantaged child from the slums of New Orleans won hearts around the world.