Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  There is no doubt that Armstrong, like so many of his peers in Chicago during the 1920s, was interested in classical music, particularly when it could do something for him professionally. But with opera, especially, the connection is secondary and ultimately irrelevant if our goal is to understand the formation of his mature style, which would not have been one bit different had opera never existed. Far more important was the cabaret culture of speed, humor, novelty, and variety.

  Singing, Comedy, and Stunts

  Another special part of Armstrong’s Vendome experience was the fact that he made his name as a singer there. He liked to point out that he was a singer before he ever touched a cornet, first in church and then in a vocal quartet with his friends, where he imitated barbershop singing. There was no singing with the Ory band in New Orleans or the Marable band on the riverboats, and only an exceptional opportunity with Oliver and with Henderson. Now, at the Vendome (and probably the Dreamland, too), he sang with great success, using a megaphone. From now until the end of his career, his singing and trumpet playing would stand alongside each other, one sometimes more important than the other, but both always present.

  We know that at the Vendome he sang his two most famous vocal numbers from 1926, Heebie Jeebies (not directly related to the weekly rag) and Big Butter and Egg Man (both songs discussed later). There are several reports of cross-dressing acts, one with Armstrong dressed as a woman, bantering with another musician about exchanging his “li’l old cornet” for a trumpet, and another with oboist Charles Harris dressed as the woman while Armstrong sang My Baby Knows How to him. “The fans laughed themselves dizzy,” wrote a reviewer in Heebie Jeebies. In another comic number he staged an “instrument argument” with saxophonist Stump Evans.

  But his splashiest comic number was a preaching act. Later in his career he performed a vocal act as a preacher, but this one was done with his trumpet. Come and see him “‘preach the gospel’ with his instrument,” wrote Heebie Jeebies, which rated the number the “fun of the week.” His costume was a frock-tail coat with battered, high-top silk hat and white-rimmed glasses, rims only. According to one account, he “preached a sermon on his wicket trumpet”; in another, he led the musicians in a “prayer” with his cornet, suggesting call and response with several of Tate’s players. He was probably using the plunger mute, something close to the talking cornet style made famous by Oliver at Lincoln Gardens. It was, according to Heebie Jeebies, the funniest act ever seen at the Vendome, repeatedly requested by “a hundred or more patrons.”

  Another observer explained with precision that Armstrong was imitating a preacher, not a minister in this act; the significance of the distinction was that preachers were illiterate, while ministers glossed readings from the Bible. The minister demonstrated his learning, interpretive skills, and indeed literacy, while the preacher offered something quite different. In other words, the act was loaded with the social-cultural dynamics of the Great Migration.

  It is easy to get the joke, even from such a distance. Chicago was a town that witnessed daily negotiations between the old ways of the South and the forward-looking ways of the South Side. Armstrong’s dressed-up audience at the Vendome looked at his beat-up, flamboyantly out-of-date costume and immediately understood that he was marking distance from the oral tradition. Attending to the overture as if at an opera, many in this crowd had moved beyond the cornfield ditties and ecstatic shouting of lay preachers in the Sanctified Church. Although this was not the talented tenth of the NAACP, these were black people who were moving up; there were no head scarves at the Vendome. It must have been easy to laugh and be pleased about how far everyone had come in such a short time.

  Armstrong had grown up with preachers, not ministers; with participatory singing rather than the tidy singing of a choir; with ecstatic shouting instead of polite smiles and nods; and this must have given him good sources for his skit. But what mattered at the Vendome was the distance he had traveled. He was no longer the uneducated rube snubbed by Sammy Stewart and dissed by the Henderson men. He was a modern, sophisticated, northern, well-paid musician. Whether he knew it or not, the task that lay before him was to help his audience understand themselves more deeply by providing them with a musical identity that was black and modern. This is the context of his mature style, the reception of which included social-cultural humor like the preacher act.

  He also discovered at the Vendome a stunt that extended his reputation even more—high-note playing. The ability to control the extreme range of an instrument or voice may smack of empty virtuosity, but it is a universal way to attract attention. In New Orleans, high-note cornet playing had been part of cutting-contest weaponry, right up there with loud playing as a way to claim superiority. In New York City, Armstrong had seen what the high range was doing for trumpeter B. A. Rolfe. In Chicago, Lillian chided him for not being able to play as high as a classical trumpeter named Strombach, and he rose to the challenge, as she undoubtedly knew he would.

  He started with high F at the end of a number and was favorably noticed. “They keep one picture three days, cats would come three days to see if I’m gonna miss that note,” he remembered. He was nervous, afraid that he would miss the note, even though he kept delivering it flawlessly, so Lillian suggested practicing high G’s at home, thus making it psychologically easier to hit the F’s. Naturally he started performing high G’s, followed by A’s and C’s. Tate began to feature him in “freakish high registered breaks,” which, to Peyton’s dismay, made the patrons “howl.” And from there came the practice of repeating the high note again and again, like so many acrobatic flips. “Up there in the high register all the time,” he remembered. “And if I had some more chops left, just use them some more—hit 40 or 50 high C’s.” Just two years earlier he had been locked into staying under Oliver. He continued to trot out this trick for more than a decade until he blew his lip out and simply could not do it anymore. He liked to point the trumpet up in the air and gaze at the ceiling as he ascended into the high range.

  To see this as more than just a stunt would be to understand it as a gesture of personal power, superior status marked through the musical metaphor of height. The gesture has long been characteristic of trumpet playing, as critic and historian Krin Gabbard has described so vividly. Armstrong valued clean execution on an instrument, and he aimed for that in the high range, cultivating an ability to hit the notes with confidence and precision. The whole high-note project expanded his comfortable range for solo improvisation. His mature solo style is distinguished by use of a varied range, which was stabilized by this extended control.

  The Jazz Concert King

  The Hot Number

  Armstrong was funny as a comedian and daunting as a high-note specialist, but both were secondary to his role as hot soloist. Tate had several options for this slot in the program—pianist Teddy Weatherford (and, after he left, pianists Walter Johnson and Earl Hines), saxophonist Stump Evans, and drummer Jimmy Bertrand, who played a blues called My Daddy Rocks Me on tympani. There could be several hot numbers on a program, but Armstrong’s was always the one known as the “primary,” taken from the stage, in front of the curtain. What Armstrong offered was perfect for the Vendome audiences, who rewarded him with standing-room-only attendance, week after week. “It was the biggest thing in the world,” remembered Doc Cheatham. The program opened with the orchestral overture and finished with Armstrong’s primary, another indicator of his popularity.

  At his first rehearsal with Tate, in December 1925, the orchestra was working on Spanish Shawl, which he described as a “swing tune.” A number of bands recorded Spanish Shawl in the fall of 1925, a sure sign that a stock arrangement had been recently released. Perhaps Tate’s version was similar to recordings issued by Fletcher Henderson’s band (under the name Dixie Stompers) and Ray Miller.

  One of Tate’s more imaginative hot numbers, performed in February 1926, was a version of Clarence Williams’s Royal Garden Blues. Tate divided the orchestra int
o sections and positioned them in different parts of the auditorium. A drum roll signaled a march toward the pit, with each section taking turns playing the piece. This was followed with another surprise: oboist Charles Harris, left out of Royal Garden Blues, started his march down the aisle after the others were seated, playing a solo version of Irving Berlin’s All Alone to everyone’s amusement.

  Along these same imaginative lines, Tate arranged an orchestral version of Cornet Chop Suey. The tune “could be played as a trumpet solo or with a symphony orchestra,” Armstrong wrote in 1951, and the most likely place for the latter was the Vendome. In early 1926 the piece must have become the strongest articulation of his eccentric, crazy figures.

  The primary hot number turned over every week, just like the overture. In March 1926, Tate brought out Sugar Foot Stomp, with Armstrong doing a takeoff on Oliver. “He fluttered, he cried, he raved, and the band raved with him,” wrote Peyton. “Over in a corner I heard a brother say, ‘Yes, yes.’” Sometime during the spring Tate offered Static Strut and Stomp Off, Let’s Go, both well-known jazz numbers and the only two pieces Armstrong recorded with Tate’s outfit. The tempos are very fast and Armstrong responds with verve and confidence, though neither solo is especially compelling. The frantic pace does not favor the density of ideas that was becoming his trademark. Static Strut, in the unfamiliar key of D-flat, presented a special challenge. His solo shows constant rhythmic variety, with two-bar modules always in flux. A nice rhyming touch anchors the busy line when he uses the same simple rhythm—ta-ta-ta-rest—at the beginning of phrases one and two, the first time descending from the third of the chord, the second time ascending from the lower fifth. The simplicity and rhyme of these two gestures help locate the melodic flow in the periodic form of successive eight-bar phrases. There is nothing particularly new in this; he had featured this kind of rhyming detail on his very first recorded solo, Chimes Blues. But in his mature style, devices like this helped provide balance and order to increasingly complex melodies.

  Trumpeter Doc Cheatham, recently arrived from Nashville, sat in the cheap seats, high in the balcony, every single day and with only one purpose: “I wanted to be able to play like Louis Armstrong,” he said. “I wanted to be able to understand how he played and why he played certain things at different times. In fact I was on his tail all the time, studying little clichés that he would do.” Sometimes the audience was so boisterous during Armstrong’s solos that Cheatham had trouble hearing him. One week Armstrong decided to sneak out of town and asked Cheatham to substitute. When Cheatham showed up, the other musicians stared at him, wondering what he was there for, since Armstrong hadn’t told Tate he would be gone. The primary hot number was Tate’s arrangement of Poor Little Rich Girl, a feature for Armstrong.46 The band played the introduction, Tate cued Cheatham to stand up, the spotlight hit him, and the audience started screaming. But when they realized it wasn’t Armstrong, a cold silence took over the hall. “It took me years to get over that,” Cheatham remembered. Armstrong paid him $85 for the humiliation and Cheatham continued to sub for him now and then, even though Tate was not happy about it. There was little Tate could do; Armstrong was so popular that he could call the shots.

  Willie “The Lion” Smith observed that wind instruments were more dominant in Chicago than in New York, and the only reason for that was the influx of musicians from New Orleans. In early 1926 Fred Keppard was taking solos at the Deluxe Café (across the street from the Dreamland), Jimmie Noone led a band at the Apex Club, Johnny Dodds did the same at Kelley’s Stables, Joe Oliver headlined at the Plantation cabaret, and Armstrong soared at the Vendome and Dreamland. The South Side successes of his older colleagues made it easier for people to appreciate his eccentric innovations and paved the way for him. Drummer and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton saw Armstrong for the first time at the Vendome as a teenager. “We were in the front row of the first balcony, and we could see the entire audience go crazy after his first, fifteen-minute solo,” he remembered.

  A movie theater in Chicago, 1940s (Library of Congress)

  Milt Hinton saw the Vendome scene in a way that opens up a deeper understanding of Armstrong’s accomplishment:

  The people would come on Sundays to the theater and they would be dressed, having on their tuxedoes with the roll collars, and it was like, you know, like white folks, like it was a big white theatre, you know. Because they thought that this was the way it was supposed to be, that you were white and you were right and this was the only way it could be… . This was a very conditioned thing that had been brought down to us, that this was the only way of life… . And we’d sit and listen to this orchestra play Poet and Peasant… . And Louis stood up and played one of his great solos, and you could see everybody letting their hair down, “Yeah that’s the way it should be, this is it.” So we were beginning to relate—“well, great to be like that, but this is what really relates to us.”

  To some, it must have seemed like destiny that music would carry the burden of defining a new African-American identity during these optimistic years. “Looking back at that, our black people had been so browbeaten that they were nothing, they believed that,” insisted Hinton. “[My mother] accepted this inferiority which she was trying to get me not to accept.” She chose music as the path to respect for her son—violin lessons at 50 cents a piece. She wanted him to be good enough to play professionally so she took him to the Vendome, where he could hear music at its best and “see some black people that are really doing and making a success of it.”

  The Vendome audience was looking ahead, moving up, bettering their condition, and receptive to change. They were less fixated on white standards than the talented tenth and more open to new possibilities, which were playing out most vividly in jazz. Langston Hughes described the alternative point of view: “The Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created [jazz],” he wrote in June 1926. “The old subconscious ‘white is best’ runs through her mind.” Armstrong at the Vendome appealed to a broad swath of the upwardly mobile working class, who found music that related to them in his modern transformation of the black vernacular. He demonstrated sophistication and technical excellence without a trace of talented-tenth condescension toward familiar values.

  Even if they had not been looking for a modern black identity, Armstrong was now making that impossible to ignore. His music was brimming with the black vernacular. In Chapter 6 we will consider how that played out at the level of melodic detail; on a more general level, the connections are easy to see. As one of the two greatest masters (Bechet was the other) of the African-American vernacular as it had been transformed and professionalized in New Orleans, Armstrong was shaped by virtually all aspects of that tradition, the distinguishing and most prominent features of which carried forward a strong African legacy, which could be cultivated or suppressed according to various pressures on audiences and innovations from the most creative practitioners.47 In New Orleans it flourished. One thing that marks his achievement—it is one of the central themes of this book—is that in the creative moment of his first modern phase this African legacy was strengthened.

  That legacy included the idea that music is conceived as an event rather than as a “piece”; this is bound up with (though not identical to) music as an oral/aural practice rather than one fixed in writing. Armstrong was a great master of non-notated music, there was no question about that at the Vendome, with his blue notes and quicksilver, eccentric phrasing. It included high value placed on improvisation. Malcolm X noted how “white people danced as though somebody had trained them—left, one, two; right, three, four—the same steps and patterns over and over… . But those Negroes—nobody in the world could have choreographed the way they did whatever they felt.” Improvisation—musical, kinetic, doing the dozens, preaching, signifying—was a marker of black sophistication and virtuosity, and at the Vendome Armstrong was exploring unknown territory. The African legacy included a strong, percussive attack, generating a sound that holds
the confident energy of the life force. The Vendome audience delighted in the vocal qualities of his instrumental music and the instrumental qualities of his voice, mapping out a range of ambiguity that opened up creative potential. And they understood, at an intuitive and very precise level, his use of the fixed and variable model, which anchored their perception of music that was carefully crafted in complexity and depth.

  Musical details were bound up with values that go beyond music; we can be sure of that, even though the connections are not always documented. Trombonist Preston Jackson was asked what he liked about Armstrong during these years: “Well, the thing that impressed me perhaps more than the music was his bearing. I had to be impressed in this manner, because he was outstanding; there was the way he carried himself, like somebody bragging and all, and saying ‘look, I am good.’” This attitude was very much in the tradition of the great black musicians from New Orleans, where the musical utterance came from a place of power.

  The people who grew up in Armstrong’s New Orleanian neighborhood rarely had access to the kind of sustained training in the Eurocentric tradition that downtown Creoles had, with their skilled teachers and years of patient lessons. Instead, he was surrounded by the sisters in church who cheered him on as he sang and the rags-bottles-and-bones man who held him spellbound with talk of music and soul. He improvised harmonies with his buddies in a vocal quartet, followed parades all through the city, and enjoyed the attention of prostitutes urging him on to play blues. He flourished in a thriving culture that had a strong sense of its musical values. Who cared if whites thought this was primitive music that belonged in the basement of their mansion of the muses?