Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  But to play at the New Orleans Country Club—that was another matter. In his late teens Armstrong understood what everyone else in his neighborhood who aspired to be a professional musician also understood—that white gigs paid more. Certain things had to be learned in order to get them. This could mean asking a pianist how a chord was formed, or it could mean tutorials in musical notation while working on the Mississippi riverboats. In Chicago it meant running the classics with his wife and lessons at Kimball Hall, and in New York City it meant learning on the job with Henderson. Once white musicians started learning the music and interacting with the black musicians, the whole exchange became more animated, with many possibilities of cross-social influence, often difficult to document.

  Yet it is easy to overestimate this process (or ignore it completely, the usual alternative). Music is a slippery object, open to virtually any interpretation, but this slipperiness does not obviate the need for precise historical inquiry. The question addressed here is this: what is the best way to make sense of Armstrong’s mature style, given what we know about him and the scene in which he formed it?

  He worked to gain greater control of his instrument, faster fingering, an even tone through the entire range, speed, and high notes. He brought the techniques of the cornet virtuoso to the hot solo. As he mastered the complicated system of keys, his solos started to glow with precision. He clarified his “natural” sense of chords—the different types, the altered tones, the different ways of arpeggiating, ways of using nonchord tones—and increased his precision further. Fluency in scales, keys, exercises, and chords, playing through new pieces week after week, month after month, paraphrasing and finding ways to keep the original tune noticeable while imaginatively embellishing it—all of this made him more and more at ease. By 1926 he was reaching the creative facility that comes to all great artists after they have thoroughly internalized the technical and conceptual demands of their craft.

  The trick was to find ways of adapting white technique without losing an African-American vernacular identity. There can be no doubt that Hinton was speaking for more than a few of the 1,500 screaming members of the Vendome audience when he said that Armstrong had discovered something that related to “us.” He replaced the harmonic and textural funkiness of collective improvisation with learned precision in scales and chords, and he put aside the freak music of Oliver in favor of extended range, impressive dexterity, and speed. It turned out to be fortuitous that he stumbled over Oliver’s plunger technique and turned in another direction.

  The new black identity at the Vendome had to somehow match the white sophistication of a symphony orchestra. “You’ll never be able to swing any better than you already know how until you learn to read,” a musician told him in 1918, on the riverboat. “Then you will swing in ways you never thought of before.” “And he was right,” Armstrong recognized. That is one way to conceptualize the entire range of white practices that he was working on in the 1920s.

  “To my mind it is the duty of the younger Negro artist … to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white,’” wrote Langston Hughes, and that is precisely what Armstrong did. “I’m a Negro—and beautiful,” Hughes insisted. Armstrong stifled the need to buy into white standards by selectively folding them into his vernacular-shaped vision. Jazz as Armstrong learned it in New Orleans had nothing to do with dicty refinement. It was all about the intensity and directness of blues-based sensitivity on the one hand, and a brash and aggressive street posture on the other. It was about masculine strength and dancehall excitement, and those values did not directly transfer to the Vendome Theater. Armstrong’s modern Negro beauty made manly excitement from New Orleans less rough, less on the level of street camaraderie and more precise and well designed, but with no trace of wanting to be white. He internalized white scales and chords so thoroughly that the values of the New Orleans style came through without compromise. “The common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself,” predicted Hughes in June 1926, not knowing that this was happening in Chicago at that very moment.

  Armstrong’s advantage was that African Americans had been relying on music for centuries to demonstrate their individual worth, to fashion a sense of self that was under no one else’s control. Black culture in New Orleans during Armstrong’s youth was collectively dedicated to this project. In 1926 he stepped forward as the most current creator of an uplifted intervention in the African-American vernacular. No one could have imagined how profoundly this intervention would radiate out, past the Vendome Theater, out of Chicago, across the country, and across oceans. His localized transformation of an African-American sense of who they were became a global regard for new musical possibilities.

  One reason it has been easy to overlook the social dimensions of Armstrong’s mature style is the strong integrationist theme in popular discourse on jazz, a view of jazz history as a happy social field that transcended racial tension long before the general public got around to doing so. (Jazz “corrects the fiction that America is racist,” said broadcaster Willis Conover of the Voice of America, apparently with a straight face.) That view is at best dramatically incomplete; it should not be allowed to obscure the inevitable impact of racism on the history of this music, playing out in many forms, some crude and violent, some subtle and insidious. A second reason is that since Armstrong’s accomplishment became the basis for jazz solo playing all over the world, his universality makes it seem like the idiom lacked social determinants, as if it was born fully grown as an emblem of world culture.

  The 1920s was full of stimulating cross-currents, with influences leaping across boundaries of class and race to produce the success of Ira Gershwin’s lyrics, with their mix of formal diction and colloquial speech; Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, with its dressing up of jazz to make a proper lady of it; and Duke Ellington’s cosmopolitan black identity, with its framing of the black vernacular in elegance and sophistication. Armstrong belonged to this expansive mindset, but his engagement with these dynamics played out quite differently. His solo style was less the product of self-conscious conceptual manipulation than the result of an extended effort to become a better soloist, first according to black standards that he grew up with, and later according to white standards that promised more money. His success was not based on the self-conscious play of social signifiers. The source of his strength was that he internalized social-musical tensions and came up with a creative synthesis that cannot be broken down into binary oppositions.

  Armstrong even impressed Dave Peyton, who “was completely anti-jazz, you know,” as Milt Hinton put it, though that assertion needs to be qualified. “Polite syncopation during a comedy or newsreel picture dealing in the popular syncopated melodies is delightful to hear, but the awful, lowdown so called blues should be eliminated entirely from the pit,” wrote Peyton in a typical rant. Yet he admired what Tate was doing at the Vendome. “They handle the heaviest kind of music, ranging from operatic suites, standard overtures, comic operas and great symphonies down to modern jazz,” he wrote in April 1926. The condescending “down to” should not be missed. What allowed jazz to enter his lofty realm of approval at all was the qualifier “modern.”

  Peyton heard Armstrong’s eccentric figures as a fresh alternative to discordant jazz; we may assume that he heard it as an alternative to symphonic jazz, as well. Armstrong gained the approval of this old-settler spokesman for Eurocentric standards by expanding the range of what jazz could be. Peyton may have been the first aspiring member of the talented tenth to recognize that Armstrong was broadening the concept of jazz with a race offering that was neither primitive nor vulgar (like discordant jazz), but also had no need for white legitimation (like symphonic jazz).

  Novelist Richard Wright wrote that he could “never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though
I was, the culture of the South.” “Southern” music—meaning, in this case, the black vernacular as it had been professionalized in New Orleans—and its feelings had that kind of hold on the South Side immigrants. At Lincoln Gardens in 1922, Oliver helped them measure their distance from the cotton fields through music that was both professional and down home, solos sometimes inspired by the dockworkers, rags-bottles-and-bones men, and railroad crews of New Orleans that in a sense belonged to everyone, including the man who liked to play them in the streets of Chicago on a comb covered with wax paper. Three years later, at the Vendome, Armstrong was offering something new. The distance from Lincoln Gardens to the Vendome was measured by proper attire, classical overtures, and Armstrong’s innovations. The connection to the Deep South could still be heard, but there was also a step up and forward into a more sophisticated professional world. No one was playing Armstrong’s solos on wax-papered combs.

  Part of the difference was that people went to Lincoln Gardens mainly to dance, to the Vendome to listen. This difference in audience position became another important dimension of his Chicago success. The great historian Eric Hobsbawm (writing as Francis Newton) once claimed that there are “three ways of listening to jazz: in a dancehall or club, on record, or at a concert. By far the worst of these is the last. In fact, if we tried to think of the worst possible setting for living jazz … we could hardly envisage a more disastrous one than the typical concert.” Armstrong’s concert hall glory at the Vendome turns this late-1950s view on its head. The dignity and attentiveness of the hall provided the perfect environment for his solo ambitions, which turned out to splendidly represent the ambitions of his fans, just as the relaxed atmosphere of uptown streets, marked by interaction and accommodation, was the perfect nurture for the participatory music making he grew up with.

  Listening to jazz instead of dancing to it was not new, but this form of appreciation was gathering a special aura in the mid-1920s. In New Orleans it was always possible to stop moving, stop interacting with everyone else, and simply listen to what was going on. But as the mercurial concept of jazz touched different kinds of music in the early 1920s, it found a firm place in institutions for listening. Paul Whiteman’s concert entitled Experiment in Modern Music, at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, was in some ways the natural culmination of a trajectory. For the 1922 opening of the luxurious Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, the owner paid Whiteman the unprecedented sum of $25,000 for six nights. To his astonishment, the event flopped. “My God, they just wouldn’t dance to our music,” explained one of Whiteman’s musicians. Whiteman was staking out a musical territory that appealed more to listeners than to dancers. “Those who like his music refuse to patronize a dance hall and mingle with the masses; while dance hall patrons won’t pay $2 to get into a Whiteman concert,” explained the New York Clipper.

  It was in theaters and cabarets, not dance halls, where Armstrong first made his mark as an innovative soloist. Whiteman and his followers (including Henderson) were the reference for Peyton’s praise of modern jazz at the Vendome, but now Armstrong was unveiling an alternative that came from a very different direction. He was thoroughly trained as a musician who played for dancing, and until this moment that was how he had spent most of his time. He remained grounded in the stylistic principles of black vernacular dance music, while exploring new approaches to melodic design. Whites established one set of evaluative terms with symphonic jazz, and now, just as Langston Hughes predicted, the “common people” of New Orleans had given to the world a young African-American artist who challenged white cultural supremacy, not so much by beating whites at their own game—that was Henderson’s project—but by creating new terms of expression and accomplishment that were every bit as sophisticated and also related to “us.”

  As if by magic, Cornet Chop Suey was waiting for him on his return to Chicago. A display piece that reminded him of cutting contests in New Orleans, it perfectly fit the listening context of the Vendome. The Dreamland Café, too, put a premium on listening when his “up” came around. Sure, people danced, but the bigger draw was to hear the creative accomplishments of the world’s greatest cornet player. The hierarchy of venues on the South Side of Chicago was weighted toward listening, with theaters being most prestigious and the Vendome the most prestigious of all.

  Armstrong was regarded as eccentric, as modern, and as the “jazz concert king,” which is what Peyton called him in December 1927. At a Halloween Ball organized by Tate for Saturday, October 30, 1926, with 5,000 in attendance at the Eighth Regiment Armory, on South Giles Avenue near 35th Street, just around the corner from the Sunset Café, Armstrong stole the show. The celebrated team of Brown and McGraw was on hand to dance the “famous ‘Heebie Jeebies,’” with Armstrong ready to “play it on his cornet.” But when Tate and his orchestra started to play, “the people refused to dance” and “crowded close to the bandstand,” reported Heebie Jeebies. “It was impossible to clear out space for Brown and McGraw so they withdrew; still, it was a ‘righteous party’ that lasted until dawn.” Brown and McGraw must have been miffed, but for many it seemed just the right thing to do—to refuse to dance while listening to the jazz concert king.

  Heebie Jeebies and the Hot Five

  In the winter of 1925–26, while making a name for himself at classy venues like the Dreamland Café and the Vendome Theater, Armstrong was also extending his reputation thanks to the Hot Five series on OKeh Records. The recordings sold in Chicago, but the main target audience was African Americans in the Deep South, where race records were immensely popular.

  Three Hot Five sides recorded on November 12, 1925, launched the most famous series of recordings in jazz history, though no one was thinking that grandly at the time. “The musicians didn’t know this music was going to be important,” explained Lillian. “Sometimes you’d have a date and you wouldn’t bother to write the songs you were going to play until you got to the studio.” Yes! I’m in the Barrel was composed by Louis, My Heart by Lillian. Yes! I’m in the Barrel had been tucked away since December 1923, around the time when he was working on Cornet Chop Suey. That the latter piece was not brought out for this session is probably a reflection of the urgency of the situation: there was simply no time to work up Cornet Chop Suey, which is more demanding than the other pieces.

  “Pops, I don’t need no rehearsal if it’s the blues,” explained Armstrong to Richard Jones. “All you got to do is knock it off.” The third piece recorded on November 12 was Gut Bucket Blues, made up on the spot with composer credit given to Armstrong. The title was an allusion to fish waste that poor people in the South relied on for nourishment; it signaled that the music would be a relaxed celebration of low-class culture, the unpretentious and nonassimilative world of honky tonks and dirt-floor dance halls. Each player takes a solo, and Armstrong introduces them as they do, urging them on, “Oh play that thing, Mr. St. Cyr, Lord you know you can really do it, everybody from New Orleans can really do that thing—Hey! Hey!” “That thing” was the blues, the staple of race recordings in the early and mid-1920s.

  The Hot Five (The William Russell Jazz Files, MSS 536, F. Louis Armstrong 325, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  When the take was over, someone from OKeh came out of the control room and quipped, in response to Armstrong’s friendly bantering, “‘What are you doing, writing a letter home?” The reference was to the intended market, the southern down-home population, people who bought records before bread and who were in fact buying anywhere between five and ten million discs in 1925. If the preacher routine and Sugar Foot Stomp highlighted the cultural distance between South and North, the Hot Five series was aimed straight at southern taste. This marketing strategy explains why the Hot Five was so unlike all the other groups Armstrong was working with in 1925 and 1926—Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, Erskine Tate’s Vendome Orchestra, Lillian Hardin’s Dreamland Orchestra, and Carroll Dickerson’s Sunset Café Orchestra. It was a five-piece
pick-up band, with four of the musicians from New Orleans.

  The arrangements for the first three tunes recorded were very slender, the rehearsals brief or nonexistent. The recording company had very few opinions about the repertory. What mattered, mainly, was that the copyright holders, Louis and Lillian in this case, agreed to cut a deal in OKeh’s favor in exchange for a flat fee and the possibility that the tune might catch on and get recorded by someone else, which would generate royalties. No one at OKeh cared if the compositions My Heart and Yes! I’m in the Barrel were any good, or if there was a well-planned and well-rehearsed arrangement, such as was mandatory at the Roseland Ballroom, Dreamland Café, and Vendome Theater.

  Instead, the band was encouraged to click into collective improvisation, which they could produce at the drop of a dime; certainly this group was assembled with precisely that goal. The four New Orleanians had perfected that texture when they played together in the late 1910s, in a band led by Ory. With unfamiliar pieces being brought in and little or no preparation, the finished result did not have a chance to sound like “it was all mixed together as if someone had planned it with a set of micrometer calipers,” as Eddie Condon said about the Oliver band at Lincoln Gardens. That kind of ensemble playing depended on performing the same tunes for many months. In truth, the November 12 performances are a bit sloppy. Armstrong’s playing is fine, but it is certainly not the kind of thing that made people line up around the block at the Vendome Theater. His lead is confident, and Ory and Dodds produce a vigorous texture.