Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  What happened next is another famous moment in jazz history. Armstrong brought along his sheet of paper, but in the middle of the recording he accidentally dropped it. Not wanting to spoil the wax, he continued the performance with scat. The story later was used to support the idea that he had invented scat on the spot. There seems to be no doubt that he dropped a piece of paper; Armstrong, Ory, and St. Cyr all included this detail in their independent accounts. Whether or not he planned to scat is interesting to speculate about, though difficult to get very far with.

  It is clear that the scat version did not exist, except perhaps in Armstrong’s mind, before February 26, 1926. He was surprised that OKeh released the recording, but the studio turned out to be the place to take a risk like this. It would have been too unnerving to introduce scat at the Vendome. The impersonal recording machine enabled innovation; spoiled wax could be melted down and reused, so why not try something new? Usually we think of recordings during this period as providing a restricted glimpse of what was going on in live performance. Here may be a case of the studio prompting an innovation that was less likely on stage.

  OKeh took a chance and was handsomely rewarded. Perhaps the studio was emboldened by institutional memory of its 1920 success with Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues. “There’s fourteen million Negroes in our great country and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle correctly”—that was Perry Bradford’s plea to OKeh executives in 1920. Perhaps Bradford’s lesson was still ringing in some executive’s ears when Armstrong unleashed his startling romp through an unfamiliar range of the black vernacular voice. The combination of low overhead and the intended market—the “letter back home”—encouraged OKeh to take a chance.

  If the scatted Heebie Jeebies was created in the recording studio, then when was it first performed in public? That may well have happened on the very next day. On Friday, February 26, the Hot Five was in the OKeh studio, and on Saturday they were featured in “OKeh Race Record Artists’ Night” at the Chicago Coliseum. It was only the second time that blacks had been admitted to this venue; clarinetist Bud Jacobson attended with Floyd O’Brien, and they felt like they were the only two whites in the entire building. OKeh took out ads in the Defender highlighting the participation of the celebrated Broadway team Miller and Lyles, but another ad, now unidentifiable, included pictures of Armstrong and blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson—and only them. OKeh promised to select three beautiful Chicago girls from the audience to dance in the chorus line. The event included a demonstration of how “OKeh records are made, finished and played—all within 15 minutes.” The Hot Five were among the demonstrators. Three thousand people attended and the show was heard on radio.

  If Armstrong did demonstrate Heebie Jeebies with scat at the Coliseum, it would help explain both the increased demand for his services in the spring of 1926 and the tremendously quick sales of the record after it was released around May 1. Sometime during the spring, and probably not too long after the February breakthrough, he was singing Heebie Jeebies through a megaphone at the Vendome. The name of the piece connected well with the radical nature of his singing and his eccentric cornet. In mid-April the Sunset Café lured him away from the Dreamland with a substantial boost in salary.

  On May 1 the Defender advertised the recording. Peyton described Armstrong as the “big feature in Carroll Dickerson’s Sunset Orchestra.” OKeh soon signed him to a five-year contract, and on Saturday, June 12, OKeh rented out the Coliseum for another big blast, promoted as the OKeh Cabaret and Style Show. “Nothing of this kind has ever happened in the world before,” wrote Peyton. This time there was no doubt about who the headliner was. “LISTEN!” shouted a Defender ad. “At the Big Main Coliseum … You Are Going to Have an Opportunity to See How It Was Done: Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five Will Actually Make an OKeh Record Right on the Stage of Heebie Jeebies Dance… . The biggest selling record ever known.” Ads promised the estimated 20,000 who attended that all 21 orchestras present would join together to play not only Heebie Jeebies but also Cornet Chop Suey, Muskrat Ramble, Oriental Strut, and Come Back, Sweet Papa, along with a few other tunes. Armstrong stole the show. “Never has any record artist received such an ovation as the one that greeted him on that memorable night,” crowed an OKeh ad.

  To capitalize on Armstrong’s spiking popularity, OKeh rushed the Hot Five back into the recording studios on June 16 and 23. The group scraped together four tunes by Hardin, two by Richard Jones, one by Ory, and one cowritten by Barbarin and Armstrong. Ory gave this account of the general approach to Hot Five preparations: “We didn’t rehearse much on those records with Louis. We rehearsed right in the studio before we started. If we were going to do eight numbers we’d start about 45 minutes or an hour at the most with the whole numbers.” That level of casualness would certainly explain the undistinguished performances from these June dates; there is no reason to believe that any of the pieces were worked up ahead of time. The tunes were not designed to showcase Armstrong’s ability to create a special trumpet chorus; the only solo that even hints at such at thing comes in King of the Zulus. OKeh had a trumpet king/singer on their hands, but in June 1926 it was the singer who was selling records.51 He sings on five of the eight tunes recorded.

  King of the Zulus seems to have had the most impact, perhaps due to its title, a reference to Armstrong’s favorite New Orleans parade, the parody of the famous Mardi Gras Rex that originated in his neighborhood. The Zulu theme was perfect for the large Halloween Ball on October 30, held at the Eighth Regiment Armory: a Zulu King was crowned at 2:00 a.m. and a Zulu King’s feast of free chit’lins offered. Interestingly, the featured vocals in the June sessions did not include scat. Armstrong had not yet developed his technique of mixing in scat with a more or less straightforward presentation of a song’s lyrics, the kind of blend that would become so important to his new vocal style in the early 1930s. Heebie Jeebies must have seemed like such a novelty that to produce another scat chorus would have been too obviously derivative. A scat follow-up to Heebie Jeebies had to wait until November to get recorded: the lovely Skid Dat De Dat does not have a chorus, but features multiple scat breaks. This slow, poignant performance, with its brief phrases of scat presented in dialogue with instruments, is actually less connected to Heebie Jeebies than to the later West End Blues. The simplicity of Skid Dat De Dat made it easy for the others to contribute without feeling like they had to keep up with Armstrong’s flash.

  In July, Percy Venable staged and produced Jazzmania, a new revue at the Sunset Café. The magazine Heebie Jeebies described Jazzmania as “the fastest and most colorful show ever staged at this popular night club.”52 For the finale of the revue the entire cast supported Armstrong singing Heebie Jeebies, in coordination with five-foot-tall dancer Kid Lips, who had, the year before, originated “the backward, skating, knee drop and other improvements of the Charleston.” At some point (it could well have been later) Blanche Calloway, a popular singer on cabaret circuits, asked the musicians if they could find a place on stage for her brother Cabell, who had dropped out of school. Cab hung around, heard Armstrong play Muskrat Ramble, Gut Bucket Blues, You’re Next, and Oriental Strut, and heard him scat. “All of the songs he did were full of fire and rhythm, and he was scat singing even then,” said the future singer of Hi De Ho. “Louis first got me freed up from straight lyrics to try scatting.” White clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow and his Chicago friends bought Armstrong’s Heebie Jeebies and played it over and over until saxophonist Frank Teschemacher insisted that they drive 53 miles to Hudson Lake, Indiana, to play it for Bix Beiderbecke. “All the way there we kept chanting Louis’ weird riffs,” remembered Mezzrow, who “kept the car zigzagging like a roller coaster to make the explosions,” in a reckless representation of Armstrong’s scatted dance.

  Summer contracts were drawn up for an “orchestral roll” and a piano roll, and in the fall OKeh’s parent company publis
hed sheet music. Boyd Atkins was credited as composer, new lyrics were added, and a new “eccentric” dance was created by Floyd DuPont (“America’s fastest dance producer,” according to the Washington Post) and introduced by Tinah Tweedie. A photograph of bandleader Paul Ash was placed on the cover of the sheet music. Armstrong’s name was nowhere to be found, even though the printed music included a transcription of his “skat chorus.” There followed a batch of fall recordings by Alberta Hunter, the Red Heads, Ethel Waters, the Original Indiana Five, and the Goofus Five; some included Armstrong’s solo, played by instruments, and the Goofus Five did it in scat.

  OKeh’s coordinated strategies lifted Heebie Jeebies into a more lucrative market—that is, into a white market. The dance was heavily promoted in Chicago, where, in the fall of 1926, white ballrooms placed printed directions for the dance on every table. Advertisements featured photographs of (white) Miss Tweedie posing in the various steps—the get-off, the stomp-off, the fling-off, the heebie-off, the jeebie-off, and the blow-off. By February 1928 the dance had reached England, where it was protested by a missionary who had “spent a lifetime teaching the natives of darkest Africa to abandon suggestive dances” and was shocked “beyond words” to “find his people doing the same dances which he had attempted to stop in Africa.”

  The Heebie Jeebies Dance (The William Russell Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 92-48-L.109)

  As it positioned the piece to sell to whites, OKeh shamelessly dropped all mention of Armstrong, without whom nobody would have heard of it, even while they kept his version of Atkins’s melody (whose original tune was closely derived from Joplin and Chauvin) at the heart of the piece’s identity. This is important for our understanding of the demographic trajectories of Armstrong’s career: it is likely that very few whites outside the Sunset Café heard his scat breakthrough, or even heard of him at all during these productive years in Chicago. The Boswell Sisters made a hit out of the piece in 1932; they recorded it in video and audio and opened their programs with it. Their neatly arranged performance, complete with minstrel-style black dialect, was based on Armstrong’s scat chorus. I see no reason to believe that white audiences who enjoyed the Sisters made any association with Armstrong, even though by that time he was well known.

  But the tune continued to be strongly associated with him among blacks. In January 1927 Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was in Chicago and stopped by the Sunset to check out the scene. He was so impressed that he decided to immediately build Heebie Jeebies into his own act. “Music is now being prepared for Bill, who ordered it ‘Rush,’” wrote an unidentified source. There is another report of Armstrong performing the song in Chicago in October 1927. In December Dave Peyton stopped by a “chop suey cafe” and encountered for the first time an early version of the jukebox; it was playing Armstrong’s Heebie Jeebies. Peyton was impressed by the machine’s sound, but he viewed it as another threat to the livelihood of musicians, along with the vitaphone (the sound system used in movie theaters) and radio: “Orchestras, beware!” he wrote. A revue at the Alhambra in Harlem in the summer of 1929 included Manda Randolph leading the Alhambra Girls “in Lewis [sic] Armstrong’s favorite number, the lively Heebee Jeebees [sic].”

  Late in life, Armstrong explained why he didn’t mind satisfying the public’s insistence that he sing Hello Dolly so often—“How many times? Six jillion?” he quipped. “Aw, I am paid to entertain the people.” During his long career, there would be quite a few pieces that the public demanded again and again. Heebie Jeebies was the first.

  Ultimately, scat would open up a new style for Armstrong, but that came slowly; it didn’t really take off until he changed his way of singing under the influence of the microphone. His huge success with Heebie Jeebies put him on the map as a singer in the entertainment world of Chicago, and his next big hit was Big Butter and Egg Man, which he sang as a duet at the Sunset Café in the summer and fall of 1926. But there was one big difference: Big Butter also featured him in an extended trumpet chorus, a deliberate attempt to combine his two-sided abilities in a single performance. During 1927, while he continued to sing both pieces at the Vendome and the Sunset Café, the trend would be more to the instrumental side, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It was a magical combination, singing and playing trumpet, that would continue to lift him higher and higher in the South Side world of entertainment.

  SIX

  Melody Man at the Sunset Café

  I’m just an old melody man.

  —Louis Armstrong

  Armstrong’s wife had a lot of opinions about his dress and much else, but as his boss at the Dreamland—well, the potential conflicts were many. Musicians teased him: “Look out there, Louie, your wife will fire you,” they taunted. He was embarrassed and grew harder to get along with, both at home and at work. “I would get ready to start the band off and he’d have all the musicians on one side, telling them a damn joke,” Lillian remembered. “I got after him about it, and he said, ‘Well if you don’t like it fire me.’”

  In early April an offer came from none other than Joe Oliver, who was running a band at the Plantation Café, across the street from the Sunset Café. Armstrong said yes, and the move was announced in the Defender. He was on his way to a rehearsal one day when he bumped into Earl Hines on the street. They had gotten to know one another at the musicians’ union; Hines remembered the first piece they read through there together, The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else), composed by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn in 1924. Hines was on his way to a rehearsal, too, though not with Oliver. He was employed by Carroll Dickerson at the Sunset, and he decided to go to work on his friend: “Why don’t you come on over with us young fellows?”

  Here is another special moment in the Armstrong biography, a choice between the greatest influence of his formative teenage years and the musician (Hines) who was best able to keep up with him in mid-1920s Chicago. “I loved Joe Oliver, and here I was back in Chicago with all these Chicago boys, and I thought I’d be more at home with Papa Joe, sitting by his side,” he remembered. But Lillian convinced him to go to the Sunset, which sweetened the deal with $10 more per week than Oliver was offering. Of course Oliver was offended, though he got over the bad behavior eventually.

  Armstrong started at the Sunset on April 17, 1926, and Oliver ended up convincing Ory to leave the Dreamland and join him at the Plantation. Seating around 500 people at 100 square tables, each covered with a white tablecloth, the Sunset offered a “new departure in ventilation” of a “refrigerator character” that cooled the place down to 70 degrees on summer nights. It stayed open past the closing times of other cabarets, usually until 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Musicians worked seven nights every week, as usual.

  Armstrong stayed at the Sunset for the some 18 months, until fall 1927, doubling up after the Vendome gig. His friends Buster Bailey, Rudy Jackson, Honoré Dutrey, and Andre Hillare were all working there, and Bobby Williams of Bugle Blues fame was first-chair trumpet. He believed that Dickerson’s 12-to-14-piece unit, with two violins, was the best cabaret band on the South Side.

  “Stir the Savage in Us with a Pleasant Tickle”

  Armstrong’s arrival was part of a change in musical strategy for the Sunset. Before Dickerson was hired in March, music was supplied by none other than Sammy Stewart, the blue-veined, conservatory-trained pianist from Ohio who had snubbed Armstrong in the summer of 1924. By hiring Dickerson—and then Hines and Armstrong—the Sunset was responding to increased interest in jazz. The Plantation, across the street, was leading the way. Before Oliver took over, Dave Peyton, the Defender columnist, had been directing a band with considerable success. With their strong Eurocentric orientations, the rivalry between Peyton and Stewart must have been a good one. Peyton brought in Oliver as a featured soloist in late 1924, perhaps under pressure from management, and by early 1925 Oliver had taken over, apparently through a bit of deception; his power move recalls similar takeovers of Ory’s band in 1916 and of Duhé�
��s band in 1919.

  Sunset Café, transformed to the Grand Terrace, 1937 (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 54, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Oliver transformed the Plantation into a place known for jazz. “The mammoth King Oliver and his 10 musicians provide the music,” wrote Variety. “If you haven’t heard Oliver and his boys you haven’t heard real jazz. It is loud, wailing and pulsating. You dance calmly for a while, trying to fight it, and then you succumb completely, as King makes his trumpet talk personally to you—and the trumpet doesn’t usually say nice things.” The contrast with Sammy Stewart’s college-educated musicians at the Sunset must have been dramatic.

  Since both venues catered heavily to whites, the success of Oliver and then Armstrong at 35th and Calumet is an important indicator of the growing reach of African-American jazz. This is the same trend that Fletcher Henderson was tracking in late 1924 and 1925, now moved several steps forward as it was playing out on the South Side of Chicago. Oliver’s popularity is indicated by the 30-minute radio broadcasts he made from the Plantation each evening. The irony must have been evident to both the King and his successful student: their dark skin and their commitment to the African-American vernacular of the Deep South had been a liability at these locations just a few years earlier; now both markers were assets.

  Management at the Plantation produced an atmosphere worthy of the venue’s name, with trailing vines rising up from picket fences and blossoming on the ceiling into tissue-paper watermelons. The entire staff was black. When you handed your hat to the check girl, she kept time with the music as she found a place for the garment. The waiters did the same thing as they swung their trays. The cashier hit the register with a little ring that punctuated the flow of Oliver’s pulsating jazz, and even the bathroom attendant brushed guests down with a rhythmically precise whisk broom, jingling the change in his pants pocket with a little flourish, as if tapping a cymbal.