Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Against Oliver’s hard-driving freak music Armstrong put his dense, flashy, and increasingly well-organized solos, the two of them standing in dueling spotlights across the street from one another. In the spring of 1927 Armstrong was clearly the winner. High-rolling slumming at 35th and Calumet turned out to be a strong stimulus for him. He was riding a swelling wave of interest in his kind of music, a moment when white Chicago was leading the rest of white America in its patronage of jazz that was strongly connected to the African-American vernacular. The combination of good patronage and high-level competition helped lift him into a creative phase that produced a series of remarkable solos that are documented in six different recording sessions yielding performances of 14 pieces during the week of May 7–14, 1927.

  These recordings were made by a new formation called the Hot Seven. The expansion was spurred by a new technology: OKeh now made electronic recording available to him for the first time, which made it easy to add tuba (Pete Briggs) and drums (Baby Dodds). Ory must have had something else going on, for he was replaced by Honoré Dutrey, who had no trouble keeping up with the core of Armstrong, Lillian, Johnny St. Cyr, and Johnny Dodds. The important exception to this list was the May 9 recording of Jelly Roll Morton’s Chicago Breakdown, which was credited to “Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven Featuring Earl Hines,” but was actually performed by a ten-member band drawn straight from the Sunset and excluding the Dodds brothers, Lillian, and St. Cyr.

  Chicago Breakdown is the first sonic documentation of the Sunset bands Armstrong played with. For Big Butter and Egg Man from the West, he and Mae Alix sang and played as they did at the Sunset, but there is no reason to believe that any other part of the recorded performance was connected to the cabaret. Chicago Breakdown is a full-blown arrangement, carefully worked out and played by the musicians who were performing it every night. The piece was a vehicle for Hines, who almost certainly put the arrangement together. The relaxed tempo and the four-beat emphasis inspire attractive ensemble work and well-designed solos, especially from Hines and Armstrong, the latter with two lovely solos that include some of the same gestures and strategies that shaped his solo for Potato Head Blues, recorded the following day.

  Earl Hines, Grand Terrace Café, Chicago 1928 (The Frank Driggs Collection at Jazz at Lincoln Center)

  Alligator Crawl, recorded on May 10, was composed by Fats Waller, who had been kicking around town for a couple of months, making guest appearances on organ at the Metropolitan Theater and taking on a regular position at the Vendome before he was chased down by the police for domestic problems and sent back to New York City. Waller stopped by the Sunset one evening and was invited to sit in. Punch Miller, a trumpeter from New Orleans, happened to be there and asked to sit in also. “Man you can’t play this music,” Armstrong told him. “Everybody is reading in this band.” But Miller insisted. His fumbling over his part inspired a quip from Waller at piano that musicians were still quoting years later: “What key are you struggling in? Turn the page!”

  There is nothing to suggest that the arrangement for Alligator Crawl—or the arrangements for any of the other recordings from May—had the kind of direct connection to the Sunset that is evident in Chicago Breakdown. The opposite seems to have been the case, first, because the Hot Seven sidemen were not employed there; second, because there is really nothing about the arrangements that indicates that kind of planning and familiarity; and third, because these performances are right in step with previous Hot Five recordings. In other words, most of the musical product was generated in the studio, by studio musicians hired for the day. “All we needed was a lead sheet and everybody would figure out his own part,” said Kid Ory about the OKeh sessions generally, and it is easy to believe that this is what happened with Alligator Crawl, Gully Low Blues, and most of the other May recordings. Commentators often project too much on these performances, exaggerating their overall importance or putting too much attention on the sidemen. The sidemen need no apologies for work that does not match Armstrong’s lofty standards. They were simply picking up a little lagniappe on a sleepy morning after a long night at work.

  But Armstrong’s solos are a different matter. It seems likely that some, though not all, were well planned out. For example, he recorded two takes of Gully Low Blues (one given the title S.O.L. Blues), and the solos are close enough to one another and also interesting enough to suggest that they were made in advance. The main solo is confidently delivered and nicely designed (it anticipates in some details the central solo for West End Blues). Thus, even if, as seems likely, the arrangement was created in the recording studio, Armstrong’s solo was not. Armstrong’s solos on Gully Low Blues and Wild Man Blues made a big impression on sixteen-year-old Roy Eldridge, who would become one of the great trumpet soloists of the swing era.

  Willie the Weeper is another good candidate for thorough planning. A number of bands recorded the tune in spring and summer 1927, suggesting that a stock arrangement had recently been published. This was probably a repertory piece at both the Plantation (Oliver recorded Willie the Weeper in April) and the Sunset; it is easy to believe that the solo Armstrong played for the Hot Seven recording reflected what he was playing at the cabaret (and/or at the Vendome, lest we forget that he continued to perform there through mid-April 1927). Similar arguments could be made about Weary Blues, Wild Man Blues (already documented at the Sunset), and Melancholy Blues, all recorded by Johnny Dodds’s Black Bottom Stompers in April, with Armstrong and Hines sitting in.69

  In other words, it seems to me that the reason we get so many superior solos from May 1927 is that they were shaped by many nights of planning and refinement at the Sunset and the Vendome. The solos were lifted out of those settings and placed in a funkier, lower-paid, underrehearsed, and more southern-sounding musical context. The OKeh series was still conceived for the race market in the Deep South and still made on the cheap, with no expectation of rehearsals and with reliance on Armstrong to carry sales.

  It is notable that Armstrong sings on only four of the twelve titles from May. This is a huge change. In the Hot Five recordings from the previous November he sang on four of six titles, in June 1926 five of eight. Moreover, the May 1927 singing all took place in the final two (of six) sessions; it is as if OKeh suddenly realized that he had recorded a week of instrumental tunes and they intervened, insisting that the group patch together a few vocal numbers.

  This suggests an increased emphasis at the Sunset, and perhaps the Vendome, too, on Armstrong’s special choruses for trumpet. The development of his special choruses was distinctly marked with Cornet Chop Suey in early 1926 and with Big Butter and Egg Man from the West that fall. It is possible that, by the spring of 1927, his creative efforts in this form became the main draw. Sure, he still sang Heebie Jeebies and Big Butter. But the implication of the May sessions is that he was now recognized as a trumpeter with extraordinary creative gifts. His promotion to leader of the Sunset Orchestra may have been tied to this. His trumpet playing had been admired from the moment he arrived in Chicago in late 1925, but without the expectation that a specially designed chorus would be the centerpiece of his performance, the thing that drew people in the door. Now that was precisely what customers were looking for.

  Since January, Armstrong had been leading the band and calling the tunes, so why not include his own compositions that featured his special choruses? Though we can only speculate, it seems likely that this was the case with the gem of the May sessions, the much-loved Potato Head Blues. Ralph Ellison considered the central solo to be a classic demonstration of African-American elegance, and virtually all commentators rank it among the most important solos in jazz history.

  This is a stop-time solo, with reduced accompaniment. We have already seen stop time used in Cornet Chop Suey, Oriental Strut, and some of the 1923 Oliver performances. Earlier documentation of stop time includes two rags by Scott Joplin, The Ragtime Dance (1906) and Stoptime Rag (1910). In Potato Head Blues the stop-time accompaniment is
more sparse than usual, with a chord sounding on the first beat of every other measure (that is, one chord sounding every eight beats). The format gave rise to one of Armstrong’s most stunning achievements, so it is worth thinking about its historical and cultural associations. The place to start is with the tradition of using stop time to accompany dance displays.

  Composer and political activist James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1926 that “for generations, ‘buck and wing’ and ‘stop time’ dances, which are strictly Negro, have been familiar to American theatre audiences.”70 The reduced accompaniment of stop time did more than simply place a spotlight on the dancer: it opened up a space for rhythmic complexity, since the dance rhythms now stood alone. That is certainly how the practice was used in professional dancing. In this way, stop-time format and rhythmically complex dancing became strongly associated with African-American vernacular culture.

  Those who knew this “strictly Negro” tradition would have automatically made the association when they heard a stop-time jazz solo. And there could not have been many situations where the connection was more obvious than the Sunset Café in 1927. Stop time undoubtedly helped define the Sunset as a place for the full and vigorous flow of African-American vernacular dance, taken to a high professional level. Reviews make it clear that this kind of entertainment was just as popular as jazz was.

  The first few months of 1927 brought an especially rich stretch of professional dancing to the Sunset. Brown and McGraw were there in early May or a bit before. The dance team of Eddie Rector and Ralph Cooper started in January. And the team known as Buck (Ford L. Washington) and Bubbles (John William Sublett) started a successful run in mid-February in a new show called Sunset Gaieties. They were “the stars of the evening,” along with Mae Alix, wrote the Light and Heebie Jeebies. “For forty-five minutes Mr. Buck and Mr. Bubbles were compelled to respond to their wild admirers,” the reviewer reported. A display ad for the Sunset saved the biggest typeface for the two of them. “They did things with their feet that looked impossible,” remembered Hines.

  Armstrong shared much with this sparkling pair. Bubbles’s specialty was tap dancing, but he could do a lot more than that. “I would do more or less a song when dancing, the melody,” he remembered. “I could do Ole Man River dancing and you could almost tell the words, the way I danced it… . The personality for singing, the personality for acting, the personality for dancing, that’s three of them.” And then he added this broader social reflection: “Do you understand what a Negro has to do to be recognized? You’ve got to be twice as great, twice as good.” Armstrong and Buck, the pianist, became close friends, often hanging out together when Buck was in town during Armstrong’s last couple of years in Chicago and later in New York City.

  Bubbles was good at inventing steps, just as Oliver and Armstrong were good at inventing tunes and breaks. He avoided repetition in his routines, thinking that this made it difficult for others to copy him. He developed a strategy of identifying his best steps, based on audience reaction, and stringing them together, one after the other, to create a dense and varied presentation. Stop time, with its regular punctuations, may have encouraged this approach. In Potato Head Blues one hears breaks and figures that Armstrong used earlier (in Tears, for example), suggesting something similar, though certainly not so deliberate. It’s unlikely that the relationship of Armstrong’s solo to Bubbles’s taps was one of rhythmic equivalence, but he certainly could have been engaged in good-natured competition with Bubbles and the other dancers, noting their successes and responding in his own way, with observable similarities between the two art forms in variety, density, rhythmic complexity, and originality.

  With Armstrong performing a spectacular stop-time solo just after or before Bubbles performed a spectacular stop-time dance, the connection would have been hard to miss. It is a connection that would have come naturally at 35th and Calumet, which appealed to white interest in black vernacular culture taken to the highest professional level. Armstrong’s solo for Potato Head Blues is his musical answer to a stop-time dance. The association may even have been so obvious that virtually all jazz solos in stop time were heard in this way—strictly Negro, even when played by a white musician.

  Comparison between his stop-time solos for Cornet Chop Suey and Potato Head Blues highlights how far he had traveled in three years. The earlier solo, written on the back steps of Lillian’s apartment, has the feeling of a melody conceived for notation, unfolding in two-bar units with variety in melodic contour but less in rhythm. The melody is not too far from Scott Joplin’s style; compare the first four measures of the A strain of The Entertainer, for example, with the first four measures of Armstrong’s stop-time solo.

  But the stop-time solo for Potato Head Blues is hardly a melody that would have been worked out in (or for) notation. Two-bar modules are much less predictable. The dazzling melodic flow is in constant motion with its vigorous twists and turns, varied in contour and rhythmic profile. It is full of the weird, crazy, and eccentric figures that were now Armstrong’s bread and butter.

  Potato Head Blues is, on one level, a demonstration of how to work with varied figures of syncopation and additive rhythm, each module completely different from the previous one. At times the melody breaks out of the two-bar box to soar across the regular signposts and take variable tension to a higher level. Armstrong manipulates harmony in ways similar to Mandy, Muskrat Ramble, and Big Butter and Egg Man; the stop-time format encouraged him to go further with this technique.

  Breaks, snakes, and fillins provide the basic musical material for the solo, the kind of playing he was good at in his teenage years and that Oliver encouraged him to put aside in favor of a solid lead. As we know from Wild Man Blues, he had not lost interest in breaks, and in the spring of 1927 he published two books, 125 Jazz Breaks for Trumpet and Fifty Hot Choruses for Cornet. These were commercial efforts that might also be taken as creative exercises focused on a small and versatile unit of melody. Armstrong “penned in book form some of his eccentric styles of playing,” wrote Peyton. “The Melrose Music Company is publishing both books for Louis, who is all smiles nowadays riding around in his brand new Hupmobile Eight.” Melrose cut him a check to the tune of $600. Potato Head Blues demonstrates perfection of a musical idiom that was not beholden to the normative features of popular song and instead emerged directly from the vernacular vigor of New Orleans, pushed forward by the strictly Negro tradition of stop time and dancers like Herbert Brown, Eddie Rector, and John Bubbles.

  Yet this stop-time solo is not simply a series of breaks and fillins strung together. Its appeal also comes from melodic design. “Louie [and other great jazz soloists] played and sang … with melodic continuity,” explained trumpeter Jimmy Maxwell. “If you look at their solos, although they’re playing a lot of notes and there is a melodic line, there is a continuity in the direction.” White musicians Esten Spurrier and Bix Beiderbecke, admiring Armstrong from ringside seats at the Sunset, came up with the phrase “correlated chorus” to describe his practice of relating phrases one to the other. Armstrong’s solo is full of goal-directed details, which are sometimes interrupted before coming to late arrivals and sometimes redirected through coy misses. Bud Freeman referred to a “conversation of notes” that Armstrong and Lester Young were both good at. Potato Head Blues is so well known that it is easy to forget how radical it must have sounded in 1927, with absence of familiar markers of popular-song coherence and with intensification of the fixed and variable model. (“Telling a story” was another way of speaking about this, though it is easy to be misled by this metaphor.)71 Fleeting patterns, correlations, and conversations of notes helped bridge the gap and added to the solo’s complexity and appeal. Like a Bach partita or a Brahms intermezzo, one can listen again and again and still get satisfaction from hearing the line unfold.

  The solo is full of surprises that somehow seem to fit, including one of the bluest notes ever heard, a D-flat resolving to the seventh of a D7 chord. Trumpeter Hum
phrey Lyttleton admired how, in the second two-bar module, the line “stalks majestically across the beat.” The playfulness of the varied modules, the brilliant tone—now transmitted through electronic recording—and Armstrong’s superb precision give the solo a shining aura. If the sudden high note in Wild Man Blues was a dramatic charge, the high-note excursions in Potato Head Blues are outbursts of joy. In the first half of the solo G is the high note, yielding to A in the second part and finally C at the end, each ripping leap upwards carrying more emotional impact. He has figured out how to make the stratospheric stunts of the Vendome serve an artistic purpose.

  The high value placed on invention was part of the reception of this solo. Armstrong “is always trying to create some form and style in jazz playing that will bring him distinction,” wrote Peyton in June 1927. “This he has accomplished.” At 35th and Calumet Oliver was spinning out new tunes and solos, Bubbles was stringing together new steps, and Armstrong was also responding to the demand to make it new. Much later, Esquire magazine solicited his comments on Potato Head Blues, and his thoughts quickly turned to his mentor: “There never was a creator of cornet any greater than Joe Oliver.” Oliver’s understanding of composition may have been among the last lessons he imparted to the only student he ever took on.

  Armstrong’s creative solos were now featured at the Sunset, and for some they must have been the main draw. Certainly they were for the alligators. Beiderbecke studied his solos and formed his own style; he may be considered Armstrong’s first great disciple. One of the two-bar modules from Potato Head Blues provided Hoagy Carmichael with a distinctive melodic turn for Star Dust (measures 3–4 of Carmichael’s chorus; the tune was first recorded in October 1927 and demonstrated at the Sunset while Armstrong and Hines were there). “I’m going out tonight,” Carmichael wrote to his wife Dorothy in the early 1930s. “Louis Armstrong is in town. He’s going to show me purty notes. And so I’ll learn some more about composing.”