Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The significance of the Sunset for Armstrong was, first, that it was a center of primitivist interest in jazz, and, second, that it put him in the middle of an intensely competitive and creative environment. He responded as he always did to a good job: he gave everything he had. The slumming white subculture made its demands, but a lot of the details were left to him. His first modern style was nurtured by the dual patronage of upwardly mobile blacks and slumming whites, a contradiction that was thoroughly part of the times. It is hard to imagine that he hesitated even for a second to simply accept it.

  Modern Melody

  “I’m just an old melody man,” Armstrong once quipped. That is a good way to think about both his creative achievement and his historical importance. The melody man composed some 80 tunes that he sent to Washington, D.C., for copyright, but those melodies (with the stunning exception of Cornet Chop Suey) were largely inconsequential. Instead, his genius found a better outlet in the “special choruses” that he created by ear and inserted into performances. The goal was not to chase after financial reward through copyright but to hold his place in the spotlight that was shining on him ever more brightly and yielding bigger and bigger financial rewards. If we focus on the special chorus as a melodic achievement, we can begin to think of him not only as a great jazz musician and a great entertainer but as one of the great melodists in American music. “All them beautiful notes,” he once said. “My livin’ and my life.”

  Several semantic and conceptual obstacles stand in the way of thinking about Armstrong as a great melodist. First, a long history in writings about jazz sets rhythm in opposition to melody. This way of speaking misses the point that melody always includes rhythm—you cannot have melody without it. It is true that his solos are often rhythmically sophisticated, but there are advantages to reframing the discussion in terms of melody. A similar problem arises with harmony. Did he think harmonically when he was improvising, or does it even matter? The fact is that his solo lines are always shaped by harmony, even when he contradicts the given chord of the accompaniment. Without an analytical approach that views melody as including both rhythm and harmony, we will always come up short in assessing his creative achievement, left to fall back on the old quip, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”

  It’s not that being a great melodist is the only thing that matters in jazz. Driving energy, lovely tone quality, and stunning virtuosity were all as important in the 1920s as they are today. The solo as melody isn’t the only thing, but Armstrong made it one of the main things. Furthermore, he did so in response to racial dynamics of the time. To think of what makes his melodies special is to examine on a deep level the impact of race on his music.

  As we have seen, Armstrong’s creativity is primarily shaped by the workings of the fixed and variable model. It is this that distinguishes his first modern phase, that made it the basis for developments in jazz solo playing for the next two decades, and that infuses it with a vernacular sensibility that was audibly indebted to Africa. We have had plenty of chances to note the importance of variety and density, which many soloists cultivated without folding them into a coherent vision of the fixed and variable model, at least not in the same way that Armstrong did. This priority made him the central figure in the history of the jazz solo and connected his style to an African way of organizing music.

  Dave Peyton wrote, in February 1926, that the “style of jazz the public has gone wild about is that which Paul Whiteman, Vincent Lopez, the late James Reese Europe, Leroy Smith and Fletcher Henderson’s orchestras are putting out—beautiful melodies, garnished with eccentric figurations propelled by strict rhythm.” That is a felicitous description and surely an accurate gauge of taste for at least one segment of the population. Armstrong’s melodic achievement was very different. It was built from the stuff of breaks, fillins, and obbligatos, with eccentric figuration in the foreground, no longer the garnish but the main dish. This was how he created an alternative standard of melodic beauty.

  What made his breakthrough possible was the nearly universal sense of periodicity that shaped popular songs and dance of the period, the absolutely predictable flow of time through symmetries of beats, half-measures (two beats), measures (four beats), two-measure groups (eight beats), four-measure half-phrases (16 beats), and eight-measure phrases (32 beats). Harmonic rhythm (the rate of change of chords) contributed in a fundamental way. The ear naturally follows this ground level of fixed activity and uses it to understand events on the variable level. In West African music, periodicity is achieved through ostinato patterns that can reach considerable complexity all by themselves. Though the patterns in 1920s popular songs are simpler, periodicity can be achieved on the different levels of temporal organization just described. This rigid layering is what allowed Armstrong to bring the fixed and variable model, ubiquitous as it must have been throughout the Deep South when he was growing up, to the theaters and cabarets of Chicago.

  The periodic organization is obvious, but the implications of thinking about Armstrong’s solos in these terms are less so: the solo, the variable level of activity, is completely dependent on the fixed foundation for its meaning. On one level this is easy to accept. After all, popular songs of the day also depend on the easily perceivable and completely regular plan of the typical eight-bar phrase. But Armstrong’s solos have a very different relationship to this foundation. The regular unfolding of the ground level allows him to build a variable line that moves in and out of phase. Interest comes from the rich relationship between the two levels of activity.

  Without agreement, the variable line sounds chaotic. Agreement comes from precise synchronization with the beat (Miles Davis on Armstrong: “He plays on the beat and you can’t miss when you play on the beat”) and precise control of chords (Willie “The Lion” Smith: “[Armstrong] works like a horse, knows how to pace himself, and knows his chord construction”). The variable line creates tension against the foundation by moving in conflict at the local level of the beat (syncopations, delayed phrasing), at the level of the measure (additive rhythm, irregular, “eccentric” accents), and at the broader level of two-measure groups (fillins across the bar and phrase, harmonic anticipation).

  Armstrong does all of this more extensively than others do it, with greater melodic clarity and greater intensity, and he extends the model to include harmony, thus duplicating in pitch relations what others articulated only through rhythm. His solos unfold with confidence and with various features of design in a continuous pas de deux with the foundation. His terms of expression insist on having things both ways: the variable line moves in and out of phase against, is connected to and detached from, is synchronized with and in tension with the fixed level. This is what it means to say that the meaning of his solo is determined by its relationship to the ground.

  His melody is in dialogue with the fixed level. There was tremendous emphasis on musical dialogue in the music of his youth. Music as a form of dialogue is a fundamental feature of traditional West African music, and it was a primary feature of collective improvisation from New Orleans, with the lead musician in conversation with the rhythm section and with the musicians playing second. This conception is very different from the relationship of a popular tune to its harmonic plan. It must have seemed natural to Armstrong to think in terms of musical dialogue.

  Less predictable, perhaps, was his move toward greater abstraction. The terms of expression for his first modern style insist that social interaction is less important than the wit and compositional skill of the soloist. Dialogue in church was open-ended and radically egalitarian, with everyone invited to contribute to the creative event. In the professional dance bands of uptown New Orleans, roles for collective improvisation were more firmly predetermined yet there was still a group dynamic involved. Appreciative audiences at the Vendome must have recognized that Armstrong was now shifting the balance in an abstract direction. Indeed, this became part of his virtuosity. The stop-time solo for Potato Head B
lues is as one-sided as it can be: Armstrong is overwhelmingly active, while the accompaniment is reduced to one beat out of every eight. One might be tempted to diminish the importance of the fixed level or dismiss the dialogic model altogether, but that would be a mistake. Even when it is as slender as it is here, the fixed level still anchors perception by providing a consistent marker in the time line and the basic harmonies. Without it, the listener would lack these organizing references and the musical event would become something completely different.

  In Chapter 2 we looked at Armstrong’s interest in harmony and his mastery of it by the time he composed Weatherbird Rag and recorded Chimes Blues. Western-style “common practice” tonality, a system of organizing chords in a logical way, had little relevance for music made by slaves on the plantations of the Deep South. The ecstatic styles of congregational singing and the funky street bands in Armstrong’s neighborhood put much more value on dialogue, texture, and expressive markers than chords. This music was rough, untutored, and primitive from a Western point of view, and the two musical systems appeared completely at odds with one another.

  Taking a global view, we could locate Armstrong’s achievement in a long-lasting, multidimensional encounter between two great musical systems, one based on the fixed and variable model of the African diaspora, and the other on common-practice tonality from Europe. A degree of simplification was necessary to combine them, getting rid of some details while reassessing the basic functions of others. It is an understatement to say that this encounter opened up many possibilities. It largely accounts for the tremendous explosion of twentieth-century creativity in the vernacular traditions of African American music, each inevitably touched by various social and musical trajectories.

  As argued in Chapter 5, Armstrong could not have achieved high status at places like the Vendome Theater and with critics like Dave Peyton if he had not mastered harmony so thoroughly—and, by extension, he would not have ultimately reached white audiences to the degree that he did in the early 1930s. Harmony was important, but even more important was how he subordinated it to the fixed and variable model. This was what made possible the audacious—at least by the standards of popular songs in the 1920s—gesture at the end of the first phrase of Big Butter and Egg Man (measures 6–7 in Example 6.1), and it is how critical assessment of Armstrong’s solos should be guided.

  With harmony subordinated, further innovations were possible, including the use of “extended” tones (dangling sixths and ninths), anticipations, and substitute chords (which became important for the next generation, led by players like Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins). Armstrong was precise enough about harmony to satisfy the ears of Peyton, who disdained “discordant jazz,” but also loose enough to be innovative. The unspoken balance alluded to here would remain active in jazz solo playing through bebop and beyond, as musicians discovered ways of using harmony that were very different from its use in the popular songs they performed every day. By using harmony, first, to establish a connection between fixed and variable, and, second, to find ways of detaching variable from fixed, they transformed common-practice tonality in ways that had never been imagined before. An educated observer might have believed, in the early twentieth century, that common-practice tonality was a dead system, with nowhere left to develop. Armstrong and his followers proved that wrong.

  It is the priority of the fixed and variable model that defines Armstrong’s creative breakthrough in the mid-1920s as an intensification of West African musical values, and it is important to note that things did not have to turn out this way. It was hardly inevitable that the future of jazz would be shaped by someone so thoroughly tutored in the vernacular from New Orleans. Joe Smith, Armstrong’s rival in New York, was content to lay his phrases down in neat modules of two and four and deck them out with eccentric garnishes, chasing after the style of beautiful melody that was working so well for Whiteman, Lopez, and Henderson. So were many white players; Frank Teschemacher, for example, a prominent saxophonist in the 1920s, developed an influential style that was similar in this regard. What Armstrong accomplished was modern in the mid-1920s, and it still sounds modern today, in spite of the many redefinitions of jazz that have come and gone over the decades. The reason is the integrity of his commitment to the fixed and variable model, which commands the attention of many musicians still working at the highest creative levels. When this is no longer the case, Armstrong will no longer sound modern.

  What will jazz melody be like? Joplin showed how vigorous the fixed and variable model could be through written composition, with the scope of conflict between the two levels limited to the measure. Based on that, he contributed a highly influential model for ragtime. Armstrong took the material of breaks, fillins, and obbligatos, derived from the ear-playing tradition of New Orleans, combined that with creative manipulation of harmony, and offered an equally influential model for jazz—to be more precise, he offered a modern, African-American melodic model for jazz.

  Like virtually all jazz models during the 1920s, his was inevitably touched by concepts about race. It is often difficult to work with the ideological impact of race at the level of musical detail, but in this case the broad outlines are clear enough. Armstrong’s embrace of the fixed and variable model had something to do with confidence in his own heritage, just as Joplin’s more conservative position, 20 years earlier, had something to do with his interest in matching the Eurocentric classics at their own game. What seemed right for Armstrong in the 1920s needed adjusting a few years later, in the early 1930s, when he moved into white markets on a national level. Indeed, one amazing thing about him was his ability to adapt. Hello Dolly has little to do with the fixed and variable model, and that is no accident.

  His modern jazz was rewarded handsomely at the Vendome and the Sunset, for different but connected reasons. Both audiences were interested in black music. Both would have understood what Duke Ellington meant when he said that the only definition of jazz he could come up with was “music with an African foundation which came out of an American environment.”72 The intensity of Armstrong’s commitment to the fixed and variable model, and the obvious location of his creativity in the realm of the ear-playing vernacular, set off his music from white styles and made it perfect for serving a modern black identity. He did not simply sustain a connection to the African past, he intensified that connection. He offered at an unspoken, musical level a new way of being black that was assertive, intelligent, and accomplished. He offered more than simple “heat,” and he clearly distinguished his modern black identity from similar identities formed through blues, ragtime, and the beautiful melody of Henderson and his peers.

  This is one of the reasons why analysis of musical style matters. A precise investigation of musical style can demonstrate how music accomplishes cultural work at a very deep level, deep enough for long-lasting results. In the present case, stylistic analysis helps expose the inadequacy of talk about jazz as a mongrelized, multicultural, Creole hybrid, the kind of lame analysis that is so common nowadays and so dramatically at odds with the experience of someone like Armstrong, who grew up during a time and at a place where it was dangerous to be intelligent, assertive, and black, where to be called mongrel was no compliment. Music probably mattered more than we will ever know.

  Armstrong’s daunting mix of imaginative variety, ear-catching conversations of notes, and forbidding density was unified by his rigorous commitment to the fixed and variable model. “How high a goal can an artist set himself and get agreement on from people?” asked pianist Chick Corea many decades later. “That’s a broad question and defines a very high purpose for the artist.” In the mid-1920s Armstrong was leading the way, in spite of the fact that people didn’t initially understand what he was doing. His drive toward a new and modern musical invention made him the greatest master of melody in the African-American tradition since Joplin. And it made him the central figure in the history of jazz solo playing.

  SEVEN

  “Some
Kind of a God”

  A musician in Chicago in the early twenties were treated

  and respected just like some kind of a God.

  —Louis Armstrong

  The summer of 1927 was busy and fruitful. On June 4, Armstrong and his orchestra appeared at the Vincennes Hotel, East 36th Street, and on June 9 they played for a victory celebration for mayor “Big Bill” Thompson at the Café de Paris (in the former Lincoln Gardens). Also in June a young Cab Calloway, described as a “juvenile tenor,” joined the Sunset regulars as a singer alongside Adelaide Hall, Jazz Lips Richardson, Brown and McGraw, and Mae Alix. On July 4 Armstrong took his orchestra out again, this time for a breakfast dance at the venue known as Alvin Dansant.

  But that performance was done under duress. About three months earlier Lillian had traveled to New Orleans to bring Armstrong’s mother back to Chicago, so that they could care for her in what would be her final illness. May Ann died on July 6, 1927, at the house her son and his wife owned, at 421 East 44th Street.73 She was forty-four years old. The funeral was conducted by Rev. Prentice A. Bryson, pastor of Carter Temple CME church, and she was buried in Lincoln Cemetery.

  Armstrong did not record for posterity the thoughts that went through his mind at this moment. Perhaps he remembered May Ann’s vigilance in looking out for him from the moment he reunited with her, around age five, until she saw him off at the train station in August 1922. Perhaps he remembered attending church and learning to sing there, or his first parade with the Waif’s Home band, when somebody ran to wake her so she could witness his triumphant debut on lead cornet. She had taught him tricks for keeping good health, how to hold his liquor, how to stay out of trouble, how to defend himself. She advised him to be himself, not put on airs, not envy others, be comfortable with how he looked, and stay true to the culture he grew up with. “Oh what a sweet and helpful girl May Ann was,” he remembered 40 years later. “Only tears I ever shed was when I saw ’em lower her into that ground.”