Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Breaking into the white market meant heavy emphasis on popular tunes, and Armstrong figured out how to do that while offering something distinctive, something identifiably black yet accessible, just like his own successful performance of Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Hudson. Vocal paraphrase of popular tunes turned out to be the main vehicle for reaching whites, his trumpet in secondary position. There was financial incentive for black musicians during this period to develop multiple styles, especially when white audiences were the target. “We played our jazz numbers but we also played tunes of the day and even waltzes,” reflected Earl Hines. “We did a little bit of everything and became very popular.” The Defender praised Ellington’s orchestra in late 1931: “They can play ‘sweet’ and discreet jazz in the manner of Paul Whiteman, then turn about and twist their music into weird and primitive strains, with all the barbaric rhythm of the jungle.”

  It was a get-ahead decade, and Armstrong was the get-ahead soloist. Nobody got ahead of him—the competitive drive that was so much a part of the music scene he grew up with served him well. By the end of 1929 he was on a course toward nationwide white success. In December white trumpeter Jack Purvis, one of the alligators who liked to sit in with black bands, recorded a number called Copyin’ Louis. The February 8, 1930, issue (p. 67) of The New Yorker included brief mention in a section on (otherwise all-white) “popular records” of the OKeh release of St. Louis Blues/After You’ve Gone: “New conceptions of familiar Senegambiana, and there is nothing quite so smoky as Mr. Armstrong’s singing of vocal choruses.” In December 1930 he was written up in Time magazine’s monthly record review, with paragraph one dedicated to opera, paragraph two to Schumann and Ravel, paragraph three to Bach, and paragraph four to Beethoven before a brief turn to four dance records, headed up by Armstrong’s Memories of You, “for those who like hot jazz and husky singing”; again he was the only African American mentioned. The publisher of sheet music for After You’ve Gone bragged about all the artists who had recorded the song, with tiny photographs of “The World’s Greatest Musical Directors” decorating the cover, pictures of 45 different men including Whiteman, Vallée, B. A. Rolfe, Lombardo, Lopez, and Armstrong, who was, once again, the only African American.

  Ironically, his ascent to the top of jazz-age entertainment coincided with the collapse of the jazz age. Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra helped define the jazz age, while Armstrong’s position was much more peripheral; his main orientation was toward the aspirations of African Americans, and his music followed suit. Whites grew more familiar with the sounds of African-American jazz as it had developed from the southern vernacular, and they eventually caught up with him. The tremendous white appreciation he would enjoy in the early 1930s coincided with the bottoming out of the Great Depression. It is sometimes possible to identify how, at deep levels of style and expression, music precisely coordinates with social structures and events. In this case, the stylistic features central to Armstrong’s white appeal during the Depression were pretty much in place before the crash of 1929. He made some adjustments in his reach for large white audiences, but they actually changed more than he did.

  Rockwell took note of Armstrong’s expanding reputation and booked him at various locations in late 1929 and the first half of 1930, joined mostly by local bands.118 Black venues and white venues were both represented, though the balance seems to have tilted white. In December he was in Chicago for triumphant returns at the Regal and the Savoy. In January he played Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. According to a report from Baltimore, “so enchanting was the music produced by the combination and so crowded was the hall, that hundreds of persons stood in front of the orchestra stand and in the balcony the entire period without taking a dance. In front of the orchestra stand the crowd was fourteen persons thick.”

  A week-long performance at Loew’s State Theater, a vaudeville house at Broadway and 45th Street, gathered mixed reviews. The show was headlined by white entertainers George Price and Irene Bordoni, with Armstrong and the Russell musicians replacing Ellington’s band at the last minute. His act included a “peg leg dancer” (Peg Bates) and a “dusky beauty” (Bobbie De Leon), along with a “peppy offering packed with delicious rhythm in the Harlem manner.” Another reviewer found Armstrong’s band inferior to Ellington’s and admitted that, while he may have been popular at Connie’s Inn, “Mr. and Mrs. State were rather cool to him in this show.” His conducting style was “peculiar,” his voice “far from a Rudy Vallée.” St. Louis Blues brought the 18-minute act to a rousing conclusion. In late February he returned to Loew’s with much the same act expanded to 23 minutes, with elaborate scenery, costumes, and lighting. “Arranged in a semicircle, the orchestra opens with an introductory paraphrase, following with a peppy number… . To the strains of Ain’t Misbehavin’ Armstrong makes his entrance.” When You’re Smiling, Some of These Days, and St. Louis Blues were performed.

  On January 24 he recorded Song of the Islands in New York City, with an attractive scat chorus obbligato around the main tune as hummed by several of the musicians. Walter Winchell described the performance as “pashy platter … simply swelegant” in the Daily Mirror. On February 1 came Bessie Couldn’t Help It and Blue Turning Grey Over You, his last recordings with the Russell band until October 1935. A week later he made another splashy return to Chicago to share the Regal stage with Marshall “Garbage” Rogers, of Heah Me Talkin’ to Ya? fame. Armstrong featured a “new stunt,” playing an “octave higher than the orchestra.”

  April 5 brought another visit to the OKeh studio in New York City, which produced a one-off duet with Buck Washington and band versions, with a new set of sidemen, of Hoagy Carmichael’s My Sweet and Jimmy McHugh’s I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me. The band arrangements are riff-based, slightly uptempo, and fresh, relative to the plodding February performances of the Russell group. My Sweet is one of my personal favorites. In the opening chorus Armstrong’s soaring trumpet is the perfect foil to the syncopated riffs, with Washington making nice fillins on piano. There is a wonderful moment in the vocal that was just the kind of thing Billie Holiday was paying close attention to: after several dreamy phrases, he bounces (CD 1:50) into trumpetlike inflections with sprightly articulation. “I just try to put the rhythm of instrumental playing into my voice,” he said in 1932.

  In mid-April he traveled to Detroit for a week, in time to make an appearance at the Monday night “colored ball” at the Graystone Ballroom. And later in the month he appeared at the African-American Pearl Theater, 21st Street and Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, where he offered $5,000 cash to anyone who could match his high-note playing. In May came another New York recording session, his last until 1935. This session produced Indian Cradle Love Song, already cited for its splendid trumpet solo, and a fine version of Exactly Like You, by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, a brand-new song from another Lew Leslie production on Broadway.119 Given the importance of I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, one of the key tunes in his white turn, there is a bit of historical poetry in the fact that this last New York session included another McHugh–Fields song. As with I Can’t Give You, he sings a heavily reconceived version of the tune while the instruments play it straight, in the background.

  Indian Cradle and Exactly Like You were issued on OKeh’s popular series, but it seems like the race series got the two standouts from this session—Dinah and Tiger Rag. The band is largely the same as in the April session, though without Washington, and the arrangements are uptempo, riff-based, and driving. Dinah was one of the most frequently recorded tunes from the 1920s. The simple arrangement here is made up of six choruses, one after the other, with nothing of the fancy introductions, interludes, and arrangement details that fill most of the 20-odd pieces Armstrong had recorded during the past ten months. It was not just the lack of a fancy arrangement that made this an unlikely candidate for OKeh’s popular series; even more of an issue, perhaps, was Armstrong’s stunning vocal transformation of the tune, w
hich is more radical than anything he had ever put on record. His delivery is more distorted, with distinct lyrics, fragments of words, and slurred words blending in and out of scat. The final three choruses feature his trumpet riffing across the static harmonies and throwing in smart quotations as he dances on top of the steady groove.

  Tiger Rag was recorded during the 1920s even more often than Dinah. Armstrong once called Tiger Rag and St. Louis Blues “studies in rhythm.” “I get new ideas about them each time I play them,” he said in 1932, adding that he learned them both in 1917. Again the arrangement is simple, just the kind of thing that local bands accompanying him in Baltimore, Chicago, and elsewhere could easily pick up as soon as he arrived in town for a gig. He must have performed these pieces constantly on tour during the spring of 1930. After the first two strains, the third strain is played five times, the last three given to Armstrong.

  Again musical quotations are thrown around liberally. Tiger Rag was based on an old quadrille, with melodies drawn from various places, and in fact this kind of quotational collage was built into the early history of this genre. As a scholar of early American music put it, “quadrilles consumed melodies at a fearful rate, and it was common practice to make the music up out of bits of popular songs or snatches of opera airs.” In three choruses Armstrong quotes Singing in the Rain, Irish Washerwoman, and Vesti la giubba from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. In the final chorus the band rocks along in call-and-response riffs while Armstrong pumps out a series of high B-flats, relaxed and confident, now on the beat, now a little behind it, now falling away, now leaping higher—22 B-flats in all, by my count, followed by a pop up to high F at the end. Tiger Rag, like St. Louis Blues, was a piece that went way back and then way forward, hanging around until very late in his career, with dozens and dozens of recorded performances.

  Armstrong did not know it then, but Tiger Rag and Dinah were his spectacular farewell to race records, the inexpensive letters back home that played a central role in the career of this eminently modern artist.

  The Modernity of Phonograph Recordings

  The only way we have to connect directly with the sounds of this period is through phonograph recordings, and we train ourselves to overcome their limitations. One theme of this book has been to relate the recordings to what was going on nightly, in Armstrong’s working gigs. Their apparent uniformity is deceptive in this regard: some of them document solos that made him famous at the Vendome, Dreamland, Sunset, Savoy, and Hudson, but many more were ad hoc products of the studio, created on the spot or a day or two in advance. It is important to also think about the phenomenon of the disc itself, for, as a representation of 1920s modernity, recordings had a huge impact not just on Armstrong’s career but on all of jazz. As others have argued, recordings shaped jazz history in fundamental ways. They were as much a part of the texture of modernity as the Great Migration was in Armstrong’s circles, and like that complex social movement they had multiple effects on his music.

  On the production side there was the record company and its hired musicians, brought in for a one-time gig—though in Armstrong’s case this arrangement was, significantly, extended in the spring of 1926 for a full five years. The company knew what it wanted. Above all, it wanted Armstrong’s name. Second, it wanted music that would appeal to the masses of southern blacks (intense blues and collective improvisation), and, third, it did not want to pay royalties. Those were the basics of a low-budget enterprise. They played out in the various ways we have described, shaping ensemble, repertory, and style while leaving many details up to the performers.

  As the musicians entered the studio midmorning, they prepared to make a set of adjustments relative to last night’s theater and cabaret jobs. Instead of facing an audience, they pointed their horns at the cold, impersonal equipment, run by the calculating, penny-counting businessmen who flashed a red light as each performance neared its three-minute limit. “Mike fright” was common in the beginning. The engineer positioned the musicians around the room in unfamiliar configurations. They struggled to hear each other, and the diminished rhythm section made things even harder. The enterprise was not designed to produce epoch-making statements, though sometimes that happened anyway.

  It would be a mistake to conceive this setting as uniformly negative. The experiment of Heebie Jeebies was more likely to be launched in the OKeh studio than at the Vendome Theater; in this case, the impersonal setting emboldened Armstrong. Having been raised with the practice of working out solos and arrangements over time, getting them right and then sticking with them, he regarded a recording as a place to put forward his best work. Keppard and Oliver were suspicious, afraid of theft. But Armstrong relaxed into his five-year contract with the confidence of a musician who knew that the density, quickness, and range of his solos made them difficult to copy, and that there would always be more ideas coming along, like streetcars.

  Few hot soloists were suited to the demands of a five-year contract, with the necessity to create new product every few months. OKeh’s insistence on tunes that came cheaply actually played to Armstrong’s strength. It didn’t matter that the compositions themselves were worthless; he was expected to carry the performance on his own, and that is what he did. The repeatability of the recording gave his audience a chance to get to know the solos very well, which in turn required him to come up with new ones. It was a special dimension of the phonograph, unlike live performance and unlike radio.

  Whether or not Armstrong actually did put his best material on record depended on the OKeh executives. Poor Little Rich Girl got everybody’s attention at the Vendome and Sunset, but he did not record it, since OKeh was not interested in paying royalties to Noel Coward. With Venable’s Big Butter and Egg Man from the West and Oliver’s West End Blues, we can assume that the composers, each on the spot in Chicago and each hoping for the lift that Armstrong’s performance and OKeh’s distribution could give them, cut a deal. Within these limitations OKeh welcomed Armstrong’s best. The three-minute scope of the commercial product encouraged cutting out showy fluff—200 high C’s ripped off one after the other. We may assume that recordings attracted a good percentage of his best work, with the obvious exception of multiple-chorus performances, though flashes of that kind of energy emerged in St. Louis Blues, Dinah, and Tiger Rag.

  The two magical facts of the phonograph were, first, its ability to capture unnotatable techniques of expression in the African-American musical vernacular, and, second, its ability to repeat the performance. Twenty-five years earlier, Joplin’s creative energy was matched to the technologies of sheet music and piano rolls. Armstrong tried to follow that model, writing lead sheets on the back steps of Lillian’s apartment and sending them to Washington, D.C., for copyright, but by 1926 it was clear that the phonograph record suited his creative talents much better. Cornet Chop Suey was a strong accomplishment, but there was no way that the intricacies of Big Butter and Egg Man, full of the unnotatable power of blues and eccentric melody, were going to be jotted down on paper and sold for profit. Once race record companies realized that they could make money selling music from the African-American vernacular, a new kind of history of recorded blues and jazz unfolded, giving prominence to the intensity of blue notes and the detachment of blues phrasing, to the wild richness of collective improvisation that nevertheless seemed like it had been made with micrometer calipers, and to the workings of eccentric melody conditioned by the fixed and variable model.

  Recordings preserved all of that, and they preserved the designs of Armstrong’s solos, allowing the purchaser to repeat the performance and get familiar with his modern music at her leisure. The cyclonic density of his special choruses made them challenging to listen to, and people didn’t know how to respond at first, as Clyde Bernhardt and Louis Metcalf tell us. As he upped the ante with greater density, wilder eccentricity, and overwhelming variety, repeated listening became proportionately more rewarding. White alligators could sit ringside at the Sunset, listen to his solos night
after night, and memorize them, and anyone with a record player could do something similar.

  Repeated listening to recordings offered the possibility to absorb the full force of his innovative creations after the initial shock of radical novelty subsided. Our familiarity with the Hot Five corpus today is the same familiarity that was available in the 1920s. The impact of recording technology on jazz was thus fundamentally different than it was on classical music. In jazz, recordings preserved and distributed musical expression that could not be captured through notation; in classical music, they cheapened the highbrow artistic aura. Aspiring jazz musicians studied recordings just as aspiring classical composers studied scores. This was how the power of Armstrong’s new melodic idiom extended through several generations of jazz solo playing. Without recordings, it would not have happened in this way.

  Richard Wright wrote about reading novels as a teenager in Jackson, Mississippi, after an Irish coworker lent him a library card. “It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself,” Wright remembered. How often did something like that play out with race recordings during the 1920s? The recordings must have had far greater impact on working-class African Americans than novels, plays, paintings, speeches, dancing, and poetry—greater in the sense of sheer numbers of people who were involved and how much the experience mattered. Culturally, one has the sense that only religion counted more.