Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Recordings did not take the place of live music making, but became an entwined supplement. They could not carry the strong physical presence of the performer—Bessie Smith with head bowed, presiding over a hushed audience who waited for her to unleash her power; or Armstrong’s bearing, “the way he carried himself, like somebody bragging and all, and saying ‘look, I am good.’” And they could not fulfill one of the central goals of the African-American musical vernacular—a musical and kinetic dialogue among those present. The centrality of musically charged social interaction was actually being challenged by the formidable skill of great practitioners like these. One thing is certain: the normal condition of musical life today, with technological mediation as standard, would have seemed bizarre to these record buyers. Recordings did not have everything, but with vigorous music making opportunities around, that wasn’t a problem.

  The status of a recording in this environment was very different than it is today. Being relatively new and relatively (to today) expensive, the recording was special and less taken for granted. The machine and the disc were both objects of value, something to show off. They brought the owner into the modern technological age. The disc indicated commercial success for the artist, who had emerged out of the pack to take position in the top tier of the entertainment world.

  And it was, in important ways, a northern world. It was not simply coincidence that jazz from New Orleans did not get recorded until the musicians left the city for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. There was something nonindustrial about New Orleans—decidedly, there still is today—and there was something industrial, forward-looking, and legitimizing about the northern places from which phonograph records emerged. In this way the discs were symbols of the Great Migration no less than the Defender, and they picked up some of the aura of that social movement.120 It was a perfect match, Armstrong’s modern jazz carried through the sprawling territories of race record–buying African America by little discs that were, themselves, emblems of modernity and of the Great Migration. A three-minute record supplied emotional texture for one’s imagined place in a vast community of black people.

  The recordings lost the aura of their original performing context, and that was not necessarily a bad thing. A stunning solo like Big Butter and Egg Man from the West lost the primitivist trappings of the Sunset Café; instead, the disc carried the shiny glow of modern technology and high-level commercial success. At home the listener was invited to create a private context in her imagination. We have practically no documentation about this kind of listening experience, aside from the testimony of dozens of musicians who were interviewed precisely because they were established musicians who had been active during this period. In New Orleans, trumpeter Bob Watts took lessons with Henry “Red” Allen twice a week, learning by ear, the two of them playing along with Armstrong’s solos. Watts became known as “Little Louis Armstrong, Junior,” a phrase he had embossed in gold letters on his trumpet case. When twenty-year-old Texan Oran “Hot Lips” Page arrived in Kansas City from Dallas in 1930, he could play all of Armstrong’s solos note for note. “If you put one in one room and one in another, you could hardly tell them apart,” remembered Budd Johnson. “I thought he was the greatest thing I ever heard,” said Cootie Williams from Alabama. “Nearly everyone had an idol, and he was my idol.” In Texas, Sammy Price believed that Armstrong had “emancipated the jazz musician.”

  Because the Hot Five series was directed toward African Americans in the Deep South (and their relatives who had moved north), it highlighted blues and collective improvisation. The recordings yielded little of the tonal beauty of Armstrong’s cornet and nothing of his charismatic presence, but they captured his modern melodic idiom in splendid detail, melody that included blues features and dialogic principles in abstract designs on a new level of sophistication. Thus, the nature of Armstrong’s phonographic supplement to the mainstream values of African-American participatory music making becomes clear: it was primarily a melodic supplement. The recordings were good at preserving melodies, and he was good at creating them. They demonstrated that there were no limits to African-American achievement. The solos matched the terms of sophistication of white achievement while belonging entirely to the black vernacular. They must have resonated in this way in the fields where people worked and the streets where they scatted and patted Juba. Shoeshine boys on Royal Street in New Orleans tapped out the rhythms of his solos as they serviced their customers.What began, in November 1925, as a letter home turned into something like a declaration of racial progress.

  Big Butter and Egg Man (Courtesy of Ron L’Herault)

  The recordings focused attention on Armstrong’s new melodic idiom, they captured the vernacular qualities of that idiom, they offered repeatable exposure to its challenging complexity, they confirmed the northern, legitimizing status of his invention, and they put his achievement into historical play, a way to let the staying power of his music go to work. This was how recordings helped make him modern and also the central figure in the history of jazz solo playing.

  Race records came to an end for Armstrong, an ominous sign that there would be less and less place for his African-American fans during the next few years, as he played mostly in white venues. A trip to Paris was announced in April 1930. It did not materialize, at least not immediately, but instead Rockwell hooked an even bigger fish: the chance to make a movie in California. Previous biographers have wondered what drove him out to the West Coast, but there is really no doubt. It was the talkies, which were now giving African-American dance bands the chance to extend their reputations beyond what records and radio could do; Ellington’s band, for example, took the same trip in the summer of 1930. Ex-Flame would become the first of many films for Armstrong. Yet this part of his career would truly be a mixed blessing, as movies helped lift him more fully into white stardom while simultaneously dragging him down with the worst racial stereotyping America had to offer.

  NINE

  The Rosetta Stone

  [Armstrong] found the Rosetta stone. He could translate everything.

  He could find the good in the worst material.

  —Sonny Rollins

  Armstrong left Chicago for Los Angeles in early July 1930. “To go to California was like going to Tibet now,” explained Milt Hinton. “It was all trains, a two or three day trip by train from Chicago to Los Angeles.” He arrived at the Dunbar Hotel (4025 South Central Avenue), a nerve center for African-American entertainers and his home for the next ten months, with a wallet full of cash. Lillian lived there with him, although their relationship was fitfully fluid. She had a boyfriend with whom she spent a bit of time during the California year, and at some point Alpha showed up, unannounced, saying that she had been missing Louis in Chicago, so she quit her job as a chorus girl and hopped on a train. Please don’t be mad, she begged him. To the contrary, he was delighted and promptly found her an apartment. “The Lord Must have sent her out there to me,” he quipped.

  The Dunbar was the only hotel west of the Mississippi servicing African Americans, and in 1930 it was going strong. It had an elegant lobby with tapestries and murals, an attractive dining room seating 100, a nice bar, barbershop, flower shop, and 100 guest rooms. To W. E. B. Du Bois, the Dunbar was “an extraordinary surprise to people fed on ugliness—ugly schools, ugly churches, ugly streets, ugly insults. We were prepared for—well, something that didn’t leak, that was hastily clean and too new for vermin. And we entered a beautiful new inn with a soul.” Armstrong got a kick out of the miniature golf course, toking on marijuana cigarettes while he putted around with his friends. Guests at the Dunbar while he was there included Stepin Fetchit, Walter Richardson, Jazz Lips Richardson, and eighteen-year-old Nina Mae McKinney, fresh from a starring role in King Vidor’s Hallelujah. Duke Ellington was there in July and August, while his band worked for RKO Pictures, which had apparently done well with the movie Black and Tan from December 1929. Ellington’s 1930 assignment was Check and Double Check, starri
ng Amos ’n’ Andy.

  On the day of his arrival, Armstrong checked into the Dunbar and quickly buddied up with a soldier who showed him around town. They stopped by a barbershop where Curtis Mosby, a bandleader who was running a nightclub adjacent to the Dunbar called the Apex, happened to be getting a haircut. When the soldier introduced Armstrong, Mosby was obviously flustered. Mosby had been running an act where he imitated Louis’s singing, and now the real thing was standing in front of him. He mumbled something about giving Armstrong a free meal at the Apex, which both the soldier and Armstrong found insulting. Armstrong implied that he would have started working at Mosby’s club, if Mosby had been interested.

  What lured him to Los Angeles was the movies—a “special featured part in a new picture at one of the largest studios,” as one article described it. He also settled into a nightly gig at Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club, in Culver City, a 30-minute drive from the Dunbar. Beginning July 10, the Evening Herald covered his forthcoming debut with nine articles in 19 days, all of them dutifully clipped by Lillian and pasted into her scrapbook. Rockwell trotted out his new publicity slogan: “Louis Armstrong, hailed as one of the world’s great cornet players, ‘king of the trumpet,’ master of modernism and creator of his own song style.”

  Sebastian’s Cotton Club was run as a West Coast imitation of the legendary Harlem venue, with first-rate floor shows and whites-only admission. When Frankye Marilyn Whitlock and Harry Levette filed their regular columns for African-American newspapers back east, their comments on the Cotton Club were based on what they could gather from the radio. Trumpeter Cootie Williams, in town with the Ellington band, remembered dropping his miniature golf clubs at the Dunbar and racing to the radio when it was time for Armstrong to play, and Lillian listened on the radio, too. In spite of the segregation, musicians remembered the 1,200-seat Cotton Club fondly, especially for the generous helpings of excellent food. Sebastian, a gregarious Italian, liked to stand in the doorway to greet people, framed by a spotlight so that you could see his tall figure as you approached.

  Local policemen ate for free, a strategic move that helped protect a secret gambling room for high-rollers, where Howard Hughes was a regular. Hughes liked to have some fun with Dudley Dickerson, a comedian-dancer who weighed 260 pounds and performed in ballet shoes. Hughes and his entourage sat at their table and heated up silver dollars with a candle until they glowed. Then they threw them on the floor for Dickerson to pick up between his toes. Dickerson was supposed to yell out, “Oh, that’s a hot one!,” causing everyone at Hughes’s table to burst into laughter.

  Forty entertainers ran a revue that changed every two to four weeks. The entertainers were identified as “Creole,” a little nod toward New Orleans that may have had something to do with the train lines that ran directly from the Crescent City to Los Angeles. Rehearsals for new shows began at 3:00 in the morning, after the night’s work was finished, and carried on until midmorning; this went on for three days before each new show. Aurora Greely was in charge of the dancing, with lovely chorines selected from the school she ran. Headliners while Armstrong was there included Baby Mack (a singer married to musician Les Hite), Evelyn Preer (a blues singer), Dick Campbell (a youthful tenor), Rutledge and Taylor, Martha Richie, and Connie and Eddie Anderson. LeRoy Broomfield produced the revues and served as master of ceremonies. Three shows ran every night. Armstrong was the star and got paid $500 per week—“the highest salary ever paid to a musician on the Pacific coast,” according to one clipping.

  He brought along a “plot” for the revue that began on July 17, which must mean that he also brought parts for the musicians. On opening night he “took over affairs, musical and otherwise,” with When You’re Smiling, Exactly Like You, Song of the Islands, and St. Louis Blues. Social dancing was timed for 11:00 p.m. hookups with radio broadcasts. By July 26 he had “taken Southern California by storm,” advertised as “The Last Word in Heat” in 300 cards placed in Red Top taxis.

  The Cotton Club was positioned across Washington Boulevard from the MGM studios, with studios for RKO right down the road. It was patronized by “the newly found rich of Beverly Hills and Hollywood and the motion picture industry,” as saxophonist Marshall Royal described them. Actor George Graham liked to approach Armstrong on the bandstand and demand 40 choruses. Armstrong remembered first meeting Bing Crosby at the Cotton Club. “Patrons have registered with Mr. Sebastian from practically every state in the Union and a number of foreign countries, who state that ‘Louie’ was the magnet who attracted them,” claimed one of Lillian’s clipped articles.

  This audience was certainly more openminded than “Mr. and Mrs. State” who had been cool to his act at Loew’s in Manhattan a few months before, more interested in the radical transformations he was experimenting with. There were, of course, limits to their openmindedness. White celebrities loved his entertainment, but few were willing to socialize with him. Director James Cruze (The Covered Wagon, I Cover the Waterfront) was one of the few who invited him to his home. “The few [white] parties I did go to left a sour taste in my mouth,” Armstrong remembered. “Somebody would always come up with a few drinks in him and say, ‘Y’know, I once had a Colored Mammy.’” “You felt they wouldn’t want you in their kitchens, or in their pools.”

  The band included two young players destined for toptier careers. Trombonist Lawrence Brown, who played for a long time in Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and drummer/vibraphonist Lionel Hampton were each twenty-two years old when Armstrong arrived.121 “I discovered the greatness of those two youngsters the very first day I went to rehearsal,” Armstrong remembered. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1908, Hampton moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago when he was eleven, and came to musical maturity under Armstrong’s spell at the Vendome Theater. In Los Angeles, during rehearsal for Song of the Islands, Hampton started playing a vibraphone, reproducing Armstrong’s solo from the recording. Impressed, Armstrong told him, “When I sing, you play behind me like that.” Cootie Williams considered this unit to be the very best of Armstrong’s many backup bands over the years. Armstrong liked the band’s phrasing, tone, endurance, and “willingness and the spirit that the eastern musicians or the southern musicians used to have before they got to Broadway and became stinkers, looking for power and egotisms, the desire to do practically anything but enjoy their first love, which is their instrument.”

  In August 1922 Armstrong had been introduced to the patrons of Lincoln Gardens with a featured blues solo. In late 1925, when he returned to Chicago after his year with Henderson, he stepped into the OKeh studio and explained to Richard Jones that he didn’t need any rehearsal for the blues numbers they would be recording that day. On his return visit to New York in March 1929, he again knocked off a blues right there in the studio. Something similar was waiting for him with his first California recording, on July 16, 1930: a one-off blues with white singer and songwriter Jimmie Rodgers and Lillian on piano. The three of them recorded Blue Yodel Number 9 (Standin’ on the Corner). Armstrong was under contract with OKeh Records, and this session was for Victor; hence his name was not listed on the disc.

  Rodgers, a hot commodity in 1930, must have found out that Armstrong was in town and requested his participation. The moment was heavily laden with racist ideologies. Two southern musicians found themselves in a recording studio in exotic Los Angeles. The white one was stretching out with his “Blue Yodel” series as a creative extension of blackfaced minstrelsy; the black one was making a comfortable berth for himself by blues-crooning pop hits for white America, the latest musician to benefit from a long history of white fascination with “real Negroes.” In Blue Yodel Number 9 Rodgers impersonates a black man standing on the corner of Beale and Main Streets in Memphis. It is a famous recording, but Armstrong is hardly distinguished. Rodgers’s song is full of irregular phrases, and Lillian is able to follow them pretty well; she was undoubtedly using a lead sheet. But Armstrong, either inattentive to the notation or declining access t
o it and preferring to play by ear, is frequently thrown off. You can almost hear him breathe a sigh of relief when he settles into his solo chorus in the middle—the only regular 12-bar chorus in the entire performance.

  The next recording session was a proper OKeh introduction of the new band on July 21. Armstrong would record 12 titles with the Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra between July 1930 and March 1931, each released, it seems, very soon after recording. The July 21 offerings were I’m a Ding Dong Daddy (from Dumas) and I’m in the Market for You. Ding Dong was probably a piece from his spring tours; the Cotton Club band was certainly using charts that he knew already. I’m in the Market for You had just been introduced through the film High Society Blues. On Ding Dong he sings “I done forgot the words” after a sprightly scat interlude, putting onto record what may have already become the explanation for how he supposedly invented scat on the Heebie Jeebies recording of 1926.122 It is an explicit play to the assumptions of his audience, who might have grown up with colored mammies and were now fascinated by his seemingly spontaneous outpourings of musical primitivism. (“He rarely has more than a rough idea of the words,” Time magazine assured its readers in June 1932.) You can almost hear the chortlings from Howard Hughes’s table, though it is easy to imagine some awareness at the Cotton Club that it was all an act, a gesture of recognition from one performer to another.

  This scat solo was certainly not spontaneous. The vocal has some lovely stretches of additive rhythm (CD 1:22), recalling a similar passage in Hotter Than That from 1928. Lawrence Brown gets a chance to show off his trombone (he has an even better solo on I’m in the Market for You), and Armstrong ends the performance with a trumpet solo that builds through four continuous choruses, with plenty of eccentric patterning and elegant dips and dives. My favorite chorus is the second one (CD 2:14), but what is most impressive is the cumulative effect, crafted through sustained familiarity. This solo made a big impression on eighteen-year-old trumpeter Buck Clayton. Ding Dong also became a favorite of Lionel Hampton, who liked to call out from his drums, “One more chorus,” urging Armstrong on with cowbells. Armstrong remembered playing 40 choruses of Ding Dong one evening in Culver City.