Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The new show in August was called Hitting the High Spots with Louis Armstrong. True to form, he was marking his turf with his miraculously high range. The $5,000 he offered in April to anyone in Philadelphia who could match his high range was not collected, and it is unlikely that there were any challengers in Los Angeles. Lillian remembered hearing Tiger Rag on the radio and being astonished when he made his usual high note and then just kept going, higher still.

  In August, Sebastian hired Charles Lawrence to be the new musical director, and we can assume that his work is preserved in the band’s recordings from that month. The arrangements didn’t have to be complicated or even interesting; expectations were very different than they had been for the Henderson band in the mid-1920s, where there was a need to individualize each arrangement. Armstrong was now the main point of every performance, and a creative arrangement would only get in the way. Featured soloists were wary of “overloading the arrangement,” and for good reason: attention grabbed by the arrangement was attention taken away from the soloist. “If he’d wanted [fancier arrangements] he’d have brought them,” explained saxophonist George James. Armstrong wanted his accompanists to stay under, just as he himself had done with such loyal perfection so many times in the past. When Lionel Hampton got a little too excited with a vibraphone obbligato for the October 1930 recording of Memories of You, Armstrong told him to hold back. Years later he regretted the decision and wished he had let the youngster play out.123

  In addition to presenting Armstrong properly, the job of the arranger was to emphasize the tune that was the basis for the entire performance. The formula for mainstream white success that worked so well with I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, in March 1929, was simple but effective: play the chorus of the song, in the foreground or the background, straight or embellished, again and again. The performance could be dressed up with introductions, interludes, and codas, but none of these should be very long. Armstrong sings a vocal chorus on every one of the California recordings, paraphrasing the song, and he plays plenty of paraphrase of the same tunes with his trumpet.

  It was now mainstream popular songs, all the time. In this regard the situation was not that different from the old days with Henderson. The Henderson band had more emphasis on distinctive arrangements and on variety, and the biggest difference of all was tempo. With the wind knocked out of the roaring twenties by the Great Depression, the music slowed down. The “off-time fox trot” or “slow fox trot” was popular around 1930; there is no evidence that the celebrated Lindy Hop, the latest thing in Harlem, was known at Sebastian’s.124

  The crooners led the move to moderate tempos. “The old-style jazz singer, the speed-manic of St. Vitus movements, has passed on to a better world,” wrote Martha Gellhorn in 1929. “It is a relief to have a man sing like a human being and not like an hydraulic drill.” From Armstrong’s California year, the most successful performances, by popular acclaim and in his own opinion, are delivered in slow to moderate tempos. It was in ballads like Confessin’ That I Love You, If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight), Memories of You, and Sweethearts on Parade that his distinctive way of crooning came through most powerfully. In 1930 he had arrived at a place where few African-American musicians could go. For most, the possibility of recording this side of their book of arrangements simply did not exist.

  Confessin’ That I Love You, from August, was the first Armstrong recording Buck Clayton ever heard, walking down Central Avenue as he passed by a shop window. “I just stopped still and stood listening to that golden tone,” he remembered. “I had never heard anyone play with such soul.” The entire performance impressed him, from Ceele Burke’s guitar introduction through Armstrong’s vocal chorus and the trumpet solos.

  African Americans got a chance to see him in August at the Appomattox Country Club, promoted as “the finest colored recreational club resort in the world,” and at Los Angeles’s Loew’s State Theater, where the featured film was Way Out West. A reviewer from the Evening Herald described his technique of sound production: “He not only expands his cheeks to produce his silver notes, but his neck, also. He can give a perfect imitation of the bullfrog’s throat swelling out and in as he hits notes unbelievably high and pleasing. In addition, he is one of the best showmen I have seen at the head of an orchestra. He has only a husky voice to supplement his trumpet in his musical offering. But he has a sure-fire personality and a native instinct for blues in addition.”

  Life was good in southern California. Curtis Mosby drove around town showing off his new automobile radio, a rare thing. In August Armstrong played a round of miniature golf at the Dunbar in a fivesome filled out with his wife, Ellington, May “Miss Snakehips” Diggs, and Myrner Rosseau. White musicians in the Cotton Club audience scooped up his discarded handkerchiefs as souvenirs.

  The primary reason that both Ellington and Armstrong were drawn to California was to make movies; secondary were the excellent rewards for live performance. Ambitious musicians usually follow the big bucks, and these two were no exception. Hollywood was the perfect antidote to the financial gloom smothering the country. When Armstrong arrived, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson had just finished his debut film, Dixiana. Dozens of black entertainers came and went for movie work during his California year: Stepin Fetchit, Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, Nina Mae McKinney, Clarence Muse (“paving the way for the Race in the motion picture industry,” as the Defender put it), Walter Richardson, John Hall’s 41-voice choir, the Four Covans, Baby Mack, Miller and Lyles, and Little Farina (Allen Hoskins of Our Gang).

  Armstrong began making movies in early September 1930. Dave Peyton liked to dish out uplifting advice to aspiring musicians in the Defender, and Harry Levette was now doing something similar for aspiring actors. “Blessings: Actors who quietly mind their own business and wait for order on the movie lots,” Levette wrote in the Afro-American. “Pests: Actors who loudly tell their own and everyone else’s business, ‘hog’ the camera, play, attempt flirtations with white extras, etc.” In the wake of Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah, both made with largely black casts in 1929, film optimism was high in the African-American community. The Ellington Orchestra pulled in $27,500 for four weeks of work on Check and Double Check, which included an effective ballroom segment featuring the band playing Old Man Blues. With stars Amos ’n’ Andy, the film surely boosted Ellington’s reputation.

  Disappointingly, Ex-Flame did not do the same for Armstrong. He received no mention in the credits, and a review in Variety included barely a nod to a “colored orchestra.” The Los Angeles Times did applaud “some merry moments from Louis Armstrong and his jazz band.” A publicity still shows an animated group of musicians with Armstrong standing at the center, but the group is identified as “Les Hite and His Orchestra,” with no mention of Armstrong. Advertised as “Adults Only, Censor’s Orders,” the RKO film previewed in Los Angeles in late October, to poor reviews. Sadly, no copies of the film survive today.

  In October, Louis Armstrong and his Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra recorded Body and Soul, Memories of You, and You’re Lucky to Me. Body and Soul was new and popular, with at least eight recordings released already. Most, including Armstrong’s, were done in moderately uptempo fox trot time. In the first chorus, the sax section plays the melody straight while Armstrong paraphrases it in the heterophonic style used for I Can’t Give You Anything but Love from the previous year. At the end of the phrase (CD 0:23) he dashes off double-time fill before moving into lively second playing against the continued melody from the saxophones; heterophony then returns by the end of the phrase (CD 0:34). At the bridge the band slips into a chordal background, yielding the melody to him, and for the return of the main theme it is only saxophones as he puts down his trumpet and prepares to sing. It is somewhat amazing that the texture of heterophony, so closely associated with African-American congregational practices and so inherently funky, was holding strong at the Sebastian’s slick new Cotton Club in 1930. In Armstrong’s vocal chorus
for Body and Soul, the same format is used: George Orendorff plays the melody straight on solo trumpet while Armstrong inventively and dynamically rags the tune. Body and Soul was another of Buck Clayton’s favorites from the California year, and he especially admired this combination of Orendorff and Armstrong. In his trumpet solo Armstrong stays very close to the tune; he probably felt constricted by the unusual and challenging harmonies of the original.

  In the uptempo You’re Lucky to Me, Armstrong is understated and clever. His final solo ends with a big, rising glissando, one continuous blur of pitches, like a trombone. Earlier in 1930 the Baltimore Afro-American casually mentioned how trumpeters Sidney De Paris (Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Ten) and Obie Austin (Bill Brownie’s Boys) were giving Armstrong a run for his money on the high end of the instrument, and doing so with a particular flair. “They have a new and original minor slur to those same high notes that is fast becoming popular with all professionals who can master them.”

  Trombones are built for glissandos; trumpets are not. Buck Clayton was convinced that his hero must have been using a special instrument equipped with a slide. He decided to try and meet him, to ask how he did it. He managed to get to know one of the Cotton Club performers, who told him to show up at six o’clock; he would introduce him to Armstrong in his dressing room. “How do you make your trumpet sound like a soprano trombone?” Clayton asked. Armstrong gave him an autographed picture and told him he would explain—“but if we were down in New Orleans, I wouldn’t,” he cautioned. “In New Orleans whenever I did it, I’d put a handkerchief over my valves so nobody could see how I did it.” The two of them casually trotted down to the restroom and Armstrong entered a stall, beckoning his young admirer to follow. There he lit up a joint and insisted that Clayton share some of it. Sufficiently relaxed, he demonstrated his technique of pushing the valves halfway down while tightening his lips. Clayton was so upset when he got home that he dropped down on his knees and prayed that the marijuana would not set him on a path to drug addiction.

  “This Whole Second Book Might Be About Nothing but Gage”

  On the evening of November 13, during intermission at the Cotton Club, Armstrong and a white drummer named Vic Berton strolled over to the parking lot to smoke a joint. As soon as they lit up, two detectives popped out from behind a car and arrested them for possession of marijuana. Armstrong was allowed to finish out his night of work before they hauled him off to jail around 3:00 a.m.

  On the drive downtown he politely asked the detective not to hit him in the mouth, since, he explained, this could destroy his career. The detective took a protective stance and told him that the only reason this whole thing happened was that a rival bandleader, hurting for business, had set him up. Armstrong spent the night in jail and was released on $500 bail, charged with a felony punishable by “not less than six months and no more than six years in the penitentiary,” as the Defender noted, for having in his possession the “flowering tops and leaves of Indian Hemp.” A trumpeter named Red Mack, who had developed an act imitating Armstrong’s voice and trumpet, filled in for him on the radio broadcast that night.

  As noted in Chapter 7, Armstrong had started using marijuana regularly in 1928 at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago. He became a lifelong, daily user. “[Louis] smoked pot just like you smoke regular cigarettes,” reported Pops Foster. In 1953, after he finished his autobiography Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, he began working on a sequel. “This whole second book might be about nothing but gage,” he wrote, “gage” being one of many names for marijuana. But his manager, Joe Glaser, was not going to allow that. Armstrong had the example of Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography in front of him, and he was impressed by Mezzrow’s candor: why couldn’t he be just as honest? Neither Glaser nor Armstrong would give in, and the book was held hostage to gage. “Joe keeps asking about the book but it won’t be done until he lets that part stay in,” he told an interviewer. In a tape recording made barely a year before he died and clearly intended for public disclosure, he spoke candidly about his fondness for pot.125 “The respect for gage will stay with me forever,” he says. “My life has always been an open book, so I have nothing to hide. And well Mary Wana honey, you sure was good and I enjoyed you berry, berry, very much.”

  Frank Sebastien’s Cotton Club (The Frank Driggs Collection)

  When he joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1922, none of his colleagues was smoking marijuana. Contrary to often-repeated claims, the musicians in his New Orleanian circles simply did not use it. “Some of the white musicians wanted me to use it,” remembered Baby Dodds, speaking of his time in Chicago. White musicians from New Orleans like Leon Roppolo were into pot (“Roppolo was probably higher than a kite when he made Tin Roof,” suggested bandleader Sig Meyer, “invention seems weak”), but as a rule they kept their distance from the black New Orleanians. The whites who were eager to share their fondness for gage with Baby Dodds and Armstrong were the young alligators from the North—Mezz Mezzrow, Hoagy Carmichael, Bud Jacobson, Jess Stacey, Gene Krupa, and others. Mezzrow eventually became Armstrong’s supplier, sending discreet packages by mail when Armstrong toured.126

  By the time of the California arrest, tension had been building nationally over marijuana. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was established in summer 1930, with Harry Anslinger appointed commissioner by President Hoover. A few years later Anslinger would write an article entitled “Marijuana: Assassin of Youth.” In October 1930, a newspaper article in distant Norfolk, Virginia, painted lurid pictures of “weird, bizarre, reckless and freakish parties that have been going on among certain members of the colored screen and stage colony” in Los Angeles. The report ended with an informational briefing on marijuana, “the most prevalent form of dope using here on the border.” The Defender ran an article in September describing “orgies of perversion” fueled by marijuana, placing them at a “leading hotel,” which could only have been the Dunbar, where a “young girl whose face has been seen a great deal here of late on the screen” (Nina Mae McKinney?) dropped her pajama pants “for the entertainment of other guests.” On November 2 the California Eagle approvingly wrote about the first local raid on suppliers of the “dope evil,” which, according to the article, was being grown by Mexicans in their backyards and distributed by whites.

  Armstrong’s trial was scheduled for January and then postponed until March 10. Sebastian had been trying to secure an extended contract with Armstrong from the beginning, and now he finally got at least some of what he wanted, with Armstrong bound to remain in Los Angeles until the case was resolved. Armstrong remembered how he occasionally encountered the detectives who arrested him: “They’d give me a beautiful smile and ask me, ‘Armstrong are you being a good boy?’ I said to them, ‘You know I’m being a good boy,’ and they’d drive away smiling.”

  Transcripts from the March 1931 trial have recently been uncovered and they include advice from the judge: “If you have a nice home and a good wife, and you are getting along all right, don’t be cultivating evil habits… . Some people mix marijuana with bootleg whiskey and they go around here with the most exorbitant ideas, and would walk up to this building here, at the corner of it, and try to lift the whole building up with one hand,” the judge warned. “You leave marijuana alone.” He was sentenced to thirty days in jail, of which he served nine. In jail he buddied up with two of the inmates and stayed in touch with them for the rest of his life. When he walked through the cell blocks to leave, some of the prisoners asked him to sing. He retrieved his suit, which had been torn apart at the linings in a search for drugs, packed up, and immediately moved to Chicago.

  As the decades passed and Armstrong continued smoking pot, the steady hassling and the increasing severity of punishment enraged him. He compared pot laws with the casualness in the United States toward racial violence: “Why I’d much rather shoot a nigger in his ass than to be caught with a stick of shit,” he wrote. “The Judge would honestly respect you better.” On file in the Library of C
ongress is a questionnaire about narcotic use by jazz musicians, complete with Armstrong’s handwritten, indignant responses, such as, “The music that comes of a man’s horn is good enough for me—his personal habit, I don’t care.” “Telling kids that gage is the same as heroin and morphine is wrong,” he told interviewer Bill Russell in 1953.

  He thought of marijuana as an herb similar to the peppergrass and dandelions his mother used to collect around the railroad tracks for him and his sister to consume as a laxative. That was her recipe for good health, and he stayed true to “physics” for his entire life. “Where other cats make their main ambition money or fame, I’ve made mine health,” he insisted, and the main tools available to him were physics and pot. Marijuana purged the stresses of his mind just as laxatives purged the germs that accumulated in his bowels. “It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro,” he explained.

  Marijuana was “a thousand times better than whiskey,” and he surely said that with the authority of someone who had seen the damage alcohol could inflict. “As a youngster, I witnessed a lot of the old time musicians who were fading out of the scenes, had turned to drinking on and off their jobs, trying to prove to themselves that they were still as good as they once were,” he wrote. Fred Keppard (“slipped out of the scene … a heavy drinker”), Carroll Dickerson (“whisky killed him, babe”), Jack Teagarden (“a sad case”), Bix Beiderbecke, Dave Tough, George Wettling, Eddie Condon, Tommy Ladnier—the list is long and tragic. Marijuana was clearly safer. “Bottle babies,” as Mezzrow called them, were inclined to brawling and loutish behavior; gage kept things “mellow and mild.” Armstrong found drinkers sloppy and dirty, pot smokers neat and clean and full of better thoughts. He did not shun alcohol completely, as Oliver did (“will power personified,” as he put it), but his preferences were clear.