Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Armstrong has often been praised for his ability to sing with emotion, but in this period he never settles into a one-dimensional rendition. Again consider Baldwin, who could have been thinking about Armstrong and the crooners when he wrote, a bit harshly, how “white Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices.” Bluesy touches, the kind of plaintive delicacy that impressed Billie Holiday in West End Blues, paint the tender side of his emotional range. But when Armstrong sings Sweethearts on Parade, no one imagines him standing distraught and isolated on the sidelines, as they well might imagine Carmen Lombardo singing it with the Royal Canadians. Armstrong is simply having too much fun.

  Gene Austin, Rudy Vallée, Seger Ellis, and Bing Crosby used the microphone to create the illusion of direct access to a vulnerable and sensuous interior, a conjured intimacy carrying over the radio waves and into the listener’s bedroom. Armstrong also exposes his inner world, but never for very long and never with fixed meaning. The set of familiars on which his success is built—microphone whispering, repertory, and big-band accompaniment—now function as a bridge to a world where the laws of a comforting emotional surface no longer apply. It is less an interpretation that he offers than a slapping, twisting, caressing, and totally unpredictable manipulation of the song, which becomes a found object subjected to his relentless, ragging creativity.131

  Ragging the tune had always been a way of dissociating singer from song, African-American performer from white copyright holder. The ragging musician is not bound by rules dictated by a composer. We have seen how dialogue was a bedrock principle of music making in Armstrong’s community of origin, and dialogue is a felicitous way to think about his music from the early 1930s. In his first modern style, his solo is in dialogue with the harmonic foundation, the two working together according to the fixed and variable grid. In his second modern style, his ragging rendition is in dialogue with the song itself.

  By this I mean that Armstrong is in dialogue with the tune as well as its sentiments. He had never belonged to the heart-baring, fully cathartic blues tradition. He knew how to arouse emotions, but where he really excelled was in the inventive practices of ragging the tune and all that went along with it, including second playing, obbligato, and paraphrase. He was a ragtime virtuoso, not in the sense of Joplin but in the sense of how the word “ragtime” was used before Joplin in the poorly documented history of the plantation vernacular. In the early 1930s this orientation led him to a vision of cool detachment mixed with straightforward sentiments.

  His play with melody and emotion launched a tradition that includes Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. With Armstrong, cool detachment never comes across as disaffection, the outsider attacking with sarcasm and irony. Irony is a slippery quality in music, and it depends on explicit cues to put it in motion. Armstrong does not give much to work with, and it would be surprising if he did, given his ambition to reach the largest white audience possible. What one hears instead is a quicksilver playfulness that puts familiar materials into a new realm of design and expression that is hard to pin down. Melody and words flicker through the performance like novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies—colorful, precise, and evanescent, “divine details” that never quite settle into a fixed meaning.

  In the early 1930s there are some wonderful uptempo solos, but it is the slow to moderate tempos, around 100 to 140 beats per minute, that inspire Armstrong’s greatest accomplishments. With the exception of Confessin’ That I Love You (84 beats per minute), these are not the very slow tempos sometimes used by Vallée (or by Bessie Smith, for that matter). They are dance tempos for the medium fox trot. A slow to moderate pace gives him plenty of room to combine a recognizable rendition of the song with carefully crafted interjections.

  In the vocals he often introduces breathing room in which anything can happen next (again one thinks of Monk and Davis). This can happen in the trumpet solos, too, but they usually incline toward heavy ornamentation. If I Could Be with You is a great example. He constantly plays variations on the simple metrical pattern of James P. Johnson’s melody, while connecting to the original through phrasing. Even though the solo carries an overwhelming flood of ornamental details that have little to do with the contours of the tune, we clearly hear him playing a version of If I Could Be with You. A key to this is his strong connection to the phrasing of the chords, which carry the rhetorical shape of the original tune, its main points of emphasis, arrival, confirmation, surprise, detour, and originality; these are supported by the band arrangement, as well.

  The emphasis is quite different than it had been in his hot solos from the 1920s, where the chords function as little more than an abstract grid. Slower tempos in the early 1930s allow him to achieve tremendous rhythmic variety through double time, with his line moving twice as fast as the original tune, while keeping the phrasing in touch with important points of arrival, as implied by the sequence of chords. His new approach also makes it easy to hear vocal solo and trumpet solo as cut from the same cloth, likewise a new effect for him. In this way, his paraphrasing technique of the early 1930s can lead to a sense of integration and extended expression.

  Sweethearts on Parade is a magnificent example. Armstrong dominates the performance from start to finish with three full choruses, muted trumpet, vocal, and open trumpet. The tune offers virtually nothing: everything valuable about this performance arises from his interventions. In the first trumpet chorus he lays out some of the paraphrasing details he will use in the choruses that follow, in a gentle and reflective mood, with some lovely effects (CD 0:17–0:21) that float away from the tune and then drift back. Ornamentation increases as the chorus progresses, a fairly standard procedure for him, with the bridge (0:36–0:51) bringing a bit more decoration without challenging the identity of the tune.

  His very first vocal utterance (“two by two”), a simple gesture saturated with swing, puts the listener in a world far removed from the Lombardo original. With a little effort you can “see through” the music, as Armstrong liked to say, to a parade marshal’s strut, minus New Orleans exuberance. The concluding trumpet solo begins with the swinging gesture, which quickly turns into an agitated rhythmic figure, urged on by Lionel Hampton, that explodes into a double-time break, making it clear that the parade has now entered a new phase. The break references New Orleans explicitly: it is from the piccolo solo for the march High Society that Armstrong learned as a teenager. The musical pun probably went unnoticed at Sebastian’s Cotton Club, though the audience had a better chance of catching the bugle call Assembly at the end of the performance (used also in Guy Lombardo’s 1927 recording).

  A lovely effect rises out of the bridge, when straight delivery of the tune suddenly swells to an intense climax (CD 2:38–2:43), supported by the accompaniment. Surging figurations take over, a stunning waterfall of varied and cascading decoration, with only brief glimpses of the tune, reaching high and then higher still before Armstrong releases into a glowing descent in which you can almost feel the California sunshine (CD 2:49–3:00). The phrase cuts across the periodicity of the eight-bar phrasing, a classic manifestation of the fixed and variable model. The parading sweethearts have witnessed a magical marriage of ragging splendor with the song’s rhetoric, as articulated through melody, chords, and accompaniment.

  Detached ragging created an opening for intellectual-emotional complexity, for creative exuberance, for virtuosity, and for independent melodic design. Slower tempos made it easier for Armstrong to do all of this while staying connected to the melody and harmony of the song. The glorious apotheosis of this approach came a year later, in November 1931, in his legendary recording of Star Dust.

  Hoagy Carmichael conceived this celebrated tune in 1927 as a medium-tempo, instrumental dance pie
ce; the first recording, by Hoagy Carmichael and His Pals, clocks in at 138 beats per minute. Words were added in 1929 to launch one of the most popular songs of the twentieth century. By 1931, crooners had slowed down the tempo—Bing Crosby, for example, to 108 and Cab Calloway to 102. Armstrong’s performance in the same year bumps the tempo back up to 132, which was probably the preferred dance tempo.

  In this case, we can say that the crooners slowed down the tempo for more reasons than conjuring a bedroom atmosphere. Carmichael’s challenging tune is made up of constant twists, turns, and leaps through varied and chromatic harmonies. It moves more like a trumpet solo by Armstrong or Beiderbecke than a traditional croon, and the resemblance is no coincidence, since Carmichael was influenced by both. Like his peers in 1927, he was a huge fan of Beiderbecke. On Carmichael’s 1927 recording, trumpeter Byron Smart does a pretty good Beiderbecke imitation, as if to make that connection clear. We have already heard from Carmichael several times about his passion for Armstrong’s music, including the confession that listening to Armstrong helped him with his own composing. The likelihood that a key melodic gesture in Star Dust was lifted from Potato Head Blues has often been noted.

  Sweethearts on Parade was pure hack work, but the beauty of Star Dust comes through almost any performance, with words or without, and at virtually any tempo. Nevertheless, Armstrong’s Star Dust cannot be regarded as simply one more possible interpretation. Like If I Could Be with You and Sweethearts, its success emerges from a dialogue between his vigorous ragging and the listener’s perception of the original. Again he dominates the entire performance with three choruses, and again there is strong continuity between them.

  Armstrong’s Star Dust conveys a tremendous sense of breadth and power. To see how this is accomplished, let’s start with the rhythm section and the chords. Around 1930 the two-beat style of the roaring twenties was gradually yielding to the more spacious flat 4/4 of the swing era. This performance is built on the relatively expansive foundation of four-beat accompaniment, and that quality is reinforced with a simplified harmonic plan. In Carmichael’s song, elegantly chromatic passing chords guide the drifty melody along, but in the arrangement Armstrong is using, the harmonies have been simplified to usually only one chord per measure, with chords sometimes extended to two measures. When the complete set of chords as Carmichael wrote them is played with two-beat accompaniment—you can hear this in parts of the 1931 recording by Bing Crosby with the Victor Young Orchestra, for example—the results feel relatively fussy. The simpler harmonic rhythm and the regular four-beat pulse provide relaxed support for Armstrong’s pliant rhythms and phrases, qualities that are evident from the very beginning.

  The simple gestures of the first four measures (Example 9.1) reveal the touch of a great melodist aiming for excitement and modernity. The two ideas are simple, with the rise of the first balanced by the descending thrust of the second. What is surprising is how different the two are in character, the first halting and stark, the second legato, dense, rapid, and confident. The space between them, longer than it should be by normal standards of phrase construction in popular songs, defines this as a moment of unpredictability, out of which burst the rapid arpeggiations. Even a detail like the abrupt end of the phrase, on the very last fraction of the measure before the downbeat of measure 5, a conventional point of arrival, points toward the decidedly modern nature of Armstrong’s Star Dust; phrasing like this would later become a cliché in bebop.

  Example 9.1 Star Dust, opening (after Schuller 1989)

  The first trumpet chorus, a paraphrase of elegance and imagination, is saturated with the kind of bluesy pliancy we first encountered in Savoy Blues. Delayed notes blend into triplet figures, blue notes merge with glissandos. The chromatic arpeggiations of Carmichael’s melody, so challenging for the crooners, have returned home to King Menelick’s agile trumpet. Armstrong introduces a different kind of energy midway through the chorus (CD 0:30) with a double-time figure in midrange. Subdued yet agitated, the figure is packed with tension, which only increases when he expands it in the third statement through dazzling arabesque. At the end of the chorus Armstrong puts down his trumpet, prepares to sing, and releases a low postcoital moan, as if to demonstrate how deeply he is relaxing into Star Dust.

  Then comes the famous vocal chorus with its extended opening gambit on a single note, sung 15 times, in complete negation of the up-and-down flow of Carmichael’s line. The delivery is conversational, slightly out of phase with the foundation. Patches of euphoric invention (“Now that Baby you know, long ago”) blend effortlessly with descending ornaments, some derived from the song (“nightingale tells his fairy tale”), and others sounding like that even when they aren’t (“in my heart it will remain”).

  The astonishing final chorus for trumpet includes enough references to Carmichael’s melody to remind us of its course, but even when free invention takes over, the solo follows the two-bar segments of the eight-bar phrases. There is a deliberate quality in this approach, which might have surprised a fan from the 1927 Vendome Theater who was prepared to hear Armstrong darting in and out of agreement with the fixed harmonic background. But this is now a standard procedure that helps him discover what can be gained by working with the phrasing and hence the rhetoric of the song.

  He uses the regular harmonic rhythm and the four sectional divisions of Carmichael’s chorus to craft a nice arc to the entire solo. Carmichael has written an intricate maze of balancing rise and fall; Armstrong strips away the rise and runs with the fall: his first eight-bar section (CD 2:23–2:39) is built entirely on descending arpeggiations derived from the original tune. That is basically all it takes for him to transform Star Dust into the blues archetype of descending sawtooth lines that we first identified in Chapter 2. The second eight-bar section (CD 2:40) rises with swelling emotion, leading to an inevitable descent (CD 2:55–2:58) that spills across the boundary of phrase three, a moment much like the third break of Sweethearts, except that now the descent can be tied directly to Carmichael’s tune.

  And that is how it goes in this gorgeous variety of bluesy, powerful, and infinitely plastic phrases. The powers of invention that distinguish Armstrong from virtually every other soloist are stronger than ever. His dialogue between composed tune and ragging invention is fluid and effortless, not only in the crafted sense of apparent relaxation and spontaneity, but also in terms of the listener’s ease of comprehension. Certainly, the recording reflects careful planning and repeated performances, getting it right and sticking with it, just as soloists in New Orleans had always done.

  Star Dust is the masterpiece of his second modern style less because Carmichael created such a terrific song than because that song suited so well Armstrong’s interest in ragging dialogue. The two aspects that were particularly useful to him were, first, the arpeggiating melody, with its point of origin in the stylistic arena that he himself was leading in 1927; and, second, the rich harmonic foundation, simplified slightly so that it is just a touch more deliberate and less fanciful. The chords carry a narrative arc that is interesting and varied, thus giving shape to Armstrong’s series of cascading descents. The true soul mate for Armstrong’s Star Dust is Coleman Hawkins’s equally legendary Body and Soul (1939). The slower tempo of Hawkins’s performance and his relatively homogeneous rhythmic figuration should not obscure the fundamental similarities in procedure—double-time ragging, made successful by a perfect match of style and tune, with a harmonic foundation of rich variety helping to give shape to a rhapsodic effusion of eccentric melody. Had Armstrong slowed the tempo down this much when he worked out his own Body and Soul in 1930 (Hawkins is at 102, Armstrong at 120), he might have stolen Hawkins’s thunder by nine years.

  Standards of musical expression derived from popular songs simply do not apply. Armstrong’s was the most modern jazz going in 1931, and it was completely African-American, coming from somewhere far away—culturally, socially, racially, psychologically—yet delivered safely and with a dash o
f adventure and perhaps even transgression, a small taste of the forbidden thrill that slumming primitivists were so fond of.

  His play with sentiment in Sweethearts on Parade and Star Dust was something like the play of humor in Heebie Jeebies and Ain’t Misbehavin’: it helped whites relax with the musical intensity of a sophisticated black musician who treated “a beautiful romantic song … as a madman would treat it,” as Rudy Vallée, a genuine admirer, put it. Easy melodic memorability was trumped by overwhelming virtuosity, cozy sentiment by cool blues detachment and untamed outbursts of joy, immediate accessibility by complex design and unpredictability, first-person sincerity by deflection, asides, and scat jive.

  This music is almost antipopular. Armstrong leans toward abstraction, which is one way to relate both of his modern styles to high modernism from Europe. During the 1920s there was an uneasy dynamic between American middle-brow modernism, which was based on extensions of vernacular idioms, and high modernism, with its ruthless attack on bourgeois conventions. Lack of sentimentality provided a bit of common ground between the two. Vernacular modernism was firmly positioned against traditional Victorian values. Gilbert Seldes, the most prominent critical champion of vaudeville, jazz, and the other “lively arts,” thought of ragtime as the important first musical step that “literally [tore] to rags the sentimentality of the song[s] which preceded” them. It would have been easy to speak of Armstrong’s fractured ballads in the same way.

  But ragging the tune was more traditionally conceived as a manifestation of African primitivism, a weak and incoherent distortion of white hymns, marches, and songs. That was why the talented tenth looked elsewhere for signs of cultural advancement. The advantages of putting trite white songs “into spade’s life” (to borrow Armstrong’s words from a different context) were not immediately obvious to them. Nor would it have been obvious from the tables of Sebastian’s New Cotton Club how Armstrong’s transformation of popular songs into bizarre little dramas shared goals and methods with the forbidding formations of high modernism from Europe. The case for a connection has been argued by Alfred Appel, who also offers sustained commentary on Armstrong and Fats Waller, a musician who is even more difficult to come to grips with. Appel’s book Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce is beautifully illustrated and fun to read, though one might hesitate to align with its main thesis.