Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  His bearing changes when he picks up his trumpet and stands fully erect, expands his chest, closes his eyes, flexes his exposed muscles, and plays with dazzling virtuosity and complete confidence. If, in your imagination, you swap the leopard skin for a tuxedo, you can understand that, in Rhapsody, Armstrong is performing just as he always did. Vocally he offers his standard blend of verbal distortion and melodic reinvention, and visually he is full of the mugging, grimacing, smiling, and general strangeness documented in the Copenhagen video, the hypnotizing motion of eyes and face and body.

  The effect of these techniques is familiar to us from Chapter 9: they suggest that Armstrong’s relationship to the song is not straightforward, that he is distancing himself from its meaning. One might even feel that he is distancing himself from the racism of the movie. This has been an attractive line of interpretation for sympathetic observers striving to rescue him from these (and other) degrading films. Critics have seen his muscular posture and confident trumpet in Rhapsody as standing above the context, a triumph over the primitive theme.

  But since this was the way he always played, it is hard to attach any special message to his technique. In Memphis, he sang out, “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you” to the police who had arrested him. Who knows what was going through his mind when he sang the same song in Rhapsody in Black and Blue? What comes across on screen is someone who is in tune with the demands of comic acting rather than trickster subterfuge.139 As much as we might like to imagine the two seamlessly overlapping, it is important to avoid the temptation to project a point of view for which there is no evidence.

  I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, the title of the other film made in January 1932, leaves no opening for a rescue opportunity (though that has not stopped people from trying). This cartoon short was part of a series produced by Fleischer brothers Max, Joe, Lou, and Dave for Paramount, based on the character Betty Boop. The Fleischers liked to mix jazz musicians into stories about their heroine, who, at this point in her career, was a fun-loving, sexualized flapper. They invented a technique of filming performers and then drawing cartoons over the photography to magically mix “real life” with Betty’s cartoon life. When they filmed Cab Calloway dancing and scatting, for example, audiences were so delighted that they demanded that the short be replayed. Armstrong’s mastery of You Rascal You, which he had been featuring for over a year now, inspired the Fleischers to what would become their most notorious effort in the integration of jazz photography with cartoon imagination.

  The film opens with straight footage of Armstrong and his orchestra playing High Society.140 As the music continues, the visual of the band yields to a close-up of Betty herself, twisting rhythmically at her hips and displaying her flapper body. This introductory sequence sets up in a pithy way the subtext of the entire cartoon—the lure of African-American jazz and its dangerous potential to seduce white women and, with that, the threat to the purity of the white race.

  Then the story begins, with Betty and her friends KoKo the clown and Bimbo the dog enjoying a leisurely jungle safari. Suddenly, Betty is surrounded by an African tribe and abducted. As the hapless KoKo and Bimbo consider a rescue plan, KoKo, in a comically aggressive move, shouts, “Wait’ll I get those babies”—shorthand for “jungle babies,” a racial slur. The two sidekicks are caught and dumped in a boiling pot, though they escape quickly. As the song I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead starts up, one of the tribesmen, in hot pursuit, turns into a disembodied head that resembles Armstrong, while Armstrong sings the song as the head mouths the words. Inspired by their new technology, the Fleischer brothers took the equation one step further by seamlessly morphing the floating head of the cannibal into photography of Armstrong singing; before the chase scene ends, the photo of Armstrong changes back to the cannibal, rounding out the equation. We could say that this visual blending of photography and cartoon is synesthetically matched by Armstrong’s blending of words and scat, all of it fusing in perfect racist fun the bestselling recording artist of the day with cannibalism, the ultimate marker of African primitivism.

  The band performs Chinatown, uptempo, for the finale of this little story, while the cartoon cannibals chant rhythmically in a swelling orgiastic frenzy as they prepare to toss Betty into the boiling pot. One of the pot stirrers morphs into Armstrong’s smiling drummer, Alfred “Tubby” Hall. The classic fantasy of black male rape of a white woman is very close at hand. If Armstrong knew how to use laughter to create an opening for his modern jazz, the Fleischers knew how to use it to stir up the most damning racial stereotypes of the day.

  Movie still from l’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You

  King Menelik had met his match. One hopes that he was able to put the whole thing behind him in a private chuckle, as Robert Moton recommended in 1929: “Sometimes it is all a huge joke to [the Negro], and his richest humour, indulged only in private, surrounds his musings on the average white man’s pretensions of superiority, the inconsistencies in his application of standards, and the hypocrisy of his professions in the face of the undisguised, unabashed, and often unrestrained humanity of his natural impulses and desires.” Armstrong did not have to read What the Negro Thinks to figure that out.

  It would be nice to blame the Paramount films on Johnny Collins, who seems to have had few scruples. But there is no reason to believe that Armstrong was reluctant to do them. It is easy to imagine that he simply chalked it up to the price of doing business in the white man’s world. After all, jungle imagery was commonly associated with jazz. As African-American historian J. A. Rogers wrote in The New Negro, jazz “is a thing of the jungles—modern, man-made jungles.”141 What was received at the Vendome as the everyday made modern was, to the talented tenth and to most whites, a raw and contradictory mix of primitive and modern. The Paramount movie makers were simply taking familiar images to a humorous extreme.

  What made Armstrong such a powerful presence in these movies was what also made him such a powerful singer of Sleepy Time Down South. He was no “musical octoroon,” as Zora Neale Hurston vividly described concert arrangements of spirituals, but the real thing, a genuine primitive, strictly Negro. He fell harder than most into these racist traps because he foregrounded black authenticity in such a compelling way. He was the most likely candidate for jungle treatment. Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington also made Betty Boop cartoons and Paramount shorts, but with very different results. Armstrong’s was hardly the only use of racist stereotypes in shorts and cartoons from this period (a number of them are so offensive that they have recently been expurgated), but none of the other jazz musicians was presented as a savage African.

  What Paramount wanted was no pretending to be an African, no musical octoroon, but the greatest exponent of “familiar Senegambiana,” as The New Yorker described his music in February 8, 1930, in a review of St. Louis Blues and After You’ve Gone. In the Paramount shorts, the full power of his musical creativity does not transcend the racist imagery but rather brings it to vivid life in a way that no other performer could. The best and most modern master of the black vernacular is successfully diminished with arrows of arrogant and derisive laughter.

  These savage depictions had everything to do with the intensity of the African legacy in Armstrong’s modern art. This was what the New Orleanians offered the country—“barbaric indigo dance tunes played with gusto and much ado that leaves very little doubt as to their African origin,” as the New York Clipper (September 14, 1923) described recordings by Oliver’s band—and Armstrong was the greatest New Orleanian of all, the one who soaked up everything his culture of origin had to offer and transformed it into a modern and thoroughly black art form. The fixed and variable model, blue notes, musical dialogue, ragging the tune, conversational phrasing, scat, something that “relates to us,” as Milt Hinton put it—all of it could be identified with and diminished by savage imagery. The black success of Armstrong’s first modern phase and the white success of his second wer
e both built on “authentic” black expression. In one arena he was crowned King Menelik, slayer of ofay demons, in the other a savage buffoon. Primitivism was the key ingredient in white reception of his music, and movies turned out to be the most powerful modern medium for delivering the goods.

  Movies produced unmatchable exposure while they locked him into degrading stereotypes. In Pennies from Heaven (1936) he played the role of a chicken thief, in Every Day’s a Holiday (1937) he cleaned streets, and in a short video from 1942 he sang Sleepy Time Down South sitting on a bale of cotton, dressed as a hired hand. Rather than search desperately for subtle signs of subversion, it is more honest to simply acknowledge how he was damaged by one of the sweeping ideological battles of the twentieth century.

  Armstrong was hardly the only great artist to suffer such a fate. To mention only two of the most famous musical examples: in the mid-1930s, in Russia, Dmitri Shostakovich came under attack for composing music that did not fit official Soviet expectations; his efforts to make up for “errors” in artistic judgment lay at the root of a tortured life. Richard Strauss’s German-themed compositions were easily appropriated by the Nazis, boxing him into an image that he wanted nothing to do with; desperate to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law, Strauss made collaborative gestures and suffered the consequences in international condemnation.

  Americans like to think of the United States as immune to this kind of crushing intrusion of politics into the minds of artists, but here it is. One of the greatest musicians our country has ever produced, by anyone’s standards, was trapped by racist ideology that was imposed not only through official government channels, but also through the marketplace. Shostakovich and Strauss were crippled by government intrusion, while Jelly Roll Morton desperately yearned for it: “Music is such a tremendous proposition that it probably needs government supervision,” he complained. “There does not seem to be any proper protection for anything in this line.” There was hell to pay, either way.

  What is amazing, as scholar Gerald Early has pointed out, is how resilient Armstrong was in response to a “culture that both psychologically and physically abused him as a person, misunderstood his art, and depreciated his real worth.”He survived the ascent to the next rung on the ladder of his career with gage, with toughness developed through the hard knocks of his childhood, and with a singleminded dedication to music.

  The Making of a Great Melodist

  What made Louis Armstrong so remarkably great? Put generally, his greatness emerged from a unique combination of where he came from, who he was, and the conditions that shaped his career. The inspired melodic results of this configuration still hold a powerful attraction, many generations later.

  He came from a place where African cultural legacies were very strong, thanks largely to post-Reconstruction migration from plantations in the Deep South. This migration may be conceived as one more step along the way of an African diaspora that began with the Middle Passage. From the word “diaspora” we get the sense of a group of people scattered across political boundaries and holding on to an identity of origin. New Orleans, as the major port joining the Mississippi River with the Gulf of Mexico, was a place to which people of African descent came and from which they were dispersed, again and again, over many generations. It was a place where these patterns of social movement received musical articulation, and this may be the chief reason why the city has been so important in the history of African-American music. That is a different way of analyzing the special nature of New Orleans—different than emphasizing its connections to France, Spain, and the Caribbean, or its laissez-faire approach to racial mixing, or its population of gens de couleur libres, or its Big Easy thirst for entertainment. Those things played a role. But as a place where the musical side of the African diaspora was organized and shaped, New Orleans really has no equivalent in the United States.

  Before the Civil War, slaves were forcibly distributed from New Orleans on the auction block; in the post-Reconstruction period the city magnetized the children and grandchildren of those slaves into uptown neighborhoods described by one observer as the “hotbed of dark, uneducated cornfield Negroes.” Music was important all around. Churches, dance halls, and street parades functioned just as Place Congo had functioned some 70 years earlier: they were places where people of African descent came together to check each other out, discover reassuring points of common practice and stimulating points of difference, and invent cultural identities that were now urban rather than rural, and yet still distinctly African-American.

  By moving in a way that was both individual and collective—“huddling for protection,” as Du Bois described it—they reaffirmed the sense that they were, as African Americans, a people in motion, a people whose resilience included an ability to adapt to new social circumstances. The role of music in this resilience cannot be overestimated. The phenomenon must rank among the most compelling social-cultural events in history. It is the story of how people who carried a culture shaped in Africa adapted that culture under extremely harsh conditions. Music for them was a collective enterprise with strong social purposes. It included an understanding that musical gesture must be fused with physical gesture in a way that instantly creates a sense of community. It explored an area of ambiguity between speaking and singing, and it took delight in flashing back and forth between the two while extending the principle of speechlike music to instruments. It manifested a conception of time that is cyclical rather than linear and arranged musical information with this in mind. It featured, sometimes simply and other times in ways that are highly complex, a model of two levels of musical activity, one fixed and foundational and the other variable and interactive, with the two levels moving between synthesis and tension. And it favored improvisation as an expressive value that was part of a lifestyle, an ability to respond creatively to dynamic social situations with markers of power and skill.

  In New Orleans the plantation traditions were urbanized and professionalized, with many points of easy amateur entry into a diverse and low-paying market. The situation fostered innovation, diversity, and upward mobility, and it was perfect for a budding young talent. Musically nurtured from multiple directions, Armstrong mastered much of what his community had to offer. Especially important to him were the fixed and variable model and the embellishments of ragging the tune, with blues covering everything.

  I doubt that his training in New Orleans was exceptional. Others had the same kinds of exposure and probably reached similar levels of mastery. He made more out of it than anyone else because of his tremendous drive and work ethic, his ability to negotiate changing and complicated environments, and an unbeatable skill set, including what we might call high musical intelligence.

  “Musicians don’t talk about music much, very few, very few musicians,” said trombonist J. C. Higgenbotham, who played with Armstrong in the 1930s. Armstrong rarely gave much specific detail about his or anyone else’s music. Great music is easy to listen to and difficult to talk about—why bother? In taking this position he had a lot of company, not just in his circles but among great musicians throughout history.

  But the intensity of primitivist assumptions—and Armstrong’s willingness to accommodate that kind of image—has made it easy to read his lack of detailed verbal commentary as the representation of an intuitive musician who understands little about what he does. Even the great conductor Leonard Bernstein, who admired Armstrong and featured him in a concert with the New York Philharmonic in 1956, rattled off a list of attributes in his introduction of Armstrong that included “simple”—and he meant it as a compliment. With concepts like “emotional intelligence” so familiar today, it is much easier than it used to be to think of Armstrong as having superior musical intelligence.

  You can see the signs everywhere you look. He was a favorite in recording studios because the sessions were so effortless. “He can pick up an orchestral routine in quicker time than it takes to rehearse it,” said a colleague. “In fact, there are virtua
lly no rehearsals at all.” His mind was precise, sure, and quick. Earl Hines said that the hot soloist was one “who had a fast mind, could think far ahead in regard to the chords coming up, and was good on his instrument.” Hines and Armstrong set the standard for musicians of their generation. Clearly, Armstrong had a fertile musical creativity and strong gifts in melodic design.

  And he was skillful in adapting to changing expectations as he advanced in his career. He is often talked about as a musician who turned entertainment music into art. For anyone who recognizes the formal rigor and creative brilliance of his achievement, that must seem like a natural way to acknowledge his accomplishment. But I doubt that the concept of art ever occurred to him in any meaningful way, or that the distinction had any bearing on his musical development during this period.

  White musicians during this period, especially those who thought of themselves as bohemian outsiders, thought about art much more than the black musicians in Armstrong’s circles. Mezz Mezzrow and his friends scoffed at “commercial” players. “The rest of us, we were the artists, the boys with their heads in the clouds, scornful of keeping books and negotiating deals and adding up the give and take,” wrote Mezzrow. “Bud Freeman … would rather starve than play commercial,” remembered another musician. This was simply not how the New Orleanians thought about music and their place in the world. They recognized differences of quality and of sophistication, but the binary opposition between art and entertainment was remote to them, culturally and socially.

  What really mattered to Armstrong, and what made things complicated as he tried to advance his career, was race. To the skeptical listener who values music for its beauty, values jazz for its happy role in social integration, and simply says, “What does race have to do with it?” the answer has to be—quite a bit.