The New Orleanians who carried a professionalized version of the black vernacular to the chilly urban North found themselves in an enviable position. Oliver was crowned King at Royal Gardens by people who had grown up on music from the plantations (or one generation removed) and still held close to that culture. People from New Orleans regarded the Oliver band at Lincoln Gardens as an exhilarating blessing from home, while those from other places in the Deep South connected easily.
The forced movement of slaves created special conditions and demanded special responses, as did the move to the North, spurred on, as many explained, by an urge to “better my condition.” The Great Migration also brought people of diverse backgrounds together into an increasingly organized music industry. In the fall of 1924 Armstrong took up with Fletcher Henderson, despite their differences in social background, training, ability, and aesthetic preference. Increasing demand by whites for hot dance music gave them common ground. A year of experimenting with hot solos gave him confidence. His solos were fast, precise, bluesy, eccentric, and wildly creative—the combination turned out to be perfect for the Vendome Theater on his return to Chicago. As he intensified the fixed and variable model and foregrounded his African heritage, his new solo style became an emblem of a black modernity that was an extension rather than a denial of the vernacular. It was also sophisticated enough—precise with scales and chords, flashy with high notes, fast with fingering, beautiful in tone—to compete with white standards. The victory of his African-American modernism can be measured by the Savoy Ballroom patrons carrying him around the hall on their shoulders; by trumpeter Ward Pinkett, sitting quietly next to a jukebox, tears of joy in his eyes; and by the thousands lined up on the levee outside Suburban Gardens, hoping to hear him through the windows.
Armstrong’s flexibility of mind, his musical and social intelligence, his matchless skill set and thorough training—all of it helped him negotiate complex formations of race and modernity. He studied what Oliver meant to recent immigrants at Lincoln Gardens, what Henderson meant to middle-class whites at the Roseland Ballroom, what OKeh’s race records meant to people back home, what the Dreamland Cabaret and Vendome Theater meant to blacks who were moving up and thrilled to have upscale places of their own, what the Sunset Café meant to slumming whites, what the Savoy Ballroom meant when he slayed the ofay demons, what black Broadway meant to white Manhattan, what a blues crooner meant to the nation, and what a modern black artist meant for the most current imagery in racist minstrelsy.
Few if any people at these venues cared about differences between entertainment and art, but all of them cared about the racial implications of his music. His music was forged through steady negotiation between black modernity and cultural racism. Vernacular music meant orally based music and all of the African-American markers of expression that went with it. The same package could represent forward-moving modernity at one venue and laughable primitivism at another. For a creative musician, this was how the “problem of the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, played out. A reviewer (November 8, 1931) of his performance at the Palace, in Cleveland, wrote simply: “It isn’t music.” “Whites were not as hip to hot music [in 1931] as they are today,” explained trombonist Clyde Bernhardt; “the average layman does not understand his type of work,” agreed recording executive Eli Oberstein. White reception of his music can be measured on one extreme by Charles Black, so inspired by this evident genius that he became a civil rights attorney, and on the other by derisive laughter at a “chunky, coal-black boy” (October 18, 1931, Columbus, Ohio) cast as a cannibal and hopelessly chasing Betty Boop, jazz flapper.
His hard-earned white success stands as a landmark in the entry of the African-American vernacular into the marketplace of popular music. Scott Joplin’s music was perhaps the strongest precedent, but the differences between the two men say everything. Joplin wanted to lift Negro music out of its vernacular limitations through notation. Armstrong created modern Negro music that unapologetically highlighted the vernacular.
The spread of white interest in Armstrong’s music began with a handful of musicians hanging around Lincoln Gardens. Eventually, they based their emerging styles on his and thus prepared white audiences for his later acceptance, while the black vernacular gradually made its impact on white jazz with pieces like Copenhagen. The time was right when OKeh decided to market his second modern style, based on dialogue between a popular melody, well known and easily understood, and his inventive ragging—dynamic, unpredictable, and thoroughly black—combined with scat, blues, and eccentric patterning, producing an “an endless succession of beautiful and bizarre effects.” That and a strong mixture of primitive fun was the formula that did it for him. His music was so thoroughly based on the non-notatable vernacular that it could not be turned into symphonic jazz and elevated to pure art; there was no possibility of reframing it as the “free, frank and vulgar spirit of the American bourgeoisie.” Thanks to him, genuine Negro music rose to the top of white markets in radio, phonograph, and RKO palaces.
Both races heard Armstrong’s music as black, as modern, and as beautiful. With such drastically different understandings of the first two attributes, how could there be agreement on the third? The answer is that his skills as a great melodist were strong enough to overcome ideological bias. Not only were his solos innovative and socially meaningful, they were crafted with melodic excellence. Of all the qualities of his greatness—tone, speed, high notes, comedy, precision, confidence, charisma, originality—this one best explains his broad and enduring success.
This book has covered many aspects of Armstrong’s musical development; in conclusion, I would like to extend and summarize that coverage from a slightly different perspective. His musical world revolved around four different types of melody—blues, lead, hot solo, and paraphrase. These had different functions, different shapes, different economies, and different histories. All four were important in the world he grew up in, in New Orleans, and also through the 1920s and 1930s, but with different points of emphasis as his career unfolded. Thinking about these four styles will help us understand how he became such an expert in melodic craft, and it will further clarify the entanglement of music and race as he experienced it.
Blues came first and stayed strong until the end. There is no question about the priority of blues in Armstrong’s musical development, or, as we have seen in Chapter 2, about its priority for the South Side immigrants in Chicago. His first musical job in New Orleans was playing blues for tips, blues all the time, hour after hour, week after week, and at a very slow tempo. There could have been no better training for a great melodist. With blues he could concentrate on melodic details and melodic sweep without having to worry much about ensemble or harmony. The job was essentially an opportunity to practice building the expressive gestures of blues into a coherent stream. The experience must have been something like that of young Mozart’s, around the same age, writing dozens and dozens of Italian arias, internalizing a melodic discourse of simplicity and grace.
He came to the attention of Joe Oliver, who advised him to stick to the lead and avoid elaborate variations. The lead melody and the person who played it in New Orleans had special status. It had to be delivered with confidence, strength, and attractive tone. Blues playing was full of heart and second playing full of complexity, but to advance a musical career you had to be able to play a solid lead.
Armstrong’s first recorded solo, for Chimes Blues in April 1923, shows his eagerness to please his mentor with a strong lead, a phrase that stays with you. It is a special moment, but it has always seemed a little unsatisfying as a marker in the historical record. There are no signs of the exciting, expansive energy of the great solos from a few years later. To compare Chimes Blues with Big Butter and Egg Man, which shows his first modern style in full bloom, is to move between two different melodic worlds.
The discontinuity is not simply due to a sudden leap into maturity. The problem is that we are comparing apples and
oranges. His solo for Chimes Blues is a lead melody, while the famous solos from a few years later would have been called “hot solos.” This is one key to understanding the development of his first modern style and, indeed, his development as a great melodist: he shifted his creative attention from one type of solo to another.
Standards for a lead melody were derived from mainstream popular tunes, with easy comprehension and memorability, a phrase that stays with you. The hot solo was a completely different conception. One could even say that the point of it was not to sound like a lead. Hot solos were fast and brief. When Armstrong was hired as featured hot soloist with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, his job was to provide a flash of variety, 20 seconds or so, in a densely packed and varied arrangement. The function was made clear by the name: hot solos were supposed to generate emotional heat with fast rhythmic energy, blue notes, and growling timbre. Since they were so short and since they were supposed to contrast with the lead melodies featured elsewhere in the arrangement, nobody cared how well designed they were. Whether or not a lead like his solo for Chimes Blues was notated, it sounded like it was. A hot solo, in contrast, had to have plenty of non-notatable features, since these were what made it hot. It had to sound like it was improvised, even if it wasn’t.
In other words, the hot solo, like the blues solo, was heavily marked as an African-American cultural production. This was true even when the soloist was white. Eccentric rhythms defined the hot solo as an outpouring of spontaneous, libidinal energy, uncivilized and raw. If we are not used to thinking of Armstrong as a great melodist, the main reason is this emphasis on rhythm in the hot solo and the lingering biases of primitivist thought. In the 1920s and still today, a strong binary opposition between rhythm and melody was built into the way people thought about jazz. As noted in Chapter 4, jazz was conceived as a spectrum of possibilities, a range of musical expression so diverse that anyone who generalizes about all of jazz during this period—and people do this all the time—is bound to stumble into a tangle of contradictions. One end of the spectrum was defined by vigorous, African-influenced rhythm, the other by lightly syncopated orchestral arrangements with straight popular melodies in the foreground. Inevitably, this spectrum was wrapped up in racist ideology.
We have managed to outgrow most of the blatant assumptions of racism from this period, but thinking about jazz in terms of a binary opposition between melody and rhythm still creates a lot of confusion. As argued in Chapter 6, the simple facts are that you can have rhythm without melody, but you cannot have melody without rhythm. Rhythm and melody are not opposites. The questions to ask are: What kind of rhythm? What kind of melody? To say that Armstrong was a great melodist is to insist that he was creatively absorbed in a complete melodic conception. So was Joplin, and so was Gershwin. It was his commitment to melody that made him so distinctive in the 1920s and 1930s, and a proper assessment of his achievement must proceed along these lines.
Musicians in Armstrong’s Chicago circle were vigorously creating lead melodies, and not just for performances and recordings. They were keenly aware of the cash potential from writing out their tunes and sending them to Washington, D.C., for copyright. Armstrong and Oliver composed Dipper Mouth Blues and Canal Street Blues together; the band recorded Armstrong’s earlier composition Weather Bird Rag; Lillian and Louis composed Where Did You Stay Last Night?, When You Leave Me Alone to Pine, and Tears; and Lillian helped Oliver and Armstrong notate these efforts with this economic system in mind. In order to copyright a melody, it had to be written down. That legal fact created an economic logic that channeled a major part of Armstrong’s creative energy in 1923 and early 1924 into leads that could be notated.
The culmination of these efforts was his breakthrough piece, Cornet Chop Suey, a notated tune that, years later, reminded him of cutting contests in New Orleans. It combined the reach for the next big copyrightable hit with a display of his formidable chops. He could not coordinate his hands to imitate Oliver’s solo for Dipper Mouth Blues, and freak music turned out not to be his thing. Instead, he placed his bets on notatable melodies. Since the notated tune could not depend on the techniques of the performer-centered vernacular, the calling card of the uptown New Orleanians, the only way to succeed was with strong melody. It never would have crossed Oliver’s mind to notate his famous solo for Dipper Mouth Blues, but Cornet Chop Suey was conceived for notation from the start, as an expanded and imposing lead.
This product of Armstrong’s creative ambition got shelved for almost two years, since there was no chance to play it while he was with Oliver, and it wasn’t what Henderson was looking for. Henderson wanted a hot soloist, a southern hot soloist, not a rough singer and not a fancy display piece like Cornet Chop Suey. He wanted a strong dose of heat when an arrangement called for it. And thus it was that Armstrong’s focus turned from the creation of leads to the creation of hot solos. He sounded so good, so confident and strong, and he was so much better than most of the other (nonsouthern or non-African-American) soloists, that he could take risks and experiment. He could challenge listeners with his daring ideas. He used some paraphrase but did not feel overly bound to feature popular tunes. The main expectation was flamboyant heat, which he delivered with dividends.
Upon his return to Chicago, his ability to play a hot solo had risen to such a level that people lined up around the block to hear him at the Vendome; “that’s what they hired me for, anyway, them hot numbers,” he explained. The sophistication and excitement of his new modern style turned out to be just what African-American patrons at the classy Vendome Theater, with its symphony orchestra, and the Dreamland Café, with its lit-from-below glass floor, were looking for. He gave them Cornet Chop Suey, which turned out to be both an ending point and a starting point. He continued to write songs for copyright, but his future success would lie elsewhere. He supplemented his hot solos for Oriental Strut, Static Strut, Stomp Off Let’s Go, and Muskrat Ramble with the stunning novelty of Heebie Jeebies. Then in the fall, at the Sunset Café, his two strengths—voice and the special chorus of hot trumpet playing—merged in a number designed to feature him, Big Butter and Egg Man.
His expanded hot solos were now a main attraction, not just a sprinkling of spice. He did not stop writing leads, but his main creative focus would now be hot solos and blues. His melodic brilliance emerged most fully through non-notated but well-designed hot solos, which could be captured, transmitted, and preserved for repeated listening on a phonograph recording just as well as piano rolls and sheet music captured Joplin’s differently conceived melodic brilliance.
Nevertheless, Armstrong’s sustained focus on written melody was important for his development. It is easy to imagine that it took him just as long to compose his solo for Big Butter and Egg Man as it did to compose Cornet Chop Suey. He had learned the discipline of composing. Before the lead sheet sent to Washington, D.C., in January 1924 for copyright was discovered, Cornet Chop Suey was regarded by historians as an “improvisation.” It was close enough to the solos generated by ear that it seemed to belong in that category. That resemblance indicates how his emerging sense of melodic style for hot solos was conditioned by thinking in terms of melody that could be notated. Yet the eccentric patterning and infusion of blues made it clear that the new modern style did not belong to the world of written music. His new conception blended melodic clarity, continuity, little conversations of notes, driving energy, blues touches, harmonic precision, technical brilliance, variety, density, and, especially, the fixed and variable model. This cyclonic mix made Armstrong an untouchable hot soloist who was opening up new possibilities of musical expression that he would continue to explore for years.
In Chicago he was singing popular tunes but not recording them, since OKeh was not interested in paying royalties. The company experimented with marketing some of his vocals to whites, and in March 1929 the New York branch took a risk and let him record I Can’t Give You Anything but Love. A shift in emphasis from hot solo to paraphrase mark
s his second modern style. In fact, it was easy for him to blend the two. His trumpet solo for Big Butter and Egg Man has paraphrasing touches, for example, as does even Potato Head Blues. No one objected if a hot soloist paraphrased a tune, though they would certainly object if he sacrificed heat to do so. Paraphrasing touches in the trumpet solos of his first modern style are secondary, bits and pieces of the original tune that enhance the little conversations of notes. His main concern in constructing the flow of energy is darting and diving through the contours of the chords in the service of the fixed and variable model.
His modern versions of mainstream popular songs put much more emphasis on the tune, especially in the vocals, of course, but not only there. Intensification of the fixed and variable model was just right for the Vendome, radical ragging of the crooner repertory just right for broad white appeal. Ragging the tune, the preferred technique for African-American musicians when they wanted to reach white audiences, was now taking a modern form. And it was easy for Armstrong to bring in much of what he had already perfected—eccentric phrasing, scat, blues effects, density that now alternates with spacious textures, all of it mixed into a lush flow of ragging filigree around the recognizable contours of established hits. The combination must have sounded bizarre to many whites, who heard Negro authenticity, technical expertise, compelling melody of power, and brilliance. “Modern” was an easy way to sum it all up. John Philip Sousa complained about people listening to jazz through their feet rather than through their brains. By shifting the energy upwards, Armstrong gave the white brain pause. “Louis has achieved through natural ability what will probably never be achieved again by any trumpeter,” wrote an admiring British critic in 1932. “I confess I do not understand him but at the same time I defy anyone to define his music, its purpose and its effect.”
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism Page 52
