Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  71“Telling a story” is a common metaphor in jazz (Harker 1999), probably because of its flexibility. Not only instruments, but feet, too, could talk. John Bubbles tried to track the melody of Ol’ Man River in his dance steps: “That smile would come from the people hearing what I’m doing,” he remembered (Bubbles IJS). Bojangles Robinson liked to prepare the audience for what he was about to do: “Now I’m going to tell it” (Blesh 1946, 189). The talking drums of West Africa and the freak music of New Orleans are close at hand here. Armstrong spoke about continuity: “That clarinet is trying to tell a story—you can follow him” (Armstrong 1999, 165). Yet it would be a mistake to put too much weight on narrative structure in jazz storytelling. The metaphor ceases to be useful when taken to the point where melodic construction is parsed in terms like antithesis, development, climax, resolution, and denouement. Mutt Carey said that Armstrong “tried to make a picture out of every number he was playing” (Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, 46), which implies a more static conception less oriented toward linear structure and more involved with emotional ambience. Armstrong spoke about “seeing through” music to visual scenes in New Orleans that he remembered; for example, the 1927 Potato Head Blues reminded him of the Pelican Dance Hall in 1918 (Brothers 2006, 277). For Cootie Williams, telling a story clearly had more to do with emotional presence of the player than narrative structure: “It’s not just to play the notes. Just like if you’re reading a book and you’re telling a story to kids or something. And when you’re playing an instrument, which I try to tell a story when I’m blowing, in the same way” (Williams IJS n.d.). Basic to this are details of phrasing, shadings of loud and soft, distorted timbre, and attack, the markers that are fundamental to blues and jazz. Telling a story could mean nothing more than strong, individualized phrasing. Armstrong praised trumpeter Natty Dominique: “You’ve got that drive. You carries them with you—they’ve got to come with you” (Russell 1994, 150).

  72Dance 1969, 69. Consider these remarks from Armstrong (2005, 145): “Q: The highlife music of Ghana, did it stem from the jazz of America? A: No, we copied it from them. The beat. Tom-toms and drumbeats. I realized when I went down there that it was copied from them. When the slaves came, they brought the music with them and they’ve still got it. It brought me back to generations, my ancestors in Africa, in New Orleans… . I could see so many things that was brought from Africa. It brought back memories.”

  73I am very grateful to Lesley Zlabinger, archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, for her detective work on May Ann’s death. Lesley calculated the date of July 6, 1927, based on indirect information from scrapbooks in the archive and online death certificates housed by the Illinois Department of Public Health. See also Anderson 2007, 136, for an obituary from the Defender. There are some inconsistencies in accounts of the purchase of the house, but it seems likely that the couple bought it in late 1925, just before Armstrong returned to Chicago. “He walked in and said, ‘You mean this is our house?’” Lillian remembered. “I said, ‘Yes, it will be someday.’ He said, ‘You are a magician.’” Lillian remained in the house until her death in 1971. In the summer of 1927, Oliver was living five blocks away, at 209 East 46th Street, between South Michigan Avenue and South Prairie Avenue. Lillian and Louis also purchased lakefront property at Idlewild, an African-American summer gathering spot in Michigan. Riverside LP interview, 1936, 83; Scrapbook 83, LAHM; King 1967, 66; Armstrong 1966, 31; Armstrong 1999, 90, 65.

  74Eddie Condon (1947, 85) described Beiderbecke: “The sounds came out like a girl saying yes.” And Humphrey Lyttelton (1978, 137) compared Beiderbecke’s solo for Singin’ the Blues to the “perfect woman” in William Wordsworth’s poem of that name. More recently, Richard Sudhalter (1999, 243) laid out a very different basis for the comparison, one dangerously close to centuries of racist ideology, with Beiderbecke contributing an intellectual dimension while Armstrong specialized in emotions: “[Beiderbecke’s] phrasing—linear, compositional, less emotionally charged than Armstrong’s but more layered, more complex—challenged the intellect as readily as the heart.”

  75Put ’Em Down Blues and I’m Not Rough were composed by Armstrong, Ory’s Creole Trombone and Savoy Blues by Ory, Struttin’ with Some Barbecue, Got No Blues, and Hotter Than That by Hardin (though Armstrong claimed authorship of both Hotter Than That and Struttin’ with Some Barbecue—and I see no reason to doubt him; see Armstrong 1999, 25, for evidence of his lasting bitterness about the latter). The Last Time is credited to Ewing and Martin, who, as Anderson (2007, 149–52) explains, are Billy H. Ewing (a comedian who sometimes performed with Martin; Defender, March 6, 1926) and Sara Martin, a famous blues singer. Anderson reports that Lillian Hardin filed copyright for the same title in October 1927, and that Martin’s recorded version differs from that of the Hot Five. In any event, Martin recorded frequently for OKeh, which probably accounts for the inclusion of this song in the Hot Five repertory, if, in fact, it was not composed by Hardin. Once in a While was composed by one William H. Butler; Anderson (2007, 165–68) suggests identification with the saxophonist by this name who played with Doc Cooke’s band in Chicago, a band Johnny St. Cyr also played in.

  76Armstrong said (1999, 135) that Got No Blues was “one of those quickies that was made up right there at the studio.” It is also closely modeled on Struttin’ with Some Barbecue, which encourages speculation that the latter was a well-established hit at the Sunset, the former an imitation designed to capitalize on its success.

  77Bud Freeman (1970, 16): “You must remember that a few years before there wasn’t any jazz; there was a thing we called ragtime… . Players who didn’t have a feeling for jazz would take a series of 8th notes and play them dotted, like da-ta, da-ta, da-ta, ta… . Whereas Louie, out of his New Orleans background, or the riverboats, or sheer instinct, would take the same group of notes and give them a beautiful, graceful, powerful line of playing… . For instance if I may use an example, Struttin’ with Some Barbecue, which he made up and first began to play around 1927 … ladedadada da-do-deet-deet-doo… . There was always a drive to the playing, never the corny type of phrasing others were using; I am sure you will appreciate the difference.” Freeman also told a funny story about this solo (1974, 16): “In the days in Chicago, before Louis Armstrong became world famous, he spent a great deal of time walking the streets of his neighborhood on the South Side. Louis was very friendly, and kind to everyone, especially pan handlers. One afternoon, as he strolled along 35th Street, he noticed a small crowd gathered around two street musicians. He stopped and listened and much to his delight, the trumpet player was playing Louis’s improvised chorus of Struttin With Some Barbecue. At the finish of the number, Louis walked over to the street musicians and said: ‘Man … you’re playing that too slow!’ ‘How would you know?’ they challenged. ‘I’m Louis Armstrong … that’s my chorus you’re playing!’ The next day the street musicians had a sign next to their tin cup. The sign read ‘Pupils of Louis Armstrong.’”

  78An ad for the Nov. 12, 1927, issue (p. 24) read: “Wanted/100 Charming Misses/They must dance well and possess individuality—charm—appearance/the Opportunity to Earn from $30.00 to $75.00 Per Week Awaits You Apply Daily—10 A.M. to 3 P.M./Savoy America’s Smartest Ballroom 47th and South Parkway Chicago.”

  79A clipping from Scrapbook 83, LAHM, lays out details of the “Louis Armstrong dance tour”: Monday, Jan. 2, Harrisburg, Pa.; Tuesday, Jan. 3, Martinsburg, W.V.; Wednesday, Jan. 4, Richmond, Va.; Thursday, Jan. 5, Norfolk, Va.; Friday, Jan. 6, Newport News, Va.; Saturday, Jan. 7, Wilmington, Del.

  80Defender, April 7, 1928, p. 6. Contributing to the decline of music at the Vendome was the death (the previous November) of Oliver C. Hammond, the owner who was credited with supporting Erskine Tate and his orchestra; Light and Heebie Jeebies, Nov. 12, 1927, p. 28. Hinton (1988, 27) has a good description of the “shopping center” that opened in 1927 and early 1928 at 47th Street and South Parkway, including a department store, a five-and-dime, a drugstore,
a Chinese restaurant named the Chu Chin Chow, and the Savoy Ballroom.

  81It is possible that the Going Home Armstrong played (Defender, April 21, 1928) was the spiritual I’m Going Home that is included in the famous publication Slave Songs of the United States, though that seems much less likely than Dvořák’s tune, which was published as a song with words by William Arms Fisher in 1922. This would have been a natural choice for funeral ceremonies in churches like the Liberty Congregational. For description of a New Orleans funeral with music, see Brothers 2006, 85. A touching tribute to Powers was published in the Light and Heebie Jeebies, April 21, 1928, p. 2.

  82Testimony: Shapiro and Hentoff 1955, 118; Jackson 2005, 87. Of the nine tunes recorded in late June and early July 1928, Don’t Jive Me, Two Deuces, and Knee Drops were composed by Hardin; West End Blues by Oliver; A Monday Date by Hines; Fireworks and Skip the Gutter by Spencer Williams. All of those follow the pattern of local connections who signed away copyright to OKeh, thus explaining the presence of their pieces on the series (on the likelihood of an OKeh connection for Spencer Williams, see Chap. 5). That leaves Squeeze Me by Fats Waller and Clarence Williams (who had strong OKeh connections) and Sugar Foot Strut by Billy Pierce, Henry Meyers, and Charles Schwab.

  83Armstrong, Lillian WRC 1938. The notes from the interview, taken by Bill Russell, read: “Joe Oliver never played the West End cadenza. That came from some of the classical stuff that she taught Louis… . She spoke about the West End cadenzas and other things he got from the classical things.” Compare with this from Earl Hines, speaking about Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the 1940s (Hines 2005, 151): “Dizzy used to go to Charlie’s dressing room and play out of his exercise book. Charlie would do the same. Play a lot of passages. They had photographic minds and they used to insert some of these passages in the things we were playing. But they were doing it in such an advanced way, especially the original tunes, that the average musician didn’t know what it was all about.” Jeffrey Taylor (1993, 95) compares figuration played by Hines on Skip the Gutter (June 27, 1928) with that of Chopin’s Etude, Op. 10, No 4. Since Skip the Gutter was recorded the day before West End Blues, it is easy to imagine them exploring together the possibility of bringing into their music passages from classical technique. See also Schuller 1989, 272; Harker 2011, 156–58.

  84People notate it today for study purposes, of course, and also because of the strange notion that seems to be part of jazz pedagogy that it is good training to notate the complicated jazz solos of the past. This teaching technique would have perplexed musicians of Armstrong’s generation (and several generations following him, I’m sure), who learned all the famous solos by ear and would have shaken their heads at the idea of learning them through notation.

  85The main exception here is the quiet call and response between Lonnie Johnson and Armstrong singing scat two-thirds of the way through Hotter Than That, which, as we have seen, was almost certainly created for the recording studio.

  86Sugar Foot Strut seems to be another good candidate for having come directly from the bandstand of the Savoy Ballroom: (1) it is a fine demonstration of the new vocal style; (2) it is a strong performance, well rehearsed and organized; (3) it was a popular hit of the time, composed by Billy Pierce, Henry Meyers, and Charles Schwab, and thus seems to be an exception to OKeh’s repertory policy.

  87Perhaps the oddest of all of Armstrong’s recordings from the 1920s is his performance (recorded June 26, 1928) with Lillie Delk Christianson of Too Busy, with Armstrong singing vocal obbligato behind Christianson’s lead. (Christianson has sometimes been incorrectly identified as white in discussions of this recording.) Christianson tiptoes into her second chorus only to run up against an explosion of scat fill-in from Armstrong. Armstrong continues scatting as full-blown obbligato to produce a bizarre 20 seconds or so of music. This performance, like A Monday Date, was almost certainly inspired by From Monday On, recorded in January 1928 by Paul Whiteman and His Rhythm Boys and heard live by Armstrong in Chicago.

  88Austin: McCracken 2000, 72; see also pp. 79–111 for musical examples. For other usages: Nellie Henry, niece of the recently deceased Florence Mills, shared (Courier, Nov. 26, 1927, p. 13) some of her aunt’s private aspirations: “She yearned to be able to express that mother love in which she could croon over her own baby in its cradle, singing the soothing lullabies, the sobbing themes of her own African ancestry.” For additional references, see “plantation songs” like G. H. Clutsam’s Croon, Croon, Underneat’ de Moon (1902). Also Frederick Donaghey, reviewer for the Chicago Daily Tribune (Nov. 11, 1928, p. H1): “Miss Marion Harris, liked here last season for her soft crooning of blues… .” Also Courier, April 21, 1928, p. A8: “For days he moped about the roundhouse. Finally he commenced to croon to himself. With the innate musical instinct of his race he was trying to put the ache in his heart into song.” Also Afro-American, April 23, 1927, p. 8: “Edna Thomas, ‘the lady from Louisiana,’ back from a two years’ foreign tour, will make her first appearance since her return, April 24, at the Lyric, New York, at 8:45 p.m. in a recital of Negro spirituals and plantation croons.” Also Afro-American, March 10, 1928, p. 9: “Abbie Mitchell … is successfully essaying a ‘Mammy’ role in the Broadway success, ‘The Coquette.’ … Abbie gets a chance to show the quality of that remarkable voice of hers, when as she starts to ascend the staircase she croons a spiritual.” See also McCracken 1999, 368.

  89Teddy Wilson (2001, 104) on Earl Hines: “the technique he used gave great force to the solo piano in the big band before the days of electrical amplification. His octave technique was original, brilliant and clear, even above full ensemble backgrounds. When I first started playing, the microphone was beginning to be used on the piano, and all one had to do was turn up the volume control to be heard. Using the octave, instead of the individual fingers, involves utilizing hand touch and gives you much more power, so you can be heard in a hall where there is no amplification. By hand touch I mean the power of the whole hand behind the touch instead of just the individual finger. Hines pioneered and developed this technique and introduced it with tremendous dexterity so he could produce improvised piano solos which would cut through to perhaps 2,000 dancing people, just like a trumpet or a saxophone could.” And further (p. 108): “The reason I do not use the extremely high volume of Hines and Waller is that I seem to be able to express myself well within a much narrower dynamic range.”

  90The phrase “total unified conception” comes from Gunther Schuller (1968, 103), as a way to assess Big Butter and Egg Man. In the sweep of this 32-bar solo—I count 154 different notes in the transcription—Schuller identified a brief rhythmic figure of two notes repeated in five places. I hear the figure as a small sprinkling of musical patterning, one of the many small “conversations of notes” that come and go. For Schuller they are an example of Armstrong’s keen regard for “musical logic and continuity” and the source of his greatness. My view is that Armstrong’s primary focus is the fixed and variable model, which may be understood as a dimension of musical form. On the one hand, the fixed level of accompaniment, with its regular flow of harmonies, is coherent to the point of banality. Armstrong’s solos dance on top of this plodding march, the perfect base for his quicksilver patterning. As long as the solo is connected to the fixed ground, it partakes of the musical logic of the chords. As suggested in Chapter 4, this is a common option for specialists in the African-American vernacular: to intensify or complement a given form with the right gesture at the right moment. The performer does not have to create a new form, but she or he can take advantage of the potentials of a given form. Local levels of musical patterning come and go, beautifully so, but the question is how systematic they are and ultimately how important any single one of them is. Filmmaker and historian Robert Altman (2004, 36, 51) has written about an “aesthetic of discontinuity” that conditioned popular theater, vaudeville, and films in the decades around 1900: “Today’s assumptions about the importance of clearly integrating all elem
ents of a performance were not operative at this time,” writes Altman, and the 154 driving notes of the Big Butter and Egg Man solo prove that claim. Read most sympathetically, efforts like Schuller’s aim to counter the primitivist view that cultural production in jazz lacks form and order and is given over to the expression of primitive emotions. Assumptions like this sneak into analytical discourse to the present day. Consider this from author and musician Richard Sudhalter (1999, 745): “Tommy Ladnier, sitting alongside Joe Smith in Fletcher Henderson’s mid-1920s orchestra, is deeply rooted in the special emotional urgency of the blues, whereas his section mate seems drawn to song, with its consciousness of form, tonal purity, precision of execution.” The implication is that blues abandons precision and form in favor of emotional urgency. Against this, one can only state the obvious facts: first, blues was a protean musical idiom that manifested itself in many different ways; second, blues was very much a form; third, “purity” in music is a relative concept; fourth, blue notes are played and sung by great professionals with just as much precision as any other great professional brings to any other style. The topic indicates how integrally bound up micro-level musical analysis is with macro-level issues of culture and society, with race never far from the discussion. Additional critiques of this topic have been published by Gushee, Harker, and Howland.