Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The implications of this line of analysis are startling: by making the fixed and variable model so central to his music, Armstrong intensified the audible presence of his African heritage. It is obvious today that cultural practice has no basis in biology. But given the strong associations between race and culture in the 1920s, Armstrong’s musical practice cannot be separated from the story of race. Aspects of the fixed and variable model are key to hearing his music, as well as understanding how it was socially conceived. When race is downplayed by jazz historians who prefer to think of the music in a unified “American” way—with whites and blacks both contributing, and with more or less equal debt to Europe and Africa, making jazz a kind of golden multiculturalism avant la lettre—these fundamental points are obscured. They are also obscured by those who treat jazz as a rhetorical text, attending to its social complexities but, for one reason or another, disregarding socially conditioned details of sonic practice.

  Trumpeter Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, who knew and admired Armstrong during the late 1920s in Chicago, described his hero as “an ordinary-extraordinary man.” There are several ways to think about that paradox. To say he was ordinary could mean that he accepted, without hesitation, apology, or compromise, the social and musical values of the people he grew up with, who were pegged as the lowest of the low. The extraordinary side of the paradox may be related to Armstrong’s musical accomplishments. He was not only a great trumpeter, but also a great singer and entertainer; further, he was a great melodist, who invented a melodic idiom of jazz solo playing that became tremendously influential. That’s a lot of greatness in one person. It all fell into place in the decade or so after 1922, which was also the period that found him at his peak.

  When Armstrong arrived in Chicago in August 1922, no one was thinking so grandly. Oliver had sent for him because he was suffering from gum disease that made it increasingly difficult for him to play his horn. He needed the support of a second cornetist, and Armstrong was not even the first player he thought of. His assignment was to play second to Oliver’s lead, which he did for almost two years. Oliver kept his maturing apprentice out of the spotlight and extended the mentoring he had begun in the mid-1910s. Among other things, he taught Armstrong how to design a memorable solo; the impact of that instruction can be clearly heard in Armstrong’s earliest recorded solo, from Chimes Blues in 1923. There also must have been lessons about the texture of collective improvisation, and perhaps composition as well. King Oliver’s recordings with Armstrong during 1923 and 1924, a treasure comprising some 30 different sides, make this phase of his career a true delight.

  An important part of Armstrong’s maturation in Chicago was the enthusiastic patronage of other African Americans who had recently moved from the Deep South and were eager to discover a new cultural identity, one that incorporated the vernacular principles they cherished, yet was also forward-looking and competitive with white culture. The urban sophistication of Chicago played out musically in places like the Vendome Theater, where Armstrong first made his mark. The spotlight there was normally on operatic overtures and symphonic arrangements. Armstrong was able to match that kind of sophistication while making music that “relates to us,” as one African-American observer put it. He did not stand up and shout, “I’m black and I’m proud,” but his music said so in no uncertain terms.

  Without Armstrong’s early commercial recordings, we would have far less reason to engage with his accomplishments from this period. Nevertheless, that legacy is at best a partial and potentially misleading representation of what was happening. Not all recordings were created equally. Some were generated in the studio, on a moment’s notice, to satisfy the demand for one more side. A smaller number reflect what was going on in venues where Armstrong played regularly. We should not expect uniformly excellent results from such a varied profile. One purpose of this book is to work through the recorded legacy with an eye toward what it tells us about contexts beyond the studio. The irony is that commercial recordings were merely a sideshow for Armstrong, while for us they are the main event.

  “Master of modernism and creator of his own song style” is a good way to sum up Armstrong’s accomplishments from this period. The word “modern” is an easy term of abuse for the lazy historian, but the 1920s was a decade when the reach of the modern was extending in all directions. “Modernism will always rule,” wrote Dave Peyton, the most important African-American critic of music from this period, in a 1925 review of a Chicago battle of bands that was won by Sam Cooke’s orchestra. Modernism meant progress, the articulation of fresh forms, sophistication, something of consequence. It meant inventions of daring and speed, the Chrysler Building in New York City, talking movies, flappers, jazz, consumerism, and distance from Victorian conventions. The degree to which modernism in the black community took white accomplishment as a standard depended on how one was positioned socially and how one imagined future progress for the race. The astonishing thing about Armstrong is that he invented not one but two modern art forms, one after the other, both of them immensely successful and influential, and that he did this with vigorous commitment to means of expression derived from the black vernacular he had grown up with.

  Armstrong’s first modern style, created around the years 1926–28 and based on the fixed and variable model, was pitched primarily to the black community. These people enjoyed his entertaining singing, but they were in awe of his carefully designed trumpet solos, which helped articulate the modern identity they were looking for. They might have been satisfied with the dazzling display of his increasingly impressive chops—the big round tone, quick fingers, and high-note playing. But he was driven to create a new melodic idiom, which made him different from almost everybody else. His compositional skills led him to craft solos of enduring melodic beauty, and that is how they should be regarded.

  His second modern formulation was the result of efforts to succeed in the mainstream market of white audiences. The key here was radical paraphrase of familiar popular tunes. The basic idea was nothing new: when, during the late nineteenth century and probably long before, African-American musicians spoke of “ragging the tune,” they meant creating their own stylized version of a known melody by adding all kinds of embellishments and extensions. This technique was part of Armstrong’s early musical training. In the early 1930s, with the assistance of the microphone, he invented a fresh approach to this old tradition, creating a song style that was part blues, part crooning, part fixed and variable model, plastic and mellow, the most modern thing around. In 1931 and 1932, Armstrong’s recordings made him the bestselling performer in the country, regardless of genre, style, color, or pedigree, and his live performances were regularly beamed across national radio networks.

  Jazz à la Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin, made by whites with the assistance of musical notation, was conceived as a modern art form infused with distinctly American energy, “the free, frank, sometimes vulgar spirit of the bourgeoisie,” in the words of one writer, clearly referring to the white bourgeoisie. Notation allowed composers like Gershwin and arrangers working for bands like Whiteman’s to create works of formal sophistication and artistic complexity. Although this white modernism was inspired by the African-American vernacular, it was so thoroughly transformed that its origin was obscured.

  Modern jazz as Armstrong presented it was something altogether different. It was just as sophisticated as white jazz, but its terms of expression could not be transmitted through musical notation. Armstrong’s music was a unique transformation and extension of the African-American vernacular. That was the key to his success as a modernist who appealed both to blacks in the mid-and late 1920s and to whites in the early 1930s.

  Few composers can claim to have made significant innovations in musical style; Armstrong did it twice. Like Beethoven, Stravinsky, and The Beatles, he had a remarkable ability to move through different conceptual formations and offer a musical response that, in turn, helped define his surroundings. He learned nor
thern showbiz ways and adapted them to foundational principles he had internalized in New Orleans. “You’ll swing harder if you learn to read music,” one musician told him around 1920, and he took the advice to heart. In Chicago he studied with a German music teacher, woodshedded the “classics” with his piano-playing wife, and learned to play higher, faster, and with more precision in the scales and chords of Eurocentric music. This project was very much in step with the agenda of the typical southern African-American immigrant who was “doing something to improve myself,” as it was often phrased.

  Armstrong played the naïve Negro, as whites expected him to. But a genuine historical appreciation of his accomplishment exposes a formidable intellect totally absorbed in music. We still live with the image of an untutored musician who didn’t think too much about his music, which simply poured out of him intuitively. Few white people who admired Armstrong in the 1930s were prepared to discover in him the kind of artistic discipline that we associate with Beethoven, Stravinsky, and even The Beatles. Most assumed that Armstrong was led “only by the sincere unconsciousness of his genius,” as one sympathetic writer said about the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, just as “inspiration has always come to tribal man.” We have not completely left that kind of garbage behind.

  Like all great artists, Armstrong was so thoroughly immersed in his art that he thought in purely musical terms, with no need for verbal translation. His creative genius expressed itself in abstract forms, the fixed and variable model, blues archetypes, and the transformation of popular songs. Armstrong used what he learned from Eurocentric music to infuse the African-American vernacular with new intensity and possibilities. This process produced, in the mid-1920s, a style that served as the basis for jazz solos for the next decade and beyond. After that, the combination of creative drive and hustle for the rewards of the white marketplace led Armstrong to create an equally innovative modern song style. These twin accomplishments make him the greatest master of melody in the African-American tradition since Scott Joplin, the central figure in virtually the entire tradition of jazz solo playing and singing, and arguably the most important American musician of the twentieth century. For that reason they are the main focus of this book.

  When Armstrong left New Orleans behind on a teary day in August 1922, there were no hints of the magnificence that would soon unfold in the North. He had played for whites on Mississippi riverboats, but only as a soloist who could carry a strong lead, not as a blues-based specialist in collective improvisation. He had played for tips in the prostitution district of New Orleans. But most of his musical experience had been in front of African-American audiences, playing the kind of music they liked and he liked. That was precisely what he was called upon to do in Chicago. At Lincoln Gardens, on the South Side, he was eager to step into a band of musicians who thought the way he did and attracted enthusiastic audiences. That band was led by none other than Joe Oliver, who had, since the last time Armstrong saw him, been crowned “King.”

  ONE

  “Welcome to Chicago”

  August 8, 1922

  Twenty-one-year-old Louis Armstrong is riding on a train bound for Chicago, having boarded at the Illinois Central Railroad station in New Orleans. He sits next to a lady with three children. The lady recognizes him, says she knows his mother. This comforts him, not least because she has packed a large basket of fried chicken, enough to last all the way to California in his estimation. Trains in “Galilee”—African-American slang for the South—do not include dining facilities for Negroes, so passengers must bring their own food. His mother bagged a trout sandwich for him, but it feels good to be sitting next to the overflowing basket of chicken. Underneath his long coat and clothes he wears long underwear, even though it is August, and he is lugging a small suitcase in one hand, a little case for his cornet in the other.

  Armstrong, the lady, and her children are following a well-worn path that took shape as an imposing phenomenon half a dozen or so years earlier. They are part of what will later be called the Great Migration, the movement of African Americans from the countryside and cities of the South into the urban North. The trend picked up large numbers with the shutting down of European immigration in 1914; it was spurred along by floods and a boll weevil epidemic—“Hey hey boll weevil, don’t sing them blues no more, boll weevil here, boll weevils everywhere you go,” goes the blues song. Lynchings are on the rise, and the force of vigilante terror—“the tremendous shore of southern barbarism,” as songwriter-poet-novelist James Weldon Johnson described it—seems inexorable. And there is the lure of money, with jobs in the North paying much more than anything available anywhere in the South. African-American musicians are as touched by this set of magnetizing and repelling forces as everyone else is.

  The South Side, Chicago

  1.Pekin Theater and Cabaret

  2.Elite Café

  3.Grand Theater

  4.Vendome Theater

  5.Ed Victor’s Barber Shop

  6.Mecca Flats

  7.Jones Music Store

  8.Monogram Theater

  9.Fiume Café

  10.Dreamland Café

  11.Musicians’ Union

  12.Lil and Louis rental, 1924

  13.Lil’s mother

  14.Eighth Regiment Armory

  15.Apex Club

  16.Plantation Café

  17.Sunset Café

  18.Lincoln Gardens

  19.Alpha Smith

  20.Earl Hines

  21.House purcchased by Lil and Louis, 1925

  22.Metropolitan Theater

  23.Regal Theater

  24.Savoy Ballroom

  25.Warwick Hall

  The thousands of New Orleanians who go north consider only one destination seriously. By 1922, so much is known about Chicago and so little about the alternatives that there is no need for deliberation. The immigrants find work in the meatpacking industry, in steel yards, and as porters, janitors, and domestics.

  The Chicago Defender, a nationally circulating newspaper produced by and for African Americans, plays a large role. Defender headlines radiate across the South like a lighthouse beam of safety proclaiming the benefits of northern living, printing letters from happy newcomers, and listing timetables for northbound trains. During the first wave of the Great Migration, some 50,000 African Americans are relocating to the Windy City, greeted at the train station by huge signs that spell out “Welcome to Chicago.”

  On the day of his departure, Armstrong accepted a funeral job at the last minute, thinking the cash might come in handy, but it caused him to miss the train he had told Joe Oliver he would be taking. Now he isn’t sure if Oliver will be at the station to greet him. As he disembarks at the 12th Street Station, the excitement of so many people waiting for taxi cabs, the vigorous hustling in all directions—it all leaves him stunned. He says goodbye to his traveling companion and her children and looks around for some help, getting more and more nervous.

  Finally, a redcap offers assistance. “Oh, you are the young man who’s to join King Oliver’s band at Lincoln Gardens,” he says. This gives the twenty-one-year-old pause, for he has never heard his mentor called “King.” The redcap flags a cab and directs the driver to Lincoln Gardens, where the evening show is already in progress.

  Through three seasons of playing cornet on excursion boats up and down the Mississippi River, Armstrong has drifted through a lot of towns. But he has never seen a city like this, with its tall buildings, bright lights, and paved streets. The cab pulls out from the station and heads down South State Street, the most famous street in the so-called Black Belt of Chicago.

  Louis, mother May Ann, and sister Beatrice, ca. 1922 (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 2041, Willliams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  It is 10:30 p.m. and the action is just starting to crank up. Young African-American adults live in eager anticipation of the sparkling night life. Some are known to work from 7:00 in the morning throu
gh 4:00 in the afternoon, followed by dinner and an early bedtime, only to wake up at 2:00 in the morning and head for South State Street to hang out until dawn, when they start the cycle again.

  The drive takes Louis past the red-light district, just a few blocks from the train station, around 22nd Street. At 2630 South State Street is the Savoy Bar, where the legendary Tony Jackson from New Orleans used to dazzle audiences with flamboyant piano playing and falsetto singing of his composition Pretty Baby, the big hit of 1916. On the same block the Pekin Theater and Cabaret has also discovered the potential of New Orleans musicians to pack in audiences, having hired Oliver and pianist Jelly Roll Morton at different times, and also clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who worked the Cabaret in 1918 in a duo with Jackson. Further down the block is the apartment Oliver shares with his wife Stella, perched strategically above Jackson’s Music Shop.

  Now the cab approaches the hub of the 3100 block of South State, the home of Elite Café #1, the Vendome Theater, and the Grand Theater, an 800-seat stop on the TOBA circuit—Theater Owners Booking Association, also known as “Tough on Black Artists” (and also known with the word “Artists” switched to a cruder word). This is where the Creole Band from New Orleans, managed by bass player Bill Johnson and featuring cornetist Fred Keppard, made a big splash in 1915 as the first to bring what the Defender described as the “weird effects” of New Orleans jazz to Chicago. The Grand’s offerings include a steady stream of famous blues divas.

  The driver hangs left on 31st Street, heading east toward Cottage Grove Avenue. He passes the Schiller Café, where the white band from New Orleans who immodestly named themselves the “Original Dixieland Jazz Band” became popular in 1915. (“They were the first to record the music I played,” wrote Armstrong in carefully chosen words.) And suddenly, a few blocks later, there it is, at 459 East 31st Street—Lincoln Gardens (formerly Royal Gardens). It is already well on its way to becoming one of the most famous venues in jazz history.