Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Armstrong and Oliver, 1922 (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 1018, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Around age ten, Armstrong found an unlikely tutor in a so-called rags-bottles-and-bones man named Larenzo, who played blues on a long tin horn. Jelly Roll Morton insisted that men like Larenzo played “more lowdown, dirty blues … than the rest of the country ever thought of.” Just before Armstrong was born, they inspired cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden, whose ability in blues made him the most famous player in early jazz; Kid Ory accused Bolden of stealing ideas from the ragmen. Like the blues divas, Bolden took gestures made by ordinary people and stylized them with his powerful horn. He was immensely popular among uptown African Americans, a population that included some 40,000 immigrants from the plantations.

  Oliver (b. ca. 1885) was in his formative years when Bolden reached the peak of local celebrity. Stella said that her husband listened to rail-and dockworkers and figured out how to play their songs on his cornet. Armstrong said that Oliver taught him “the modern way of phrasing” on the cornet, which must have meant conversational inflections, shadings of loud and soft, and the microscopic suppleness of come-and-go rhythmic patterning that communicated resilience. Oliver could demonstrate how to play blue notes, “the strongest notes you can play,” in bass player Pops Foster’s view.

  Armstrong’s first musical job at a local honky tonk, around age fifteen, required him to play nothing but blues, all night long. The idiom fundamentally shaped his conception of music. He may have been exceptional in his talent and in the opportunity to work closely with someone like Oliver, but he was not exceptional in the centrality of the blues-based vernacular to his musical upbringing. For all of these reasons, no musician who knew him was surprised to hear him play blues for his solo debut at Lincoln Gardens. That was his strength, and it was what the audience wanted to hear. When he finished, he must have been even more convinced that he would not be getting homesick in his new town.

  Music can be heard in many different ways, and we have now seen three different types of reception encountered by musicians from New Orleans as they moved around the country in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Whites could look at the Creole Band and see “the southern plantation darky as he really is.” Bicycling white teenagers at Lincoln Gardens heard in Oliver’s band a liberation from bourgeois narrow-mindedness and parental control. And in that same location, African-American immigrants found satisfaction for their immense appetites for blues. They crowned Oliver “King” on his first night there (when it was called Royal Gardens) in 1918. A man known as “Memphis” walked around Chicago playing Oliver’s solos on a comb covered with wax paper, thus completing yet another vernacular loop, from the rags-bottles-and-bones men and the levee and railroad workers into the repertory of professional wind players and back into everyday music making by ordinary people.

  In one sense, blues was the foundation for everything the uptown New Orleanians played. In another, the word meant a slow-tempo dance, and with that we step into some confusing terminological territory. The three key words for understanding African-American secular genres during this period—jazz, blues, and ragtime—were alive with various types of usage, even within the discourse of a single community. These categories have been simplified today, so we need to carefully attend to the ways in which they were used.

  Of these three terms, “jazz” was the most foreign to the New Orleanians. Armstrong and many others said that they did not call their music jazz in their hometown. “‘Jazz,’ that’s a name the white people have given to the music,” insisted Sidney Bechet. As I have explained in Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, the word these musicians were most likely to use for early jazz was “ragtime.” With the national success of the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, they willingly adopted “jazz.” In the 1920s “jazz” was used interchangeably with “hot music” to mean any uptempo music for dancing. “It was ragtime, Dixieland, gutbucket, jazz, swing—and it ain’t nothin’ but the same music,” Armstrong wrote, with a degree of frustration, in 1955.

  “Blues” had similar flexibility. For musicians from New Orleans its primary meanings were, first, a very slow tempo, second, a musical form or pattern. Musicians need some kind of shared formal convention in order to improvise as a group, and blues provided this without requiring anyone to say a single word or have a single rehearsal. “Blues” could also mean a style, the emphasis of the present discussion, defined by blue notes, conversational phrasing, and so on. A musical performance in the 1920s might have one of these attributes—blues tempo, blues form, or blues style—but not the other two and still be thought of as blues. But the marketing potency of the word was so strong that it was often applied to music that lacked all three.

  Pops Foster remembered W. C. Handy’s band from Memphis during the 1910s and highlighted the absence of non-notatable techniques of the vernacular: Handy’s band “was called a blues band but they didn’t really play any blues,” he said. “They just played everything straight… . With him it all came out like it was written in the book.” Discussing Dipper Mouth Blues, the most famous record made by Oliver’s 1923 band, drummer Zutty Singleton said, “That was a rag. Just because they named it blues don’t make it a blues”; for Singleton, “blues” meant a tempo slower than Dipper Mouth and a musical form.

  As for the word “jazz,” George Gershwin summarized the problem in 1926: “The word has been used for so many different things that it has ceased to have any definite meaning.” Isham Jones, a white dance-bandleader in Chicago, argued in 1924 for a precise definition that actually excluded his own band, insisting that jazz was a “down South Negro type” of blues. Jones felt that “American dance music” was the phrase that fit his own band best.

  What Jones rejected, Oliver was happy to embrace. The New Orleanians’ most compelling asset in Chicago was blues. When Willie “The Lion” Smith came through town in 1923, he was surprised by the dominance of wind instruments and by how well those winds played blues. “We hadn’t heard groups in the East that could play the blues and stomps like these guys in the Middle West,” he said. Dominance of the New Orleanians accounted for both distinctions. “There wasn’t an eastern performer who could really play the blues,” explained Garvin Bushell. “We didn’t put that quarter tone pitch in the music the way the southerners did. Up north we leaned toward ragtime conception—a lot of notes.”

  With blues in their pockets, “the New Orleans musicians had Chicago locked up,” as trombonist Preston Jackson put it. Singer Alberta Hunter agreed that “the New Orleans boys had something that the Chicago musicians couldn’t get at that particular time.” Their impact was felt on nearly every instrument. Bubber Miley visited from New York and studied Oliver’s freak technique from a distance; he eventually personalized Oliver’s approach and became the central force in Duke Ellington’s maturing orchestra. Before Miley it had been clarinetist Sidney Bechet who brought the sound of New Orleans to Ellington’s attention. “I had never heard anything like it,” Ellington remembered of his first hearing of Bechet; “it was a completely new sound and conception to me.” Clarinetists Dodds and Jimmy Noone shaped famous white clarinetists Benny Goodman and Frank Teschemacher. Cornetist Johnny Dunn from Memphis had blues talent, but even he, said Bushell, was not as soulful as the New Orleanians. Bass player Bill Johnson was the model for Hinton and others. Drummers Baby Dodds, Zutty Singleton, and Tubby Hall influenced George Wettling, Dave Tough, and Gene Krupa; the New Orleanians did things other drummers had never heard before, remembered Glover Compton from Kentucky. Even in the early 1930s, when saxophonist Leon Washington and Hinton were breaking into the professional scene, the New Orleanians still dominated. Hinton felt “surrounded” by them; “they controlled the real hotbed of jazz,” he said. When he finally got a regular job playing in a band led by Singleton, he believed that it was this association with a New Orleanian that helped him enter the local network of musici
ans.

  The New Orleanian advantage came from the fact that they carried a tradition that had, over the course of several generations, packed more and more of the plantation vernacular into dance-band music. This was partly a matter of ear-playing ensemble style. It was not just for self-protection and camaraderie that they clannishly stuck together: their way of playing by ear depended on knowledge and experience. And it was partly a matter of improvising solos: the “get off men”—players who “get off” the composed melody and onto an improvised solo—were “strictly” from New Orleans, according to clarinetist Ralph Brown. The musical legacy of slavery had been folded into professional dance music in New Orleans as it had nowhere else. It could all be summarized in the word “blues,” if the speaker was so inclined, or “jazz,” if inclined differently.

  Many felt that Oliver was the best, both as bandleader and as soloist. On the South Side of Chicago, in 1922, Oliver stood at the top of the local dance-band pyramid, just as W. C. Handy was at the top of the list of composers who published blues, and just as Bessie Smith would soon be in the forefront of the blues divas. Oliver’s success was largely local, however, in contrast with Handy’s and Smith’s.

  Alberta Hunter suggested to Columbia Records that they record Oliver’s band in early 1923, but since she was not available to join them, the company refused. White businessmen could not yet imagine the phonograph market for black dance bands without a vocalist, no matter how bluesy. A small label took a chance. In doing so, Gennett Records launched Oliver’s fame beyond the reach of those who could hear him in person and provided the earliest documentation of what his band sounded like. “When Joe Oliver went up [to Chicago], he made it bigger than any of them because he started to make records,” acknowledged Pops Foster. This was one of the transitions the New Orleanians faced as they left behind the preindustrial South for the industrialized North. Gennett Records gave Oliver and his band a bigger spotlight than they previously could have imagined.

  Blues and the First Recordings from Oliver and Armstrong, April 1923

  In the spring of 1923, Oliver’s engagement at Lincoln Gardens came to an end, as all location jobs eventually must. Somehow he arranged a tour of one-night stands in dance halls through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Indiana was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, with 250,000 members, more than any other state, so it was not a place African-American musicians looked forward to visiting. Cornetist Punch Miller found Indiana to be worse than Mississippi or Georgia for prejudice. Trombonist Clyde Bernhardt remembered a tour of the upper Midwest in 1927, and how difficult it was to find food. “If the town was all white we knew not to stop. When we be starving, and that was frequently, we take a chance and pull up behind some white food store… . Ask if they feed us in the back or maybe allow us to take food out. Most of the time they wouldn’t, so we move on.”

  While dealing with challenges like these, the band made its way to Richmond, near the Ohio border, where Gennett Records had its home base. The location was remote, so the company liked to sign up bands on the spot as they came through town on tour. A low-budget enterprise, Gennett looked for relatively unknown groups that had not yet recorded and were willing to do so for little or no money up front. The Oliver band entered the Gennett studios on April 5 and 6, and from these sessions nine sides were eventually issued. Four of the nine were called blues—Canal Street Blues, Mandy Lee Blues, Chimes Blues, and Dipper Mouth Blues.

  Gennett studios, Bix Beiderbecke and His Rhythm Jugglers (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  The humble Gennett studio measured 125 feet long and 30 feet wide, with the performing space separated from the control room by a double pane of glass. Noise from trains frequently interrupted the recordings. A large Mohawk rug, a lot of draperies, and some towels hung from the walls helped with soundproofing, and sawdust filled the cavities between the walls. The room’s resonance was so poor that musicians often had trouble hearing each other.

  Recordings were made with the “acoustic” technique, which required the players to direct their instruments into the conical center of a large megaphone that popped out of the control room wall. The technology had severe limitations. Drums and string bass caused the recording needle to jump out of its grove, so they were usually abandoned. For the April 1923 sessions, Bill Johnson played banjo instead of bass and Baby Dodds tapped on a woodblock. A good portion of each session was dedicated to searching for balance. Banjo players usually sat directly in front of the megaphone on a high stool, since the instrument was difficult to pick up. When two musicians played the same instrument, as was the case with Oliver and Armstrong, the engineer experimented with different ways of positioning them; two cornets were known to create special problems with distortion. All of this fussing with balance was not just a matter of prettiness, since too much volume bounced the stylus and too little would not be recorded. Dozens of preliminary recordings were usually made to test the various combinations and positions.

  When the testing began, Oliver and Armstrong stood side by side as usual, but the engineer soon remarked that Armstrong was overpowering Oliver’s lead. The solution was to move Oliver up, closer to the horn, and Armstrong back, toward a corner of the room. Since Oliver was playing lead and Armstrong second, the basic logic of the decision was clear. Nevertheless, Armstrong took up his corner position with a frown. He must have been eagerly anticipating this moment, his first chance to record. He himself later said that the main problem with the 1923 recordings of the Oliver band was that the cornet pair together was not prominent enough, thus distorting the sound of the band as a whole.

  Recordings were limited to around three minutes, so there could be no stretching out to 40 or more hot choruses. A red light flashed at two minutes and 30 seconds into every recording, signaling that it was time to wrap things up. Three masters were usually made for each piece. To keep the wax soft, the temperature was set around 85 degrees; pianist Earl Hines said that the Gennett studio felt like “sort of a steam room.” The heat, the standing around, and the general anxiety about making a mistake made for a long day at work. “We were all very nervous,” said Baby Dodds, who found relief in habitual fashion—with a bottle.

  In these brief, tinny recordings, we have the best glimpse we will ever get of what Armstrong sounded like at age twenty-one, what Oliver’s band at Lincoln Gardens sounded like, and even what jazz from uptown African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans sounded like before the musicians moved to Chicago. Yet the documentation is hardly direct. The inferior technology and the difficulties of instrumentation and balance automatically distance these recordings from what was happening in Lincoln Gardens, and so does Oliver’s reluctance to put his best material on record. A few years earlier, Fred Keppard had passed up an opportunity to record because he was afraid someone would steal his ideas; Victor made the offer, and when Keppard refused they turned to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which hit the big time.

  Keppard’s reluctance is easy to understand. The biggest advantages in the performer-centered musical world the New Orleanians brought with them to Chicago were their unique creations, which they relied on week after week, year after year. It must have been worry enough for Oliver to look down from the stage of Lincoln Gardens and see the hungry alligators, studying his fingers and scribbling on their shirt cuffs. How much more damage they could do with a recording they could play over and over. Oliver never recorded Eccentric, and that may have had something to do with the fact that the New Orleans Rhythm Kings beat him to it with their own Gennett version some eight months before he arrived in Richmond. “I’d never heard any white band come so close to the New Orleans style before,” said Mezz Mezzrow about the Rhythm Kings. “They stole Joe Oliver’s riffs and they stole them good.” Before entering the Gennett studios, Oliver told a friend, “I ain’t gonna give these white boys my best stuff, you better believe it.”

  Alberta Hunter remembered hearing Oliver and Armstrong at Lincoln Gardens play a duet based on the celebrated anthem
Holy City (music by Stephen Adams with words by Frederick Weatherly) that “would make the hair on your head rise.”4 They played it without the other band members, “just the two of them floating along,” she said. Two of the four blues titles from these April sessions, Canal Street Blues and Chimes Blues, prominently display the main theme of Holy City. Compositional credit for Canal Street Blues went to Oliver and Armstrong jointly, credit for Chimes Blues to Oliver.

  It is easy to imagine the hair-raising power of Holy City in this context. Oliver and Armstrong were both brought up with church music, and New Orleans dance-band music was filled with inspiration from that source. There were a few dissenters to this kind of mixing, and even Oliver’s wife Stella admitted that she was opposed, early on in New Orleans, to the way he mixed the sacred with the secular. But most people loved it. Oliver majestically plays the main theme of Holy City in the second strain (CD 0:37–1:07) of Canal Street Blues, while Armstrong harmonizes below him. In Chimes Blues something very similar happens (CD 0:42–1:16). The pastiche approach to creating blues numbers, pursued so successfully by Handy, was an easy model to follow. The main theme from Holy City as originally composed does not match blues form precisely, but it is close enough that Oliver only needed to tweak it slightly so that it fit the standard pattern of 12 measures with conventional harmonies. It was easy to drop the tune into these two pieces.

  Co-compositional credit to Armstrong for Canal Street Blues must mean that he created a melody for one of the strains, probably the first one. The theme for the third strain (CD 1:08–1:22 and repeated at 1:53) holds the strongest appeal for most listeners today, and it is very much in Oliver’s style, with a simple but effective riff (a short musical idea repeated many times), rhythmic clarity, and punch. Johnny Dodds, a close follower of the great Sidney Bechet, provides another highlight with his funky solo.5 Dodds repeatedly leaps and lands with an accent on blue notes that are then stretched and bent. His brother’s counterrhythms behind the solo are clear and varied, livening up the texture. Also behind him is Bill Johnson, playing the banjo in a way that probably resembles the slap-pizzicato, four to the bar, that he and other bass players from New Orleans sometimes used to give a chorus special force.