Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Pianist Richard Jones said that the only time he ever heard the word “jazz” used in New Orleans was to identify the “jazz stop,” or break. “Only that ending was called ‘jazz,’” he said, “the music that went with the bumps of the dancer at the end. All the musicians heard about that jazz stop at the end and came to hear it.” The early history of the break is not well documented, but Jones indicates a connection to dancing and a moment that everyone waits for. (“Break” must be related to the “break-away,” when couples parted and briefly performed steps that were both creative and individual.) Jelly Roll Morton was adamant about breaks: “Without breaks and without clean breaks, without beautiful ideas in breaks, you don’t need to even think about doing anything else. If you can’t have a decent break, you haven’t got a jazz band or you can’t even play jazz… . Without a break you have nothing.”

  Because the break was a rupture in the normal flow of the music, it fostered a kind of solo utterance very different from the beautifully constructed lead so dear to Oliver. The lead melody organized the listener’s perception of the musical flow for the entire piece; the break was a suspenseful eruption of that regular flow. Baby Dodds liked to use a mix of cowbells, ratchets, and cymbals for his solo breaks. Oliver was admired for his ability to create an endless stream of them. Doubting, perhaps, his ability to improvise, white musicians at Royal Gardens offered him a dollar for every new break he could play. “Joe broke them that night, took all their money, and was still playing breaks afterwards,” remembered Fess Williams.

  Now his apprentice was here to support him, staying under all the while. For most bands, solo breaks were the norm. The Oliver-Armstrong duet breaks seemed to come out of nowhere, splendidly synchronized, and many observers commented on them. Armstrong alluded to a secret system of communication, with Oliver cueing what was coming next and his student scrambling to match it. “The crowd would go mad over it!” he wrote.

  In uptown New Orleans, the break was both an energizing moment and an opportunity to make a personal statement. The success of the performance hung on the prominent statement of the known tune, whether it was Maple Leaf Rag or What a Friend We Have in Jesus. The break split the seams of that statement with a flash of idiosyncratic brilliance from the performer. It was a brief spotlight on personal identity, regional identity, class identity, or racial identity, depending on how the situation was configured.

  Oliver took control of Eccentric (discussed in Chapter 1) by adding breaks and expanding them to four measures, each filled with his award-winning freak music. Armstrong’s slightly older rival, clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, also used the break to good advantage, for example, in his first successful recording, made on July 30, 1923, with Clarence Williams’s Blue Five. Williams arranged Wildcat Blues to give Bechet no fewer than seven breaks, and he takes every one of them with complete authority. As a group, they are nicely varied in range, contour, and rhythm. Barney Bigard said that it was impossible to walk down the street where he lived in New Orleans without hearing phonograph machines, positioned next to open windows, broadcasting Wildcat Blues into the open air.

  It may not be mere coincidence that Armstrong recorded, just a few months later on October 26, 1923, a piece that is even showier in its use of multiple breaks. Tears, with the Oliver band, features Armstrong in not seven but nine breaks packed into a stretch of some 40 seconds during the middle of the piece. No duets—it is all Armstrong. He and Bechet, the greatest soloists ever to come from New Orleans, had already established a budding rivalry during their teenage years before Bechet left the city. Both were reared in the competitive environment of improvising cutting contests, each trying to outplay or cut out the other, and neither was known to back down from a challenge.

  Tears was co-composed by Armstrong and Hardin. Bechet’s performance would have been the only incentive the engaged couple (wedding plans were made in August) needed to design a piece that would display Armstrong’s growing powers of invention and technical skill in a series of breaks. He is perhaps not yet able to match Bechet’s soaring confidence and precision—few could. But his nine breaks, taken as a whole, convey slightly more variety in design. One of them (CD 1:49–1:52) would still be useful to him four years later, in his famous solo for Potato Head Blues. In Tears the caution of Chimes Blues has been put aside, and it is clear that Armstrong, after one year of late apprenticeship with Oliver, felt well qualified to fill the rupture of the break on his own. The recording documents a breakthrough, a proper format for presenting his creativity and intensity.10

  Staying Under: Collective Improvisation

  Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston discussed the high value African Americans placed on ornamentation in the 1930s. She described a cabin in Alabama where the walls were enriched by calendars, scarves, colorful ads from the Sunday newspaper, crepe paper, and a lithograph showing the Treaty of Versailles. “Decorating a decoration … did not seem out of place to the hostess. The feeling back of such an act is that there can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much… . Whatever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes.”

  Louis Armstrong was surrounded by this attitude for the first 21 years of his life. At home in the 1960s, as he scaled down his touring career, he enjoyed making collage decorations on the little boxes that stored his collection of reel-to-reel tapes. His will to adorn comes through again in his prose writings, where he routinely spins out wild displays of hyperpunctuation, capitalization, underlining, and commentary. But it was in music, of course, that the decorating passions of his community shaped him most profoundly, especially the ensemble styles of church and early jazz.

  The musical texture of early jazz was connected to congregational singing in Sanctified churches, and the southern audiences who heard the Oliver band in Chicago certainly recognized this. Armstrong and the other musicians he knew probably grew up with a practice that is called heterophony. This is the simultaneous performance of two or more variations of a single melody; the number of variations is limited only by the number of participants. Outsiders hear congregational heterophony as chaotic and primitive, while insiders delight in richness that is both socially organized and uncompromisingly individual. It is one of the most welcoming, participatory musical practices ever invented, one designed to foster intense emotional involvement within the firm support of the community.

  The distinctive texture of early jazz from New Orleans, derived from church heterophony, is known as collective improvisation. The closest musicians from New Orleans got to naming this rich practice was with the phrase “every tub on its own bottom.” The connection between heterophony and collective improvisation is one basis for Armstrong’s assertion that “it all came from the old Sanctified Churches.” Jazz bands learned how to create an atmosphere of abundant ornamentation with fewer people but no drop in intensity.

  Collage (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  Collective improvisation must be based on a prominent lead melody. “The melody is supposed to be heard distinctly from some instrument—the trumpet, trombone, clarinet or violin,” as Baby Dodds put it. “At all times.” The lead anchors the listener’s perception amidst a swirl of musical activity. Collective improvisation probably grew out of heterophony, with several melody instruments simultaneously ornamenting the tune, as can be heard in recordings of 1950s street bands in New Orleans. Heterophony requires no harmonic regulation whatsoever. Early jazz musicians, like singers in Sanctified churches, created a musical world that did not depend on harmony. Given the importance that harmony would later take on in jazz, it requires an effort of historical imagination to understand the implications of this. When professional jazz musicians deepened their harmonic understanding and started to create supplemental parts with true melodic independence (as opposed to simultaneous variations on the same melody), collective improvisation pulled away from church practice. Yet, as we have seen in Chapter 2 in the discussion of Chimes Blues, harmonic precision was still
a secondary concern for the Oliver band in 1923. Their main priority was the intensity of individual lines and their combined textural effect.

  Out of standard practices come personal visions, and there was plenty of incentive for those, too, in New Orleans. The success of Oliver’s bands depended on doing things his way. At times his authoritarian streak stood in tension with collective practice. He fired musicians when he saw benefit, leading to protests and even sympathy departures from those who regarded the band as more of a club. In California he started speaking of “my” band rather than “our” band, and Baby Dodds detected a distinct change in atmosphere. In recording sessions Oliver picked the pieces to be recorded and decided how to adapt them. “He started being a writer” in the studio, said Armstrong. The other New Orleanian to whom that comment might also apply is Jelly Roll Morton, who came at the matter from a very different direction. Yet Morton, commonly regarded as the first great composer in jazz, was said to give soloists more opportunity and freedom than Oliver did.

  “Joe was always making suggestions for the improvement of the band,” said Dodds. When he wanted Dodds to play more lightly, he bought him a pair of wire brushes. Dodds had trouble with them, but he eventually learned to lighten up with regular drumsticks. When Lil Hardin joined the band, she quickly got the message that her role was limited to chording on the beat. “Sometimes I’d get the urge to run up and down the piano,” she remembered. But Oliver growled, “We [already] have a clarinet in the band.”

  The band’s success was due partly to the excellence and experience of the musicians and partly to Oliver’s vision. Dodds explained how tight the musicians were, how they had such a good sense of playing with each other. They were all experts in the ear-playing tradition from New Orleans, yet Oliver found ways to intervene. Clarinetist Albert Nicholas said that Oliver “wanted everyone to blend together… . He had discipline in that band.” “The Oliver band was traditional and Joe was always doing things according to the New Orleans tradition,” Dodds insisted, yet it was his version of that tradition that was being advanced, bit by bit.

  Joe “King” Oliver (The William Russell Archive at the Historic New Orleans Collection, accession no. 92-48-L.108)

  Oliver’s instruction to Hardin points to the details of how collective improvisation works, with a designated role for each instrument. A summary of those roles will provide a deeper sense of what this music is all about, as well as a better idea of what was expected from Armstrong.

  The rhythm section kept the beat steady and articulated the chord changes. The bass played the main pitch of each chord on beats one and three; for special effect he played all four beats, with a plucking slap of the string against the fingerboard. The pianist and banjo (or guitar) hit the full chord on each of the four beats. “She would … lay that good 4 beat under Papa Joe,” who could “really give out,” wrote Armstrong about Lil. The drummer played all four beats on the snare drum, beats one and three on the bass. This was the basic format, though a degree of variety was valued.

  When Armstrong wrote about the “good ol’ New Orleans 4 beat,” he meant the even articulation of all four beats, with no difference in accent. In Eurocentric music, stress accents typically produce a hierarchy, with beat one emphasized the most, beat three slightly less, and beats two and four receding into the background. The lack of accentual differentiation in the good old New Orleans four beat may be thought of as “flat,” yielding the flat 4/4. In the Oliver recordings from 1923 this is produced by pianist and banjo player. Later recordings document four-beat slap-picking in the bass; Ed Montudie Garland called this “doubling up.” When, alternatively, string bass and bass drum play only beats one and three, the flat profile of piano and banjo is overlaid with a two-beat feeling.

  The historical record does not reveal completely when and where the flat 4/4 was invented, how often it was used during the 1920s, and how it eventually became standard in dance-band music by the 1930s, in time to launch the swing era.11 But it is clear that the four-beat style was used sometimes in uptown New Orleans, before Oliver left, and that this tradition had an impact in Chicago. Eddie Condon bought a ticket for Lincoln Gardens and was struck by the music flowing through the entryway “like a muscle flexing regularly, four to the bar.”12 The eventual domination of the flat 4/4 in commercial dance music in the 1930s signals the growing impact of that vernacular on the popular music of the United States, in tandem with vernacular dancing. It was a kind of territorial conquest, the spread of a cultural invention far from its place of origin. New Orleans was the point of entry into commercial dance-band music and the travel of New Orleanian musicians the means of distribution.

  A drummer could make or break a band, and Baby Dodds was highly valued. The routine withdrawal of drums and bass in recording studios could be crippling; “the rhythm tended to get ragged,” confessed Garvin Bushell. Dodds sometimes used the less invasive woodblock on the 1923 recordings, and his playing shows inventiveness and precision, a way of keeping things fresh that made him a crowd pleaser at Lincoln Gardens. He was known to mischievously roll off rhythms anticipating what a soloist was about to play, just to keep things interesting.

  The rhythm section is the anchor that holds the basic layers of time and pitch with clear beat patterns and chords. The lead melody, played all the time by at least one instrument, provides another kind of anchor. Armstrong’s comment that the 1923 recordings do not give sufficient prominence to the cornets has everything to do with this principle. Oliver liked to have a strong, clear lead that was not too heavily ornamented, playing “few notes and with good rhythm,” as Muggsy Spanier said; “he was a ‘feeder,’ helping the others in the band.” The main reason Oliver wanted Armstrong to join him was that he felt that his ability to deliver a strong lead was slipping, due to a gum disease that would eventually bring him down.

  Lead melodies in this repertory inevitably unfold regularly, in an easy-to-follow way that the listener can effortlessly predict without even thinking about it. Trombonist Roy Palmer gave the standard New Orleanian critique of bebop when he said, “The new stuff they got now ain’t got no foundation. Everybody’s jumping up, and you can’t tell, you can’t get the significance of the piece. You don’t know what they’re playing. There ain’t no lead.” New Orleans jazz was created with an eye toward excitement and richness, but also accessibility. “There’s people all over the world, they like to hear that lead,” noted Armstrong.

  Trombone, clarinet, and cornet fill out the “front line” of main melody instruments. With cornet on lead, the other instruments enrich but do not challenge its primary status. They treat the lead “like a girl,” in Eddie Condon’s colorful description, “they hang around it, doing handsprings and all sorts of other tricks, always keeping an eye on it and trying to make an impression.” The trombonist has some choices. At times he reinforces the bass notes of chords on beats one and three, duplicating the bass. He can also fill in between phrases of the lead melody. Clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow called this playing “in the windows.”

  Armstrong claimed to admire trombonist Honoré Dutrey’s ability to fill in (less appreciative commentators have derided Dutrey’s “mooing”). An easy way to begin hearing fillins is in blues form, which is built on a regular flow of four-measure groups that divide into two parts; traditionally, a call and response between instruments or between voice and instrument follows from this division. In Dipper Mouth Blues (OKeh, June 1923), listen to Dutrey entering with a prepared “response” on a strong high note as a way to build momentum into the next “call” (CD: 0:09; 0:23; 1:05; 2:00).

  Johnny Dodds was good at all of it—breaks, leads, fillins, and obbligatos, which are melodies that remain independent of the main melody in both contour and rhythm. The clarinet moves easily through its wide range, so Dodds freely dips below and above the cornet in a constant buzz of activity, blurring the distinction between filling in and obbligato. He accounts for some of the great moments from the Oliver band. For example, he
rises to a dramatic, independent climax that seems to come out of nowhere and then quickly dissolves back into the flow in the first strain of Chimes Blues (CD 0:07–0:42). He is even more exposed in the second strain of Canal Street Blues (CD 0:37–1:07): with Oliver and Armstrong playing the theme from Holy City in steady long notes, Dodds’s melody stands out.

  In these ways, the adornments that distinguish collective improvisation come from obbligatos and fillins produced by the clarinet and trombone. With the cleanness of this format in mind, Oliver commanded Lillian to drop her clarinet-like runs. But there was one additional part to play—second cornet, which did not always support the lead from below, in parallel. Sometimes Armstrong plays fillins and obbligatos, to wonderful effect. His experience in this technique had considerable impact on his emerging solo style, so the topic is important.

  It has often been noted that it was rare for dance bands in New Orleans to carry two cornets, suggesting that Armstrong lacked models to look to. But in fact there were plenty. Oliver provided one back in the early 1910s when he played second cornet—making “monkeyshines” and “barrelhouse,” as observers described it—to Manuel Perez’s lead in the Onward Brass Band. Cornetist Buddy Petit provided another with his skillful second playing, and so did Bunk Johnson. Even the legendary Buddy Bolden, who attracted so much attention, may have done so by playing second rather than lead. And when you realize that Fred Keppard and Sidney Bechet were also great second players, it becomes clear that virtually all of the great soloists to come out of New Orleans excelled not only at lead but also at second. Armstrong played second in the Tuxedo Brass Band, just before he left for Chicago in 1922, staying soft and under the leader, cornetist Oscar “Papa” Celestin. One band member insisted that he should have played lead. But it was Celestin’s band, Armstrong countered. “I can’t be a boss on that, man. I just want my money,” he joked.