Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Oliver probably gave sparse but pithy instructions regulating the texture. A few comments here and there and a few nonverbal cues were pretty much all he needed. In jazz it has always been important to make room for performer-centered specialties that cannot possibly be dictated and controlled in the traditional way of a composer or arranger. The details of collective improvisation depend on the experience and alertness of the ear-playing musicians; there is no way to micromanage them.

  It is possible that the band used commercial arrangements—“stocks,” as they are called—but that was probably rare. Preston Jackson and Lillian both said plainly that the band did not use written arrangements. The band’s stately rendition of Riverside Blues was based on a composition by Richard Jones and the young Thomas Dorsey, who made an arrangement of the piece for Oliver’s recording in autumn 1923.13 Most likely, he and Jones produced a set of melodies with simple harmonic accompaniment, thus defining the “composition”; Dorsey then added notated details for the introduction, the coda, and parts of the accompaniment for the “arrangement,” including rhythmic punctuations supporting the second-strain solos by clarinet and trombone (CD 1:02–1:54), repeated again when Armstrong takes the final statement of the same melody (CD 2:20–end).14

  It was standard practice in New Orleans to take a piece of sheet music and tweak it to produce a head arrangement that existed nowhere but in the memory of the players. The arrangement could take shape gradually, night after night, the band getting things the way they wanted them. But the bands also rehearsed. Armstrong remembered the tough winter of 1922–23, when Mrs. Majors turned off the heat at Lincoln Gardens on “bad nights.” The musicians wore overcoats and Johnny Dodds even wore gloves. Armstrong noticed a few ice crystals on his mouthpiece. “The only good thing about it was that we got a chance to do a lot of rehearsing,” he said, “and that kept us right on the ball.”

  An unprescribed sequence of experimenting and rehearsing produced a head arrangement that foregrounded the African-American musical vernacular from New Orleans; eventually the arrangement became set. Of course, spontaneity was still possible, but the important thing was the appearance of spontaneity. The music sounded fresh and alive because the texture and details could not possibly be produced through notation, only through flexible give and take as guided by the players’ ears.

  “Once you got a certain solo that fit in the tune, and that’s it, you keep it,” explained Armstrong, and the same principle held for group playing. This is why the phrase “collective improvisation” is a misnomer: the musicians were not actually improvising when they performed in public. Their music was shaped by a potentially fourfold process that included the use of notated arrangements, a traditional formulaic sense of how each instrument should participate, head arrangements formed by ear, and spontaneous improvisation. We are stuck with the term “collective improvisation,” which should be understood to mean not the process but the glorious results.

  Viewed in another way, collective improvisation intersects with the fixed and variable model described in the Introduction. This practice may be one of the more imaginative transformations of this model in the New World. In blues we discovered the first great legacy of slavery that conditioned Armstrong’s music; collective improvisation is the second. Both were central to the development of African-American vernacular music and to Armstrong’s mature style.

  In the Caribbean, where drum ensembles remained surprisingly stable through slavery up to the present day, the fixed and variable model works just as it does in Africa, down to details of identical rhythmic patterns played by identical instruments. One group of instruments, or simply a single instrument, repeats a rhythm that orients the listener or dancer. The pattern is usually divisible by two beats. This is the fixed group. The variable group, while always maintaining some connection to the fixed group, brings the music to life by departing from the pattern in interesting ways. Complexity comes from the way these two groups go in and out of phase with each other.

  The changing activity of the variable group, as it interacts with the foundation, going back and forth between agreement and tension, is made more obvious through instrumentation. Timbral diversity—using instruments with contrasting sound qualities such as bell, drum, and gourd rattle in West Africa; or stick, harmonica, guitar, and fife on a Mississippi porch; or cornet, trombone, and clarinet in the front line of collective improvisation—makes it easy for the ear to pick out the layers. The emphasis is not on blending the timbres, as happens, say, in a classical string quartet, but on differentiating them, creating a stratified texture that makes it easy to pick out the distinct voices of fixed and variable activity.

  Early Western scholars were often misled by the complexities of African drumming. What is now clear is that no matter how intricate the entire ensemble is, all of it must be understood in terms of the fixed rhythmic group. This is not merely an analytical matter, but a very real matter of perception. The movement of dancers teaches everyone how to hear the music, how to track the fixed layer as the primary one, and therefore how to recognize the variable group and internalize its relationship to the fixed in a natural, relaxed way.

  The human ear’s ability to synthesize sonic events that sound simultaneously is one basis for the miracle of music. Music all over the world takes advantage of this ability to hear multiple patterns and maintain a sense of their independence as well as their unity. European harmony may be explained in this way: we hear chords that serve as the foundation for textural complexity. Music of the African diaspora exploits the same auditory potential in a different way.

  In African drum ensembles, the fixed group of instruments may create a rhythmic web that, in itself, is considerably complex. Compared to this, the fixed group in early jazz is stark and simple. Drum ensembles were routinely suppressed during slavery in the United States (those heard in Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans being a famous exception), so it is not surprising that specific details of the African model were lost while the general principles were retained and applied to different instruments, techniques, repertories, and styles.

  Though details of West African drum ensembles did not survive in the American South, the fixed and variable model not only survived, it flourished. Musicians transformed it in countless, imaginative ways. Their creative search often meant incorporating Eurocentric harmony and melody into the model, and Louis Armstrong’s mature solo style in the 1920s was the product of precisely this kind of synthesis.

  In other words, the fixed and variable model, created in Africa and transmitted to the New World by enslaved people, accounts for central qualities of jazz as Armstrong learned it, transformed it, and propagated it.

  The rhythm section keeps the beat and forms basic patterns. Eddie Condon, who liked metaphors, said that the “rhythm section provides transportation, everything floats on its beat.” Another way of saying that is that the rhythm section provides a foundation that is analogous to the fixed rhythmic group in Africa.

  In the 1923 Oliver recordings, the variable group usually departs from the fixed in four ways: dragging behind the beat, syncopation, additive rhythm, and irregularly placed accents. The first two are common in blues, the middle two in ragtime. Improvising wind players from New Orleans favored the final method—using irregular accents to form phrases that build tension against the fixed foundation. The variable group is connected to the fixed both rhythmically and harmonically: the improvised lines of clarinet, cornet, and trombone prominently feature the chord tones of each measure, and they are in phase rhythmically, to a degree.15 The listener does not need this all spelled out in order to hear the form, for the ear will recognize it effortlessly and unconsciously. Pointing it out, however, leads to a more complete understanding of what the New Orleanians did with this basic structure, since it is the key to their distinctive sound.

  The instrument playing the lead melody, usually the cornet, participates in both the fixed and the variable groups. The lead melody clear
ly articulates the tune’s two-bar pattern. Then, with syncopation, dragging behind the beat, and irregularly placed accents, the trumpeter creates a rhythmic clash. Meanwhile, the trombonist plays the lowest notes of chords on the beat. He also shifts to the variable side of things with fillins and obbligato, but it’s the clarinetist who is the variable specialist. Trombone and clarinet stagger their phrases against the regular pattern of the tune, unpredictably cutting, dipping, and rising. “Notes I had never heard were peeling off the edges and dropping through the middle,” said Condon. The players clash on the level not only of rhythm, but of phrasing as well, with the fixed group following the established pattern and the variable constantly challenging it with irregular points of entry and irregular accents. This extensive clashing is not typical of ragtime and blues, and seems to have been a special achievement of New Orleans.

  Uptown African Americans in Armstrong’s community took two principles that do not necessarily go together—the will to adorn, and the fixed and variable model—and synthesized them to create music that was new and exciting. The New York Clipper (Sept. 14, 1923) reviewed four recordings by Oliver’s band, including Dipper Mouth Blues, and referenced “barbaric indigo dance tunes played with gusto and much ado that leaves very little doubt as to their African origin.” “In west Africa the superposition of two different, related pulse schemes is common and is like a grid in the mind,” according to Gerhard Kubik, a scholar who has spent a lifetime studying African music south of the Sahara. African Americans in Armstrong’s community, many recently arrived from the vast plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, where African legacies were strong, carried this mental grid to New Orleans and then to Chicago; phonograph recordings took it from there.

  Collective improvisation balances total order with total chaos. Other kinds of music do the same thing, but this one invites uncompromised intensity, which is precisely where the Oliver band excelled. They were oblivious to old settlers, dicty writers, and unappreciative whites who turned up their noses at rough dissonances and harmonic confusion. We can see more clearly now why it was not such a big deal to miss a chord and why the musicians had nothing to say when Hardin asked what key they would be playing in. It is not that harmony was irrelevant, only that it was less important here than the fixed and variable model, which extended an invitation to move. “One couldn’t help but dance to that band,” said Baby Dodds, and again the connection with West Africa is clear.

  Without emphasis on the fixed and variable model, jazz would have become a very different kind of music. In fact, the model became a defining characteristic of the idiom. When watered down, the music drifts toward pop. Bebop embraced the model and extended it; modal jazz retained aspects and free jazz abandoned it. Intensifications and departures like these were calculated, for complex historical reasons.

  Louis and Lillian (Collection of Duncan Schiedt)

  Oliver did not want Hardin interfering on the variable side, but Armstrong plays some attractive fillins in the 1923 recordings. Sometimes he breaks out with an extended obbligato, as he was known to do during the early days in New Orleans. “I didn’t never understand Louis Armstrong, because that son of a gun, he didn’t care what you played,” remembered trombonist Charles “Sunny” Henry. “He would play a obbligato all the time, be off you understand; he wouldn’t play straight with you. But every thing he put in there worked.”

  The classic representation of Armstrong’s obbligato is the October 1923 recording of Mabel’s Dream. In the third strain (CD 1:24–1:46) the ensemble is reduced, and for some reason Armstrong is close to the recording horn. Against the rules, he is louder than his mentor’s lead. Yet the lead remains clear thanks to his skill in design; he keeps his obbligato out of the way. He balances the two lines while capturing just the right degree of independence in phrasing, very much in the tradition of filling in. The mandate to stay under Oliver generated this kind of sensitivity, no doubt.

  Condon succinctly described the ensemble at Lincoln Gardens: “Everyone was playing what he wanted to play and it was all mixed together as if someone had planned it with a set of micrometer calipers.” Condon had no way of knowing that he was witnessing modern masters of an ancient tradition of communal music making, one distributed to the New World through the African diaspora.

  Garvin Bushell remembered the Dodds brothers feeling “very highly about what they were playing, as though they knew they were doing something new that nobody else could do.” Intense urban competition lifted the vernacular to a sophisticated level of professional practice, first in New Orleans and now in Chicago. Armstrong was the emerging talent who was finding ways to express himself while staying under. Such was the nature of his late apprenticeship with Papa Joe, and even though it seemed to some that he could easily have skipped this stage in his training, the evidence of his mature solo style suggests that the control of musical order he was perfecting was extremely important.

  Stepping Out: Marriage and Cornet Chop Suey

  The summer of 1923 was a lot of fun for Louis, Lil, and the rest of the band. When he wasn’t feeling well, Oliver gave Louis some featured solos. These were token gestures; in general, Oliver was still holding him back, even in after-hours jam sessions. Willie “The Lion” Smith witnessed this at Schiller’s Café, a favorite place for cutting contests in the early-morning hours. “Oliver would refuse to let Louis get off on his own sometimes,” Smith remembered. “Louis at that time was beginning to out blow his boss and so Oliver would try to keep them both working on those famous cornet duets so Armstrong couldn’t outshine him.” Smith liked to tell Armstrong to step out and play a solo while slipping him five bucks. He showed his stuff one night in a contest against cornetist Bobby Williams, dashing off 40 choruses on The Sheik of Araby. Williams responded with a version of Bugle Blues that was gaining him a reputation. “The thing that seemed to get the listeners was Bobby’s sweet tone and the way he made chords—something like Sidney Bechet later handled the soprano saxophone,” said Smith.

  Lil bought a used car and took her friends for rides. She and Louis attended an “all-colored” auto race, billed as the first of its kind and heavily advertised. Everyone had a hip flask and the place was buzzing with excitement. A pileup put a damper on things, and the event fell apart when a pedestrian wandered onto the track and got blasted into the air by a speeding car. “From now on I don’t want to see a foot race let alone an automobile race,” Louis told Lil as they hastily left the scene.

  The couple attended picnics, including one at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, East 38th Street and Wabash Avenue, where John Henry Simons, a rector who enjoyed occasional write-ups in the Defender, gave strong sermons. St. Thomas’s was known for elaborate performances of classical pieces like Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. Lil wanted to expose Louis to a classy way of doing things, but the results were mixed. He watched “all the big wigs … each trying to out do the other,” and decided “they was a pack of fools.” “The big wigs in New Orleans acted differently when they were supposed to be the big wigs,” he joked. Lil confided to him about her troubled marriage to a singer named Johnny and his heavy drinking; they were still married but no longer living together. He in turn told her about problems with his wife Daisy, whom he hadn’t seen since he left New Orleans.

  In early June the band was hired for the Music Trades Convention at the Drake Hotel, downtown on the “Gold Coast,” as the only African Americans amidst a bunch of white units. Local bandleader Sig Meyer described the event as a “festival of recording bands.” “The ‘dark horse’ orchestra of the whole bunch was sure dark,” quipped Talking Machine World, which also singled out “the little frog-mouthed boy who played cornet.” With Louis getting special notice at an event that was overwhelmingly white, Oliver must have seen the writing on the wall.16

  Louis and Lillian helped May Ann find an apartment, and he entrusted the selection of furniture to Lil, since “she was really up on things, the modern things,” he said, “and she had such
wonderful taste.” They set up the furniture and paused to look around. Lil may have made the first move; he later claimed that even now he did not suspect that she was romantically interested in him. “We both looked at the bed at the same time,” he remembered. “And Lil, being the master mind of the two …” They played “a little tag” and finally got down to the business of “making violent but beautiful love. And from that moment, until the day we were married, we fell in love with each other”—an interesting and perhaps precise assessment.

  Other, unnamed members of the band had been making a play for Lil, and there was some bafflement and even hostility in response to the blossoming of this relationship. “For a while they all gave she and I a lot of ‘ice,’ meaning they treated us rather cool when we went to work,” Louis wrote. On June 23 the band recorded a piece cowritten by the two of them, Where Did You Stay Last Night?, which must have generated a few snickers.

  On the June sessions Armstrong also played slide whistle, a common novelty instrument of the day, on Sobbin’ Blues. Early August saw the co-composition of When You Leave Me Alone to Pine, music by Louis Armstrong and words by Lillian Hardin. An August 18 article in the Defender bragged that Sobbin’ Blues and Sweet Lovin’ Man were selling well all over the country. An August 22 notice in Talking Machine World mentioned Oliver’s “trick” cornet playing, which is featured on both of these recordings. On September 1 the Defender reported that the Oliver band was filling up Lincoln Gardens close to capacity, night after night.

  In early August 1923 Lil and Louis decided to get married. Each initiated divorce proceedings with their respective spouses.17 She started to take a more active role in his life. He mentioned that Oliver had been keeping his money for him, dishing it out periodically as an allowance. (Armstrong would later duplicate that arrangement with Joe Glaser, who managed him for the last 35 years of his life.) Lil objected and told him that he should keep his own money. “You know, Mr. Joe sent for me and he looks out for me,” he insisted. She replied that she would be looking out for him from now on.