Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  When he showed up at work in a new gray overcoat and velour hat, the manager, Budd Red, cut him down to size, saying he knew that “if you fool around with that chick she was gonna change your appearance.” Oliver angrily told him that Lil was spoiled and would waste his money on clothes and ice cream. Early in August Louis was switching to fashionable Chicago dress as a way of signaling his alignment with Lil, which meant taking a step away from his hometown friends. “He liked the [new] way he looked,” insisted Lil. The two of them composed Tears, which made it into the October recording sessions with OKeh, and Armstrong showed the record-buying public what he could do. From the first recording sessions with Gennett in April through the October 25 sessions with OKeh, the Oliver band recorded 22 different pieces that feature dozens of breaks; but the first solo break for Armstrong on record comes in Tears. This moment represents an assertion by Armstrong and Hardin and a concession from Oliver: Lil was clearly advising him on more than clothing.

  We have already seen two musical manifestations of Lil’s ambition for Louis—their co-composition of Where Did You Sleep Last Night? and Tears, with its multiple breaks. The completion of Cornet Chop Suey in January 1924 marked an even more important milestone. We do not have much detail about the path to this impressive piece, which Louis composed as a solo vehicle for himself. But we do know about various streams contributing to his progress around this time. Some of this information comes without specific chronology and may describe slightly later events, but the general trends are firmly established. In their search for fame and lucre, Lil and Louis were exploring two main avenues—compositions that they could copyright and a more prominent space for Louis as a soloist. Cornet Chop Suey is a splendid synthesis of both.

  Lil said that the two of them practiced once a week. She played the piano while he struggled to master Oliver’s solo for Dipper Mouth Blues. Oliver’s freak music had earned him a king’s crown at Royal Gardens, and the Gennett recording of Dipper Mouth Blues extended his fame beyond Chicago. Freak music was the thing, and not just with Oliver. Keppard was featuring it, and so was fellow Louisianan Tommy Ladnier, whose solo on Play That Thing with Ollie Powers’s Harmony Syncopators, recorded in September 1923, is a fine example. Lil said that Louis couldn’t coordinate the wah-wah effects with his right hand as he manipulated the plunger over the bell of his horn. “I’m not much with a plunger, man,” he said much later. “Well I mean I like it at times, but I don’t have time to get to mine.” It is easy to understand his frustration: if he couldn’t play freak music, how was he going to make a name for himself?

  Meanwhile, Bobby Williams was presenting an alternative voice on cornet. Soon after he arrived in Chicago, Armstrong heard Williams playing with Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra at the Sunset Café. He described Williams as a “nice looking, stout, brown skin man, a little on the heavy side and rather short,” with a “pleasant smile and a very good looking personality. Always had a kind word for anyone whom he should meet.” Williams had served in World War I as a military trumpeter. Armstrong believed him to be the composer of Bugle Blues, which Williams featured every night at the Sunset.

  Bugle Blues belonged to a set of interrelated pieces that included Bugle Call Rag. The various titles were frequently confused; most likely these pieces had fluid musical identities. They all feature some kind of military call, usually reveille, mixed in with jazzy ensemble sections. Whether or not Williams thought up the idea, he was doing well with it at the Sunset Café, thus presenting Armstrong with an alternative solo model that was enjoying success.18 Here was idiomatic cornet playing, based on the arpeggiated chords typical of bugle calls, heard now in a jazz context. It was a novelty that people obviously enjoyed.

  Hoagy Carmichael remembered hearing Armstrong play Bugle Call Rag at a fast tempo in Chicago during the summer of 1923. Six months later he mailed a manuscript copy of Cornet Chop Suey, full of buglelike arpeggiations, to Washington, D.C., for copyright. Williams’s Bugle Blues must have been an important precedent for this creative breakthrough.

  Cornet Chop Suey begins with a strong set of solo arpeggiations around a single chord, just like the bugle calls. Faced with a challenge, Armstrong’s instincts were to play faster (as Carmichael heard him do with Bugle Call Rag in 1923) and with greater elaboration (as he does with other arpeggiations in Cornet Chop Suey). Perhaps he remembered his own bugle playing at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he blew Reveille, Taps, and Mess in 1912. The military-style gesture fits right in with the brash confidence and masculine assertion that were so much a part of jazz in New Orleans and now Chicago.

  The title Cornet Chop Suey can be read as a reference to both Bugle Blues and Clarinet Marmalade. The latter had been going strong ever since the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s bestselling recording in 1918. Back in New Orleans, Armstrong had learned the clarinet solo on his cornet as a way to show off his quick fingering. That and the piccolo solo for High Society were measures of accomplishment that could be dished out in cutting contests. Alphonse Picou made a name for himself by transferring the piccolo solo of High Society to clarinet, and Armstrong did him one better by playing it on cornet, a harder assignment.

  To call a piece Clarinet Marmalade meant that the featured instrument was delicious, and Cornet Chop Suey meant the same thing. The title promises music to savor like your favorite Chinese dish; there is a hint of exoticism, something new and fresh. Chop suey was immensely popular on the South Side. In January 1923, the Defender raved about the Dreamland Cabaret’s new Chinese chef, whom Alberta Hunter remembered cooking the best chop suey in all of Chicago. (Coincidentally, it would be the Dreamland where Armstrong would first present Cornet Chop Suey to the public, with great success, several years later.) The Pekin Inn, another gathering spot for musicians, also served Chinese food, but chop suey places were all over the South Side. We know that Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and other New Orleanians loved Chinese food generally and chop suey in particular.19 A musician who traveled with Armstrong in the 1950s claimed that he ate Chinese food every night of his life. The title Cornet Chop Suey was born out of a widely shared pleasure.

  Armstrong gained a reputation for quick fingers in New Orleans in the late 1910s, and in Chicago he extended his technique further by signing up for formal lessons with a classical musician. We don’t know the precise date, but it is possible that these lessons were part of the momentum that led to Cornet Chop Suey.

  “Improving my position” was the slogan of immigrants from the Deep South, and formal study with classically trained teachers was how that aspiration manifested itself with musicians. The backgrounds of most New Orleanian musicians (that is, the ones Armstrong grew up with) in instrumental technique, music theory, and even the basics of notation were thin or nonexistent. Lessons made sense if they wanted to get ahead in Chicago. Bass player Ed “Montudie” Garland said that he “didn’t take any kind of lessons ’til I got to Chicago. I didn’t know nothing about no [written] music.” Garland secured a studio slot with Professor James Jackson, at 31st and State Streets. Jackson also taught fellow New Orleanian Wellman Braud; “I was a faker until I went to Chicago,” Braud remembered. Clarinetists Jimmie Noone from New Orleans and Buster Bailey from Memphis took lessons with German music teacher Franz Schoepp, first clarinetist with the Chicago Symphony; they were sometimes joined by the young Benny Goodman. Trumpeter Bob Shoffner and pianist Luis Russell, members of Oliver’s band in early 1927, were both applauded publicly by Dave Peyton when they signed up for music theory lessons twice weekly. Trumpeter Reuben Reeves took lessons with another German teacher, Albert Cook, who also played in the Chicago Symphony. Kid Ory took a few lessons in Chicago with “some German guy” who played with the symphony, but the teacher was perplexed enough by Ory’s tailgating ways to turn him away after a few attempts with the unlikely suggestion that the two should reverse roles, Ory as teacher and the German guy as student.

  This kind of training had been within view but not within reach of Arm
strong in New Orleans. He was able to pick up bits and pieces here and there, but he lacked access to a sustained program of Eurocentric pedagogy that Creole musicians, living on the other side of Canal Street in the Seventh Ward, were routinely brought up with. On the riverboat jobs he mingled with trained musicians who shared their knowledge with him; in fact, Fate Marable, the bandleader on the boats, had assembled the musicians with precisely this mix in mind. Now in Chicago he could advance further, urged on by his classically trained girlfriend.

  New Orleans pianist Richard M. Jones, who was active in Chicago at this time, reported that Louis studied with a German teacher at Kimball Hall.20 Kimball Hall was an impressive complex on Wabash Avenue, downtown “in the Loop,” with a recital hall, 75 offices, and a warehouse for the W. W. Kimball Company, which manufactured pianos and organs. The Defender occasionally covered African-American participation there. It reported, for example, that lyric tenor William Hart gave a recital, in which he displayed excellent diction in Italian and Russian, and that Mrs. W. T. Gray, niece of “Mrs. and Mr. Jack Gray, the former cotton king of Candler, Arizona,” took voice lessons at Kimball Hall. The March 26, 1921, issue reviewed a piano-vocal recital with “master” Hersal Thomas at the piano and his brother George Thomas singing his own composition, Sweet Baby Doll. Oliver’s band recorded Sweet Baby Doll on October 26, 1923, and Hersal would record with Armstrong on several occasions in 1925 and 1926.

  Jones did not say if the German teacher taught Armstrong cornet technique or music theory; it could easily have been both. (Jones did say that Oliver studied harmony in Chicago. We know that Armstrong knew solfège; here would have been his chance to learn it.) The method book of choice for cornet lessons was the “Arban” book, filled with tricky exercises in stages of increasing difficulty and designed to enhance facility with fingers, lips, and tongue through arpeggiations and ornaments—just the kind of thing that Cornet Chop Suey puts on dexterous display.

  Armstrong said that he learned how to transpose music from a piano while playing his cornet and that this helped him in his practice sessions with Lil; that, too, is the kind of thing that was being taught by German music teachers at Kimball Hall. He and Lil liked to “wood shed,” as he described it. “We bought classical trumpet music,” he remembered. They performed the fruits of their labors in recitals at churches. He was nervous and, according to Lillian, got anxious before his solos. “He’s a fellow who didn’t have much confidence in himself to begin with,” she said. “He didn’t believe in himself.” It is attractive to think of the confidence first documented in Tears as the product of lessons, practice, and recitals under the watchful eye of his fiancée.

  There are stories of jazz musicians avoiding formal training because they were afraid it would make them sound “white.” Partly defensive and partly assertive, we find signs of this attitude in sarcastic references to the “cute guys,” musicians who could read music in New Orleans. Many years later, Miles Davis called that a “ghetto mentality.” “Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn’t believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it,” Davis insisted. “It’s like a ghetto mentality telling people that they aren’t supposed to do certain things, that those things are only reserved for white people.” Armstrong and his self-improving friends in Chicago would have agreed. It is easy to imagine Hardin’s pride in her boyfriend, who was definitely moving in the right direction with his nice clothes, music lessons, and picnics at St. Thomas Episcopal.

  Cornet Chop Suey is a showpiece in the New Orleans tradition of High Society and Clarinet Marmalade, with the added precedent of Bugle Call Rag and the added ammunition of improved technique. In 1951, when Armstrong listened to his 1926 recording of the piece, it reminded him of cutting contests in early New Orleans with Buddy Petit, Joe Johnson, and Kid Rena. “We were all very fast on our cornets,” he commented. When the recording came out, its purpose was clear back home. Kid Rena lost a cutting contest to Lee Collins, who scored the victory by playing Cornet Chop Suey note for note. When asked why he hadn’t also played Armstrong’s solos in the battle, Rena unleashed his scorn: “Because Louis was up North making records and running up and down like he’s crazy don’t mean that he’s that great. He’s not playing cornet on that horn; he’s imitating a clarinet. He’s showing off.” Rena had heard Armstrong showing off in New Orleans by playing the clarinet parts of High Society and Clarinet Marmalade; now his old rival was upping the ante even higher. A more direct association for the challenging arpeggiations that provide the basic melodic material for Cornet Chop Suey would have been the lively rags of Scott Joplin (and virtually all other piano players). Can you top this one?—that was the message from the other end of the New Orleans–Chicago train line.

  The fact that Armstrong created Cornet Chop Suey as a notated piece, and not just a solo that he memorized and played on stage, is important and part of the musical economy of the time. It also has a lot to do with the kind of creative musician he was becoming. We will watch this line of development play out during the next few years as he takes position as the leading figure of African-American jazz modernism in mid-1920s Chicago.

  Lil and Louis had each been composing tunes before they even met. Lil had some success with Sweet Lovin’ Man, which she copyrighted in September 1922 (the New Orleans Rhythm Kings recorded it in March 1923, Oliver’s band in June 1923). Armstrong had been writing tunes with Oliver (Canal Street Blues, Dipper Mouth Blues), and before that on the riverboats, where he created Weather Bird Rag. Even before that he had composed a dirty little song called Katie’s Head that was adapted and sanitized by Clarence Williams and Armand Piron, who published it as their own and entitled it I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, a bestseller in 1919. It must have seemed like destiny that the two aspiring songwriters should hook up both musically and romantically.

  Musicians in their circle were acutely aware of the cash potential of notated tunes, which they sent to Washington, D.C., for copyright. “Have you got any good blues?” Oliver wrote to his friend Bunk Johnson back in New Orleans. “If so send them to me and I will make them bring you some real money.” Oliver put his name on a number of tunes during the early 1920s, and he probably wrote a few that were claimed by other people, too. Jimmy Noone insisted that he and Oliver cowrote Royal Garden Blues, one of the classic repertory pieces in early jazz, and that Clarence Williams stole it and published it under his own name. There are so many stories about Williams doing this sort of thing that there seems no reason to doubt Noone.

  Armstrong once mused about occasions when musicians had done the same thing to him, but he was able to take the offenses in stride since, as he mused, “there will be other tunes. There’s always another one coming along—like a streetcar.” He and Oliver each had a knack for melodic invention. Armstrong praised his mentor’s abilities on many occasions: “no one created as much as Joe,” he wrote plainly. But what, precisely, did he mean by this? On recordings, Oliver occasionally plays a solo that is his own invention, but more often he simply paraphrases popular tunes.

  My guess is that Armstrong was mainly praising Oliver as a composer who helped create Canal Street Blues, Chimes Blues, Snake Rag, Camp Meeting Blues, West End Blues, and many other tunes. How much he created and how much he shaped, arranged, abridged, combined, paraphrased, or simply notated is impossible to say. Composers everywhere routinely move through this same range of activity, which was standard procedure in the oral tradition from which jazz emerged. When the market for vernacular music opened up, the rush to copyright wasn’t always pretty. Jelly Roll Morton was accused of claiming lots of pieces that were simply floating around, and Oliver undoubtedly participated in this kind of appropriation, too.

  But what should not be missed is the status of composition as part of Oliver’s musical identity. Armstrong admired Oliver’s ability to make a phrase that stays with you. Oliver told his apprentice to avoid snakes—too many variations—and to state a clear
lead. These were advanced lessons in composition for his promising student.

  Oliver, Hardin, and Armstrong were interested in notating compositions because they held out the promise of big returns—“real money,” as Oliver wrote to Johnson. Recordings for Gennett and OKeh did not generate much cash, but if a disc became popular and other musicians decided to record the piece, then the composer (that is, the holder of the copyright) might see a steady stream of royalties, based on sales of the new recordings. This, along with an expanded reputation, was the opportunity that race recordings—recordings aimed at the African-American market—opened up. Now there was an alternative to distributing notated pieces through sheet music. Untrustworthy publishers could be avoided and the claim could be made simply by putting the notated melody in the mail.

  This was the chain of economic logic that drove a great deal of composing, recording, and notating in the early 1920s. It was an unexpected, secondary effect of recording technology, which inadvertently brought this nexus into focus. Armstrong understood the incentive to think of composing, notating, and recording as a package rather than as separate activities. He remembered writing Cornet Chop Suey on the back steps of Lil’s house at 3320 Giles Avenue. By January 18, 1924, the notated copy, which is clearly in Armstrong’s hand, had reached Washington, D.C.21 “We were all so ambitious,” observed Baby Dodds as he mused about Lil’s and Louis’s compositions.

  This economic situation—the financial incentive to create tunes that could be easily written down and copyrighted—shaped Armstrong’s creative development. By finding his niche in melodies that could be notated, he was forced to think in those terms. Beginning with Weather Bird Rag, in April 1923, he relied on Lillian to write the lead sheets that were sent to Washington, but in December he started to notate them himself; perhaps this was a sign of progress in his studies.22 All along he was training himself to channel his creativity so that it could be articulated in writing. Cornet Chop Suey marks an arrival in this regard. This is not to say that he does not bring his skills as a performer to the piece when he plays it, but the notation does capture something close to his full conception.