Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  It is clear that Armstrong had already found ways to negotiate Handy’s famous tune. His creative and ambitious fillins during 1924–25 sometimes feel highly localized, as he focuses on chords as they pass by and tries to be fresh and interesting with each one of them. Here his lines have more purpose and continuity. Smith reduces Handy’s varied contours to the narrow span of a perfect fifth; everything she sings occurs within this small range. In the repeated first strain (through CD 1:30) the reduction draws attention to her subtle exploration of a range of blue notes (on the words “sun,” “see,” “tomorrow,” “feel”). Armstrong’s fillins sometimes sound like complementary answers to Smith’s calls, slightly more active but not out of character; other times they feel more like extensions of her line. A third option is to integrate with the harmonic turns, landing on the next chord with a sense that he is making a presentation of both it and Smith’s next vocal phrase.

  In Chapter 2 we considered how Handy used formal variety to set his published blues songs apart from the oral tradition. Specialists in the African-American vernacular—the performer-centered tradition emphasizing unnotatable means of expression—may intensify or complement formal design with the right gesture at the right moment. The performer does not have to create a form; that is rarely where the expressive power of the vernacular lies. But there is always the possibility of interacting effectively with a form that already exists. (Misunderstandings of this practice are rampant in written commentaries, and they go in both directions, toward exaggerating the formal thinking of a soloist and asserting that such thinking does not exist.) Armstrong’s interest in applying the fixed and variable model to the periodic forms of song repertories is a good example.

  Smith’s response to the three-part form of St. Louis Blues is to distinguish the second strain (1925, CD 1:30–2:24) with more forceful declamation, especially on the high note of her narrow range, and to put aside for the moment the heavy blue notes of part 1. Armstrong’s fillins become more expansive, forceful but not flamboyant, with more bending of pitch (and on a fresh pitch, the lowered seventh of the scale) than she does in this section, as if to keep up the blue-note intensity. Smith then sets off the third strain with a growling “I got them St. Louis blues,” rocking back and forth between the blue third and the main pitch with rhythmic force. She has made the piece her own, and Armstrong buys into her vision.

  This St. Louis Blues gave young trumpeter Zilner Randolph his first exposure to Armstrong. “I had never heard such a thing,” he remembered. “And I said, ‘That’s the kind of horn I want to play.’” Many years later, British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton memorized the two parts, Smith’s calls and Armstrong’s responses, and performed them as one continuous line, a lovely way to preserve this collaborative conception in a living tradition of performance.34

  Armstrong’s last recording session in New York before his return to Chicago was organized by Perry Bradford on November 2, 1925. Bradford assembled an eight-piece band that included pianist James P. Johnson to record his own composition I Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle, with Charleston rhythms, collective improvisation, vibrant solos, and a few tightly arranged passages. It was a good situation for Armstrong: the tempo is a bit slower than typical of the Henderson band, and Armstrong knew the tune from his performance with Bessie Smith. After a fine solo by Buster Bailey, he enters with an energetic ascent to the high register. He varies phrase lengths and details of the melody almost continuously, confirming his commitment to the fixed and variable model with unwavering confidence and precision.

  A few days later Armstrong attended a farewell party in his honor at Small’s Paradise, 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Years later he remembered the party as one of the few times in his life when he got thoroughly drunk. The festive moment was spoiled when, sitting next to the talented-tenth leader, he vomited all over Henderson’s neatly pressed tuxedo shirt. The dignified Henderson turned to Bailey and mumbled, “Take him on home.” It was an inglorious end to an eventful year, and the next morning he was on a train, hungover and headed for Chicago.

  Like Armstrong, Sidney Bechet bristled at the restrictions of brief snippets of solos in tightly arranged music when he first arrived in New York City. One big difference between the two was Armstrong’s ability to adapt, which helps account for their contrasting career trajectories, and perhaps also for the evolution of their styles. Armstrong met the challenges of playing with Henderson, which put him in a good position to climb another rung on the ladder of his career. Waiting for him in Chicago, besides his wife, was a situation that would be similar in some ways to the New York scene, with elite white standards in place, but very different in social context and musical possibility. These changes proved to be just what he needed, and they led him into his musical maturity, where he defined a fresh kind of African-American modernity.

  FIVE

  “This Is What Really Relates to Us”: The Dreamland Café, the Vendome Theater, and the First Hot Five Records

  His method of playing jazz, which causes controversy even among jazz musicians, was first worked out when he was playing in a cinema orchestra in Chicago.

  — Manchester Evening News, England, summer 1932

  Armstrong’s return to Chicago can be dated, like so much else in his adult life, by recording sessions: on November 2, 1925, he was making a record in New York with Perry Bradford, and on November 9 he was in Chicago for a session organized by Richard Jones, backing up the singer Bertha Hill. He returned later the same day to accompany Blanche Calloway, Cab Calloway’s older sister. Clearly, Chicago was waiting for him. Hill and Calloway sang blues songs composed by Jones, a studio pianist and middleman for OKeh Records, while Armstrong improvised garlands of second playing around them, just as he had done so many times in New York.

  On November 11 he worked a longer session and, for the first time, got his name featured on a disc—“Hociel Thomas acc. By Louis Armstrong’s Jazz Four.” And on the very next day “Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five”—Armstrong, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Johnny St. Cyr, and Lillian Hardin Armstrong—made their debut. The step from sideman with Clarence Williams’s Blue Five in New York to headliner for Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five in Chicago was a little one, but sometimes a clean break is necessary to put the next phase of a career in motion.

  His wife had been cooking up some deals to coax him back. She was now leading a band at the Dreamland Café, a “nice little swing band,” he called it, and she convinced management to offer her husband $75 a week. That got his attention, since it was $20 more than Henderson was paying him. Lillian persuaded the Dreamland to hang up a sign promoting “The World’s Greatest Cornetist, Louis Armstrong,” and the café took out an ad in the November 14 issue of the Defender saying the same thing. The Dreamland started a banner campaign on advertising trucks, “Louis Armstrong’s Coming Back to Chicago!” The splashy claim of being the world’s greatest cornetist embarrassed him, probably because he still felt shy about upstaging Oliver.

  “Louis Armstrong. Who is he?” wrote Dave Peyton in the Defender. “He is the jazz cornet king, and he just got in from old New York, where he left ’em sad on account of his departure. Louis is the feature man in Lil’s jazz band at the Dreamland. I am surprised that he hasn’t named himself ‘King Louis.’”35 That was quite a compliment from Peyton, who usually represented the old-settler, conservatory-trained wing of Chicago musicians. In the same column he praised the Harlem Symphony Orchestra, “the Race’s pride,” and railed against “our lax musicians” who “bang away on so-called jazz.” Armstrong was now cast as a local rather than as an immigrant from New Orleans: an article in the Defender announcing his return was headed “Home at Last.”

  During the next five months he made his mark at the two premiere entertainment venues for African Americans in Chicago, the Dreamland and the Vendome Theater. He continued at the Vendome until April 1927, a healthy run of 16 consecutive months, with time off for a brief summer vacation and not much more. Thi
s was where Armstrong’s mature solo style crystallized and flourished, where he achieved a status in black Chicago as one of the leading singers and cornet players on the scene—significantly, and for the first time, the priority between the two is not clear. It was at the Vendome, he later told a newspaper in Manchester, England, where he worked out his style. These were relatively elite venues, and the Vendome shared some cultural leanings with the talented tenth in Harlem. Yet the difference was that his Chicago audiences were fully receptive to what he had to offer, which could be understood as a new mix of the African-American vernacular with the flashy sophistication of northern show styles. His activities extended through a third venue of sorts, the Hot Five recording series. Together, the three created a multidimensional field of African-American reception that allowed him to take center stage, no longer a dash of hot variety in a fancy arrangement or background support to blues singers.

  “Our Own Place of Amusement”

  Among South Side cabarets the Dreamland Café stood apart, since it was owned and operated by an African American. A huge building, almost a block long, where customers discreetly brought bottles, the Dreamland benefited from the Defender’s “race pride” initiatives. “This is the only cabaret in the city operated exclusively by our Race,” cheered the newspaper in 1923. An article from October 1924 laid out clearly what was often implied: “Residents and business men of the Race throughout the city could feel safe in taking their close friends and the members of their families there with the knowledge that nothing would be allowed, by word or act, to cause complaint.”

  The word “class” often comes up in discussions of the Dreamland. The decor was decorated “to the queen’s taste.” In the middle of the dance floor was a section of glass lit from below by colored lights. Tables were set with crisp white linens, and the Chinese chef’s superb chop suey was a major draw, a notch or two above typical cabaret food. The entertainment was classy, too. There was no shortage of risqué songs or sexy female dancers, but the cruder language of downscale vaudeville and burlesque was avoided. Classy entertainment meant tempos leaning to strong, peppy jazz and not the “vulgar mush kind that invites immoral dancing,” as the Defender noted in its praise of Lil’s Dreamland Syncopators. Showbiz celebrities popped in from time to time, white actors and singers passing through Chicago who liked to check out the latest black entertainment, especially on Thursday matinees. Al Jolson once asked Alberta Hunter to sing his favorite song, Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose, a moment of decidedly mixed emotions for Hunter and probably everyone else that did not get recorded by the Defender but was preserved in her memory for decades.

  The enterprising hero in all of this was the main owner and operator, “our own” Bill Bottoms. Bottoms did well for himself with the Dreamland and various real estate ventures. One observer noted that only three people on the South Side drove Marmons, a prestigious automobile—the owner of a local insurance company, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bill Bottoms.

  The Dreamland had classy aspirations, but its entertainment package was similar to cabarets all across the country. Singers and sexy dancers topped the bill. Entertainment was shaped by values of novelty, variety, speed, and humor. Armstrong fit right in, since he excelled in all four categories.

  Singers were the main draw, just as they are in music today and just as they always have been in most musical cultures throughout the world, since they provide the easiest way for most people to relate to music. We have already mentioned Ollie Powers. Alberta Hunter was a big draw in extended engagements in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Women singers dominated the cabarets almost as much as they dominated the blues circuits, drawing subtly or not on sexual allure. “Alberta wore heavily beaded dresses that glittered and sparkled as she shimmied around the room and sang,” remembered Lillian Armstrong. “Every now and then she’d make her breasts jump and then the cats really loosened up on their bankrolls.” Chicago That Toddlin’ Town was a featured number for Hunter.

  The main presentation for each performer was known as an “up,” as banjoist Danny Barker explained: “Some guy comes on and does his thing of singing like a soprano and then singing like a baritone—that’s his ‘up.’” The up was the singer or dancer’s spotlit moment in the snappy flow of cabaret entertainment, presented in front of the band. Singers needed to fill up a large space with no assistance from a microphone (though megaphones were sometimes used), as they did in vaudeville houses, theaters, and tent shows.“Ollie Powers and I had the biggest voices,” insisted Hunter. Armstrong’s recordings reveal a vocal style that is right in step with these demands, which do not foster nuanced shadings of loud and soft; the more punch in the attack, the better. When he started to use microphones later in the decade, his vocal style changed dramatically, but the 1926 recordings with the Hot Five document a singer who has worked out his style in front of large audiences in large spaces.

  After their ups, the singers circulated between tables, stopping wherever tips were offered, with continued accompaniment from the band. They took requests, but otherwise they sang the same song over and over again, in a softer voice so that just the people sitting in front of them (and tipping them) could hear. The singer could hear the band, but the band could not easily hear the singer, who threw up his or her hands as a signal when it was time to stop. Tips were supposed to be shared equally, though there are many stories about bills dropped on the floor for a waiter to pick up for storage or stuffed slyly into hidden parts of a dress.

  In both the main presentation and the little table visits, the singer worked to convey intimacy and emotion. Singers were actors as much as vocalists. The great Sophie Tucker was a pioneer in this cabaret style. “You’ve got to give something of yourself across the footlights,” Tucker explained. In cabarets, the entertainers were close to the audience and on the same horizontal plane, not distant and elevated as in a theater, giving patrons a sense that they were being admitted to a privileged and somewhat risqué space. Styles of visual expression typical of cabaret singing certainly shaped Armstrong’s own style. He first saw Sophie Tucker at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans, in the late 1910s, sitting in the balcony, or “buzzard roof,” as he called it. A video of him singing from 1933 shows what seems today like a strange display of highly stylized facial expressions, which probably owed much to both minstrelsy and cabaret singing. At the Dreamland he had his first chance to work out his technique, night after night.

  Singing and dancing were thoroughly intertwined, the two routinely mentioned together in newspapers, as in a reference to “the clean-cut principals with their singing and dancing specialties” at the Dreamland. “The entire cast dance the Charleston in a decidedly pleasing manner,” was the opinion of a reviewer in November 1925. The principals may have been clean-cut, but minimal costumes were typical for women at every cabaret. “Restaurant audiences do not want men. They want women, the more the better and the less they wear also,” wrote Variety bluntly. Like the lead singers, the dancing girls flirted with men in the audience. “They glance mischievously down at you,” reported an observer, “and she swings her foot over the railing above you, smokes a cigarette and smiles.” Florenz Ziegfeld’s hiring priorities for cabaret dancers were beauty, personality, and talent, in that definite order. African-American dancers had to have light, café au lait skin. Couple-dancing teams demonstrated how to do various dance steps so the patrons could try them out during the open-dancing portion of the evening.

  “Now ladies and gentlemen, we have a little novelty for you this evening”—that was Armstrong’s promise to his invisible audience at the outset of a 1931 recording. Like sex appeal, novelty is a timeless commodity, but it had special resonance in the 1920s, a period of inventions. “In those crazy Twenties the sensation-hungry public was ready for a new fad every twenty-four hours,” said clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow. In music, novelty ranged from animal imitations to all kinds of physical displays—playing three clarinets at once, playing the bass viol while lying down, shimmying
the stomach muscles rapidly while playing the drums, playing a miniature piano that rolled through the room, trotting out a four-foot coach trumpet.

  The words “eccentric” and “novelty” were close in meaning. “Eccentric” was especially flexible; the word was, in fact, applied to Armstrong’s innovative playing. “Louis has promised to give the Chicago public some new figures in jazz,” Dave Peyton wrote in August 1926, after Armstrong returned from vacationing with Lillian in Idlewild, Michigan, “as he has had ample time to figure out some eccentric ones.” The following April, in a brief review of the publications Louis Armstrong’s 125 Jazz Breaks for Cornet and Louis Armstrong’s 50 Hot Choruses for Cornet, Peyton wrote that “Louis has penned in book form some of his eccentric styles of playing.” Two other formulations were “trick figure” and “trick manipulation,” as in a column “Vaudeville News” from Heebie Jeebies (September 4, 1926): “The orchestra rendered some classy numbers Sunday night that won thunderous applause from the patrons. Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines copped ‘big hands’ all week on their trick manipulations.”

  “Eccentric,” “trick,” and “novelty” were standard categories for the entertainment industry; “weird” and “crazy” were more informal ways of saying the same thing. It is easy to imagine that Armstrong’s “up” at the Dreamland was introduced as an eccentric act. In 1924 and 1925, his solos with Henderson seemed challenging and unfamiliar to audiences from Harlem to Harrisburg; undoubtedly, many listeners in Chicago had the same response. Reminiscing about a saxophone player in Chicago who had his own distinctive way of playing, pianist Glover Compton explained how it was challenging for him to blend: “He was one of them fellas who everybody just stay down and let him play his style, like Louie was… . His [Armstrong’s] style was so odd, so different from anything anyone had ever heard.” “Eccentric,” “trick,” “weird,” and “crazy” were familiar categories that helped make room for his innovative playing, which clearly stood outside of the range of normal jazz.