Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  In their pathbreaking account of jazz dancing, Marshall and Jean Stearns concluded that “the term ‘eccentric’ is a catchall for dancers who have their own nonstandard movements and sell themselves on their individual styles.” African-American eccentric acts typically exaggerated the distinguishing features of their own tradition. Freak music with plunger and wah-wah effects, for example, fell automatically into this category; it was not accidental that Joe Oliver chose the rag Eccentric as a vehicle for his specialty. The Stearnses mention contortionist dancer Jigsaw Jackson, the Human Corkscrew, who performed with his face on the floor, feet spiraling around in vigorous rhythm. “He did everything around the beat,” remembered Charles “Honi” Coles, in a formulation often used to describe jazz musicians.

  In an analysis of Earl Hines’s style, the great swing pianist Teddy Wilson defined eccentric music with some precision. The analysis is worth quoting at length, since what he says applies well to Armstrong. Hines, explained Wilson,

  has a beautifully powerful rhythmic approach to the keyboard and his rhythms are more eccentric than those of Art Tatum or Fats Waller. When I say “eccentric” I mean getting away from straight 4/4 rhythm. He would play a lot of what we call accent on the “and” beat. This is the beat that comes between the 4/4 quarter note beats, and Hines accented it by starting a note between the 4/4 beats. He would do this with great authority and attack. It was a subtle use of syncopation, playing on the in-between beats or what I might call “and” beats: one–and-two-and-three-and-four-and … Now Hines would come in on those “and” beats with the most eccentric patterns, that propelled the rhythm forward with such tremendous force that people felt an irresistible urge to dance or tap their feet, or otherwise react physically to the rhythm of the music… . He had such a beautiful approach to playing rhythmic piano that he could easily move an audience… . As I have said, Hines is very intricate in his rhythm patterns: very unusual and original and there is really nobody like him.

  Nobody like him—except perhaps Louis Armstrong. Wilson is describing a way of working with the fixed and variable model, and in this Armstrong was leading the way during the 1920s. That is one reason why Hines is sometimes said to play “trumpet style” piano; the phrase is partly in recognition of Armstrong’s influence. It is impossible to know how widely Wilson’s understanding of “eccentric” circulated during the 1920s, but it is easy to believe that it was understood intuitively as a way to make sense of this kind of music.

  Alongside novelty stood the principle of variety, another aesthetic principle that has enjoyed great favor in many kinds of art forms. Armstrong’s first recorded solo, on Chimes Blues, reveals very little interest in variety, but six months later (October 1923) his series of breaks for Tears shows him firmly focused on this principle, which he then took to heart as he explored different ways of constructing solos with Henderson. In his embrace of variety, he is thoroughly in step with the period’s tendencies, signaled by the title of the trade magazine for the entertainment industry—Variety. Virtually all programs in cabarets and theaters featured different kinds of performers following one another in rapid succession, and within each performance, too, there had to be a flow of continuously fresh detail. Performers who were good at generating a lot of ideas had an advantage, and no one was better at this than Armstrong.

  Speed may have been more important than anything else. The entire decade embraced it through cultural and technological inventions. “Behold now the days of super-speed, of super-brilliance, of super-power,” wrote the Chicago Daily News. A taste for quick dance tempos in Chicago required the New Orleanians at Lincoln Gardens to make some adjustments, and speed shaped entertainment of all kinds. The swiftness of shows was a frequent point of emphasis in reviews, as in this 1924 comment from New York: “the new show sped along without an interruption in its pace… . From the very first scene … the show traveled at breakneck pace.” “‘Speed’ is the present day slogan,” agreed a show columnist for the Defender in 1926. “‘Step on it!’ ‘Give her the gas!’ ‘Jazz it up!’ ‘Snap into it!’ are familiar exclamations that beat a tattoo upon one’s eardrums from every direction.” Performers entered on the previous act’s exit or even before its finish, avoiding any lull in the snappy stream of variety. Armstrong was thoroughly caught up in the race. Nevertheless, the fastest tempos were not conducive to the dense flow of ideas that marked his creativity, and his greatest solos tend not to be his fastest ones.

  Speed was a cutting-contest weapon in New Orleans, alongside freak playing and technical facility. Cornet Chop Suey, with its quickly moving arpeggiations and filigree, was designed with this in mind. Armstrong had been sitting on Cornet Chop Suey since January 1924: there was no way to use it with Oliver, where his assignment was to stay under, and no way to introduce it in New York, where he took short solos and accompanied blues singers. With his name now on the Dreamland marquee, he was finally in a position to perform this carefully crafted display piece. He remembered how the piece “turned out to be a very popular tune—especially among the musicians and actors and music lovers,” which places it directly in the Dreamland. Cornet Chop Suey must have been his “up,” the Chinese chef smiling broadly.36 The piece found success not as an accompaniment to dancing but as a piece for listening, a context that would shape Armstrong’s return to Chicago and his musical maturity.

  Entertainers often integrated comedy into their routines, and specialists were in high demand. “A show without a comedian was no show at all,” insisted trumpeter Doc Cheatham. Earl Hines agreed that “the Negro comedians were very successful… . Their funny comments on everyday life, and on what happened in the Southland, were all mixed up with references to segregation that were particularly funny to us Negroes who knew what it was all about. It was a relief to the distress and the turmoil and the obligations we always had, and that is where a lot of that great soul feeling came from.” One of the oldest surviving documents associated with Armstrong is his copy of a comedy skit called “The Boy from Gaffney Alabama.” It would be hard to overestimate the extent of humor in his vocal music. His two big hits of 1926, Heebie Jeebies and Big Butter and Egg Man, were primarily expressions of cabaret-style comedy.

  Musicians were rarely the main attraction at a cabaret. Pianist Art Hodes explained how the other entertainers were far more important than the band, which “was at the bottom of the ladder.” A newspaper review praised Lil’s Dreamland band for its versatility, for following the entertainers well, and for playing good dance music; there was no mention of any musical solos, which was absolutely typical. Armstrong transcended these limitations. Though we have little detail about his performances at the Dreamland, we do know that his name was featured on the marquee and in the newspaper, that within a short time he was in position to demand more money, that, according to Lil, people lined up “ten deep” in front of the bandstand to hear him, that, according to Ory, people “lined up in the snow to get in to hear us,” and that, according to Armstrong himself, he “became more popular every night and was the talk of Chicago.” An undated newspaper clipping preserved in a scrapbook kept by Lil also frames the matter clearly: “Louis Armstrong, the greatest jazz cornet player in the country, is drawing many Ofay musicians in Dreamland nightly to hear him blast out those weird crazy figures. This boy is in a class by himself.”

  Sunday Afternoon at the Symphony

  Sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, writing in 1945, claimed that the “five years from 1924 to 1929 were the most prosperous ones the Negro community in Chicago had ever experienced.” That relative prosperity happily coincided with Armstrong’s coming of age as a soloist, the first period of his musical modernity. “Things were jumping so around Chicago at that time, there was more work than a cat could shake a stick at,” he wrote. Steady patronage is always a great boon to artists, and support for Armstrong from the African-American community was now beginning to flow in unprecedented volumes. In return, he helped define and bring to artist
ic life a sense of what that community was all about.

  Vendome Theater (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 52, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Soon after his name lit up the Dreamland marquee, conductor Erskine Tate invited him to join the Vendome Theater Symphony Orchestra. The Vendome was a movie house on State Street at 31st; Armstrong worked there from December 1925 through April 17, 1927. Because of the length of his stay and the prominence of the venue, we know more about what he did there and what went on around him than we know about the Dreamland.

  If Armstrong was embarrassed by being advertised as the world’s greatest cornetist at the Dreamland, the prospect of playing with Tate was terrifying. “I like to have fainted,” he remembered. His wife scolded him: “Boy—if you don’t get out of this house and go on down there to Erskine Tate’s rehearsal, I’ll skin you alive.” He had good reason to be nervous. Henderson tolerated his unschooled ways with a touch of contempt, but Tate’s outfit may have been the most sophisticated African-American orchestra in the country. He took the job, and it turned out to be a good decision. It “was my greatest experience of them all,” he wrote much later. “I wouldn’t take a million for that experience.”

  Entertainers often doubled up on jobs that fit two different time slots, and that is precisely what Armstrong started to do in December 1925. The Vendome opened at two o’clock every afternoon and closed at eleven.37 (The organist probably played by himself for the early shows, with the orchestra arriving for the later ones.) The timing was perfect for Louis to trot over to the Dreamland, four blocks away, in time for the late show there. After that he might grab his horn and check out an after-hours club or two, retiring to bed around dawn. He occasionally extended his work day with a midmorning recording session. Routines like this, seven days a week, helped keep the music profession young.

  Of all the venues Armstrong played in during the 1920s, movie theaters were most unlike what people expect today. To go to the Vendome meant that you were going to watch a movie, but that was not all, and it wasn’t necessarily the main attraction. “We sell tickets to theaters, not movies,” explained Marcus Loew, who made a lot of money with that point of view. From the beginning of the silent-picture era, movies were packaged with an astonishing range of live entertainment. Theaters explored different formats as they tried to hook into one market niche or another. There was always some kind of music to accompany the films, and the music itself could become a major draw.

  Music could in fact be more important than anything else.38 When the silent era ended, music receded into the background, where it remains today, but in 1925 many theaters used it to attract customers. There was, for example, the Pied Piper concept of a small performance outside the entrance to the building, luring customers in. There might be a player piano for atmosphere in the front lobby. Music always accompanied the film, and there were often musical highlights before and after, such as the community sing-along, the “illustrated song,” the orchestra overture, the featured singer, the instrumental soloist, and the organ solo. Every theater needed at least a pianist, larger halls at least an organist. Many had small combos of piano, violin, and drums. And the ones that relied on music the most had “symphony orchestras,” a term that carried special resonance at the Vendome.39

  African-American musicians felt that there was more theater work in Chicago than in New York City, which meant that there was more than anywhere. “They improved their ability that way, and so could read a little better than jazz musicians in the East,” explained Garvin Bushell. In the spring of 1926 one writer counted around 100 African-American musicians, all of them unionized, working in South Side theaters. Theater work was coveted because it offered the best pay scale, reasonable hours, and steady work throughout the year. A feature in the Defender (August 1926) gave a list of “Chicago Orchestras and Where They Play,” and it described the makeup of 29 ensembles. The list included seven theaters: the Monogram Theater had two musicians, the Pickford four, the Grand five (soon to be augmented to seven), the Twentieth Century and the Owl seven, the Metropolitan twelve, while the Vendome topped the list with fifteen.

  Management had decided to distinguish the Vendome in this way in June 1924. To publicize the initiative, they scattered large posters around the neighborhood reading simply, “9 to 15,” with no hint of explanation or even a mention of the Vendome. The Defender solved the mystery on June 28: on July 3, the Vendome would be expanding its orchestra from nine to fifteen players, which would make it “the sensation of the time.” This move swung the balance of interest toward music to a degree unprecedented for South Side theaters.

  There were plenty of models, though. Setting national standards were the Rialto and the Rivoli in New York City, both under the musical direction of Hugo Riesenfeld, a protégé of Gustav Mahler and former first violinist at the Imperial Opera House in Vienna. In the early 1920s the Rialto and Rivoli had orchestras of 45 players. Each week, Riesenfeld and his four assistant conductors perused their combined music library of some 32,000 pieces to assemble programs. Riesenfeld’s aim was not simply to make excellent music to go with films; he wanted to have the finest orchestras in the city. Theaters across the country imitated his strategy, routinely raiding traditional symphony orchestras for the best musicians.

  Riesenfeld popularized the practice of featuring the overture as a presentation completely independent of the main movie. A new one was selected every week, the title often advertised. This was followed by an orchestral segment of classics, both light and serious. Why pay for Carnegie Hall when you could hear Beethoven and Wagner performed at the movie house? “No concert schedule needed in New York,” ran an advertisement in 1921, since “the best orchestral and vocal music is always available at the theaters under the direction of Hugo Riesenfeld.” Venues like these stretched out the range of class positions associated with movie theaters, positions defined by shifting social, economic, and cultural packages.

  By the standards of the Rialto and Rivoli, the Vendome was modest. What mattered was that it was good enough to be the best on the South Side of Chicago. The Vendome had full-dress orchestral music, played with distinction, with additional entertainment to fill out the program. The articulation of social class through cultural practice is always a relative thing, and the requirements for an elevated position in white Manhattan were different from those in black Chicago. What Riesenfeld did with 45 musicians, the Vendome could do with 15—increased to 20 when Armstrong joined.

  If you wanted to hear African-American musicians playing the finest classical music at the highest technical level, you headed to the Vendome, no matter where you lived. “The Vendome theater … has one of the finest symphony orchestras to be found in any theater in the country regardless of size. The type of music offered the patrons of this house is equal to the best to be heard in the largest movie houses of the country.” That is how Bill Potter, writing in the Defender, regarded the Vendome in September 1925, and that is why Armstrong was a bit nervous when Erskine Tate invited him to join his orchestra.

  Tate was well suited to this job, which he supplemented with instrumental lessons at his studio in the Columbia Hotel, a half-block from the Vendome, and sales from a little music store. Like most leaders of theater orchestras, he was a violinist. And like Lillian Hardin Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, his background was strictly classical. In late 1925 he was at the top of his game. Though jazz in its various forms was gaining popularity on the South Side, he and other theater musicians with no background whatsoever in improvised music hardly felt threatened. They were secure in their niche. “See, music you fit in certain slots,” explained drummer Red Saunders. “You’re either a good theater man or you’re a good cabaret band, at that time, or you’re a good ballroom band, you know.”

  “Erskine Tate’s Vendome Theater Orchestra has new pictures of the gang, and they look like a million bucks, in modern grouping. This organization played over the ra
dio last week from the Drake Hotel studio and created quite a sensation.” Defender, December 5, 1925 (The Frank Driggs Collection)

  Musicians from New Orleans enjoyed advantages on most instruments in Chicago, but not the violin, as Johnny St. Cyr acknowledged when he counted off the names of six players who were all better than the best player from New Orleans. Good string playing carried tremendous symbolic value. A theater orchestra of 12 to 14 musicians usually had two violins, viola, and cello, which is apparently what the Vendome carried. When first violinist Joe McCutcheon was out for five days because of an injury, his absence and the name of his replacement were duly noted in the Defender, much as the sports page reported injuries of star players for the White Sox. Percussionist Jimmy Bertrand was occasionally mentioned in the press for solos on tympani or xylophone. The orchestra included bassoon, oboe, flutes, clarinets, and trombone. Paul “Stump” Evans, alto saxophonist, took solos while sitting in a distinct way on the back of his chair. Tate hired Eddie Atkins from New Orleans to play trombone. The piano player was the great Teddy Weatherford, a model for Earl Hines. “So cruel is this man on the poor little ivories, so barbaric is this creator of eccentric jazz figures on the piano keyboard, I have decided to name him Terrible Teddy,” wrote Peyton. “Teddy is wholly original in everything he does.”

  Erskine’s brother, James, occupied the first trumpet chair; he was applauded in one review for a beautiful solo that was, “as usual,” an “ear smacker.” Shortly after Armstrong joined, Erskine took him aside and gently pointed out a little problem. With Louis playing the cornet and James sitting next to him with the longer trumpet—well, it just didn’t look good. You look “funny there with [your] stubby little cornet,” Tate joked. It took Louis a while to get used to the new horn, but such were the demands of a symphony orchestra.