Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The format is close to that of the 1923 Oliver recordings except that collective improvisation is generally reserved for beginning and end, with reduced accompaniment for solos in the middle. Armstrong plays the lead with crisp ornamentation, usually in the context of collective improvisation, and contributes some strong breaks. Dodds and Lillian get more exposed solos. There are no “special choruses” of the kind that would later make Armstrong the central figure in the history of jazz solo playing. Ory contributes a few hot breaks, and the atmosphere is relaxed and buoyant, though not distinguished. It must have been a lot of fun to rejoin his old friends and relax into collective improvisation, where everything flowed and nobody worried about pianissimo or anything else.

  “The records I made with the Hot Fives were the easiest I ever made,” Ory remembered. Just two weeks earlier Armstrong was throwing up into Fletcher Henderson’s lap, and now he was surrounded by his home boy buddies. “The important part about playing music is the idea of having a happy heart and a happy mind. We had it then,” said Baby Dodds about the Oliver band from 1922 to 1923, and the Hot Five recordings transmit the same spirit. It was not just a New Orleans ensemble but an uptown New Orleans ensemble that Armstrong had assembled—not Jimmy Noone with his smooth, flowing clarinet lines but Johnny Dodds with his biting blues licks; not Honoré Dutrey with his command of cello parts but Kid Ory with his simple and effective tailgate style. “Mellow moments, I assure you,” was how Armstrong remembered the Ory band in the late teens, and in the fall of 1926 he was revisiting that atmosphere.

  After the modest November session, the group did not record again until February 22, 1926, with another mediocre tune, Come Back Sweet Papa, composed by friends and fellow New Orleanians Paul Barbarin and Luis Russell. The 14-week gap established a loose pattern that would hold for Armstrong’s “Hot” units through 1926, 1927, and 1928, with visits to the OKeh studio spaced in clusters of three per year. These recordings document Armstrong’s artistic growth, and it is important to try to analyze what they tell us about what he performed outside the studio, even though such correlations are not straightforward. One obvious problem was built into the differing business plans: the recording companies wanted from their “race” artists original material that the performer signed away to the company, while cabarets and theaters wanted well-known hits. These strategies made the repertories largely, though not completely, incongruent.

  Nevertheless, the Hot Five series had three things in common with what Armstrong was doing at the Dreamland and Vendome. First, it was designed to feature him. His abilities as a cornet soloist, and soon as a singer, were now recognized as something people were willing to pay for. Second, this was music conceived for a black audience. Ironically, at the very moment Armstrong became headliner at the Vendome, the classiest theater on the South Side, OKeh began marketing him to the down-home rural South. None of these enterprises had incentive to turn white dollars away, but there was absolutely no sense of designing the musical product so that it appealed to white audiences.48

  Third, the recordings, too, were for listening. It is true that people danced to them, but it was just as easy to simply listen. Virtually everything Armstrong played—and for virtually his entire life—could support dancing. But now he was stepping into a different and parallel role of playing for an audience that listened, and doing it from three different directions.

  On February 26, 1926, the band returned to the studio to record six tunes—Oriental Strut, Georgia Grind, Cornet Chop Suey, Muskrat Ramble, Heebie Jeebies, and You’re Next. The session produced two major hits and a much-loved standard of New Orleans jazz. Perhaps these successes were due to familiarity with the tunes from the Dreamland, where Lillian was in charge of the band, choosing repertory, and where all five musicians worked.

  Oriental Strut was composed by banjo player Johnny St. Cyr. Both the title and the extended stop time solo for Armstrong suggest that it was conceived as a follow-up to Cornet Chop Suey. The twisting and unpredictable turns of his solo are just the kind of eccentric figures that were catching attention at the Dreamland and Vendome. The differences between this stop-time solo and the one created two years earlier for Cornet Chop Suey are notable and indicate his developing sense of style. Though not one of his classic solos, Oriental Strut is nevertheless a historical gem that shows him reaching toward his mature approach.

  The solo in fact begins with a very strong reference to (almost a quotation of) the stop-time solo from Cornet Chop Suey. After that the new solo is much more adventuresome. The earlier solo conforms to the flow of two-bar groups, as defined by the harmonic rhythm, while the solo for Oriental Strut is highly irregular. Listen to the highest notes as the line unfolds. They pop out of the texture on different beats, sometimes in between beats, spinning out figures that constantly change in length and are in tension with the fixed levels of sub-beats, beats, measures, and two-bar groupings, as well as with the previous patterns of the solo. Armstrong uses the main pitches of St. Cyr’s simple tune to hold the otherwise unpredictable line together, a technique he had been exploring with Henderson.

  This is eccentric playing according to Teddy Wilson’s definition, the kind of melodic flow that characterizes some of his most famous solos from the next few years. Here it is slightly out of control; one can hear him feeling his way toward something that he imagines and has not quite found. He was fond of Oriental Strut and continued to play it after he moved in April to the Sunset Café, where Cab Calloway remembered hearing it. It was also another piece (Good Time Flat Blues was the first) that impressed Jack Teagarden, listening in faraway Albuquerque. “When I played that for Jack he thought it was the end,” said Wingy Manone. The two of them decided to honor Oriental Strut by burying the phonograph disc in the desert sand, hoping that this treatment would preserve the artifact for all time, like petrified wood.

  From the first Hot Five session in November 1925 though November 1926, the band recorded 24 different tunes. Georgia Grind, by Spencer Williams, was the only one composed by someone who did not have an obvious local connection. The easiest explanation for its appearance is the enterprising energy of Clarence Williams, who published Spencer’s tunes and probably had an arrangement with OKeh; Richard M. Jones, who worked for OKeh, also started working as the Chicago representative for Williams’s publishing firm in 1926. Perhaps the piece was featured at the Dreamland, but the only musical detail hinting at this—that is, the only distinction of the performance—is Armstrong’s vocal solo. Here is his first extended singing on record. Lillian also sings two choruses, and it is easy to imagine her part being covered by one of the professional singers at the Dreamland. Armstrong offers attractive speechlike music. He completely ignores the composed melody, and if he did perform this at the Dreamland, perhaps that success gave him confidence for the daring scat vocal on Heebie Jeebies.

  Cornet Chop Suey, discussed in Chapter 3, was certainly performed at both the Dreamland and the Vendome. It was probably the number that made people line up around the block, waiting to get in. Released in June 1926, the recording was a “biggie” in New Orleans according to Barney Bigard. Josiah Frazier talked about learning it there from the record and bringing it into his band’s repertory. “When we played that number the house just screamed and hollered and right now if it was left to them people we’d still be playing,” remembered Frazier. Trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen memorized it, and Wild Bill Davison said it changed the way he played. Kid Rena complained that Armstrong was showing off, and it was clear to everyone that he was no longer the home boy they once knew.

  Kid Ory is listed as the composer of Muskrat Ramble, but Armstrong claimed that they wrote it together; Ory named it, so Armstrong “gave it to him.” This probably means that Armstrong composed the first strain, a theme of riff-based arpeggiations characteristic of him and not of Ory, and that Ory added the second strain, which features the trombone. The two strains combine well, the second one providing the basis for the solos and the fir
st one returning at the end with nice variations from Armstrong. Muskrat Ramble flows with the relaxed swing of New Orleans. Ory is at his best. A musician of limited technique, with weak reading skills, Ory had clear strengths—a strong and crisp attack and also great timing, both valuable for collective improvisation. The piece has long been a New Orleans standard, and it is difficult to spend more than a few days in the Crescent City without hearing it played somewhere.

  The relaxed environment of Muskrat Ramble inspired one of Armstrong’s most accomplished solos to date, one thoroughly shaped by the fixed and variable model and at the same time beautifully designed. The tempo here, and also the tempo for Oriental Strut, favors the density of ideas that he was continuing to work with; comparison with the much faster Static Strut and Stomp Off Let’s Go will make this clear. Speedy northern tempos during the year with Henderson may have inhibited Armstrong’s growth as a soloist: a frantic pace simply did not accommodate his explorations of constant shifts in rhythmic patterning and microelements of melodic design. A tendency toward more moderate tempos may have been an unexpected benefit of the Hot Five series, with its southern orientation.49

  Notable in Muskrat Ramble is a harmonic anticipation near the beginning of Armstrong’s solo. This is the device observed already in Go Long Mule, where it was analyzed as a creative extension of the fixed and variable model. The foundational harmonies are clearly directed toward the arrival of the main chord in the third measure, and so is Armstrong’s opening melodic gesture. But he arrives one beat early. When the main chord falls into place at the proper time in the accompaniment, at the downbeat of the third measure, his solo melody has already collapsed from its high-note arrival (CD 1:07) into an effortless downward sweep. It is this ease of motion, in and out of phase with the fixed and periodic foundation, that makes the event so attractive.

  The relaxed flow of melody continues for the rest of the solo. There are several more harmonic anticipations of the main chord, suggesting the blues technique of “ubiquitous one,” and they are always well integrated in the line. What I hear in examples like this is Armstrong using pitch to dislodge his melody from the harmonic foundation without severing the connection. This is another way to capture the effect more typically achieved through rhythm in the fixed and variable model. In these examples, we find him using pitch both to enhance rhythm and to reproduce the same effect in a different musical parameter. Notable also is his use of ninths, sevenths (especially the joyous leap up to the major seventh in measure 8; CD 1:15), and sixths for the same purpose. These nonharmonic tones create the effect of dangling above the harmony, a middle ground that is not dissonant yet not fully consonant with the foundation. In this way, they, too, distance his variable line from the fixed foundation without severing the connection. Again, they are well integrated into the design.

  Muskrat Ramble was paired on the flip side with the big hit of the session and probably Armstrong’s biggest hit until Ain’t Misbehavin’ in 1929. Heebie Jeebies made him a local celebrity. It was at the Vendome, Armstrong remembered, that he really began to sing; Heebie Jeebies became the song with which he was most associated. Armstrong said that the record reached sales of 40,000. Barely a month after it was released, OKeh was advertising it as “the biggest selling record ever known.” Armstrong later quipped how composer Boyd Atkins “must have made a nice little ‘taste’ (meaning) the tune made a quite a bit of ‘loot’ (meaning) they sold lots of records and made lots of ‘dough’ (meaning) ‘money.’”

  The success of Heebie Jeebies had nothing to do with Atkins’s skill as a songwriter, for Armstrong’s scat chorus was the sole reason for its popularity. The huge impact of the recording caused many people to believe that it documented the origins of scat, a myth that was later promoted by an unscrupulous publicity agent. Preceding him on recordings were Ukulele Ike, Don Redman, and, all the way back to 1911, Gene Greene’s King of the Bungaloos. But since Heebie Jeebies gave many listeners their first exposure to scat, associations with Armstrong remained strong, especially after he began to incorporate the technique into his new singing style of the early 1930s.

  In one of several late-life tirades, Jelly Roll Morton insisted that the originator of scat was not Armstrong but a comedian named Joe Sims from Vicksburg, Mississippi. But clearly Armstrong grew up with strong local exposure to the practice, which probably came from West Africa. Trumpeter Punch Miller said that scat was popular “up and down the street [in New Orleans] but they didn’t know what they were doing. Louis went up there and made something out of it.” As a child, Armstrong and his buddies imitated marching band instruments—“did you hear that riff, son, Bum Bum Da De, Da De Da DA DA … that was the way we went on for years,” he remembered. His street-corner vocal quartet included scat as part of their routine. Armstrong’s friend and fellow quartet singer James “Red Happy” Bolton turned out to be an important model for Armstrong in his teenage years. When the two of them became old enough to sit in with bands, Red Happy entertained the crowd with a scat number as a comic interlude, giving the paid musicians a little break. A fantastic drummer and also a good buck dancer, Bolton shaped Armstrong’s own singing style, according to one observer.

  Many signs—from comedian Joe Sims to Red Happy’s interludes and from Gene Greene’s King of the Bungaloos to Ukulele Ike—indicate that scat was mainly received as humor. Asked about Heebie Jeebies, Lillian said, “I don’t know if he planned to scat or not. I know that ever since Louis started working alone he would always add little extra touches and things, and little comical things to his work.” Kid Ory remembered Armstrong making funny faces while he scatted Heebie Jeebies in the OKeh studio. Violinist and trumpeter Peter Bocage said that people in New Orleans laughed when they first heard the recording back home. It must have been funny indeed to buy the recording at a store, open up the fancy package, and encounter local street jive, shipped down from Chicago. Whenever music is presented without words, it is possible to spin virtually any interpretation, and scat is no different. Such are the terms of musical expression that people can hear abstract utterances in highly imaginative ways that have nothing, necessarily, to do with the conception of the creator and his or her immediate audience. But if listeners regarded scat as a serious enterprise with covert meaning in 1926, there is not a shred of evidence from the period to indicate it.

  Humor aside, scat had a solid place in African-American vernacular culture. It was a special example of blurring boundaries between speaking, singing, and playing an instrument, an orientation that gave rise to a rich array of creative possibilities, including Joe Oliver’s virtuoso freak music, African-American preaching styles, West African talking drums, blues phrasing and inflections, and “talking blues” by the comedian Stringbeans (of Stringbeans and Sweetie May) and others. Bass player Bill Johnson with the Oliver band sometimes mixed talking and scatting at Lincoln Gardens. “Well my singing’s nothing,” said Armstrong in 1931. “I just try to put the rhythm of instrumental playing into my voice.”

  What distinguishes Armstrong’s scat from examples recorded earlier is his unabashed vigor. It is as if he is strutting down the dirt streets of New Orleans in a crowded, funky parade, doing what he can to draw attention to himself. Heebie Jeebies is an assertive celebration of an unrefined, everyday African-American voice, the opposite of dicty snootiness. Percussive consonants explode from his gravelly throat, and his curt melodic utterances are so vivid that you can almost see them. Atkins’s song is named after a dance. Armstrong first sings about the joys of the dance before he slips into the scat chorus. The sharp jabs and sudden dips of his lines—he has abandoned Atkins’s melody completely—dislodge the song from any narrative function and turn it into a sonic representation of bodily motion. The effect further saturates the performance with markers of vernacular culture. “The Heebie Jeebies is rich in haunch movements,” was one description of the dance from 1927, and it is easy to hear Armstrong’s lines in that way. He defines the dance as having little in comm
on with polite fox trotting at the Roseland Ballroom. Singing like this had not been heard before at the Vendome or the Dreamland Café, and it is significant that Armstrong did not introduce it in those places. The place to do it turned out to be a recording studio, hiding behind a supposed mistake.

  The phrase “heebie jeebies” (or “hibby jibby,” “heebie geebies,” “hebe-jibies,” and so on) had wide currency in the 1920s. In the late 1910s a band in Atlantic City assumed this very name. By 1925, the phrase was popping up all over, in the comic strip Barney Google, as the title of a song recorded by Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders, as the title of the South Side magazine, and as the title of a movie. The phrase implied eccentric movement and vague associations with mental disturbance. It was a perfect name for a dance that aimed to satisfy the mid-1920s fascination with cutting loose and stepping out of convention for a couple of happy minutes.

  Like drummer Paul Barbarin, who composed Don’t Forget to Mess Around at the very same time (February 1926), Atkins wrote an instrumental tune, not a song with words. Both composers were aiming to hook their tunes up with dances, a common strategy that held the potential for great economic reward: if the dance took off, your song might ride on its coattails. James P. Johnson’s Charleston Rag was a famous example, but there were many other attempts, including Georgia Grind, Irish Black Bottom, and Sunset Cafe Stomp, all recorded by the Hot Five.

  Atkins and Barbarin had something else in common: each asked his prestigious friend to promote his new song. Atkins knew Armstrong from a Mississippi riverboat band, where he played violin alongside Armstrong’s cornet from 1920 through 1922. Armstrong agreed to place Heebie Jeebies on the February 26 OKeh session, and we may assume that Atkins was delighted to cut a deal with the company. OKeh was now encouraging Armstrong to sing, so Atkins’s tune needed some words, which Armstrong supplied himself. It is easy to read between the lines here: as co-composer, he would be in a position to receive royalties if the song got recorded by others. This, too, was a common strategy, a way to increase the commitment of a person or publishing house who held powers of promotion. Armstrong wrote out some words and brought them to the studio.50