Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The melody is elusive yet orderly, detached yet controlled. It belongs to a tradition of blues playing that was delicate and subtle rather than powerful and showy. Until this point, Armstrong was not typically associated with this side of black experience—relaxed, reflective, and lyrical. I doubt that he ever played like this in cabarets. Perhaps Lonnie Johnson was the inspiration, or, more prosaically, the possibilities were opened up by the microphone. Like Struttin’ and Hotter Than That, the final chorus features an inspiring ascent into the high range.

  On December 24, 1927, pianist Glover Compton wrote a letter from Paris to Dave Peyton, in care of the Defender, saying that he had just had a nice chat with the famous bandleader Paul Ash, also in Paris. The main topics of their conversation were Chicago, Peyton, and “Louie” Armstrong. With Armstrong, OKeh had an unmatchable soloist. But in 1927 there was an impressive amount of sophisticated jazz being recorded, not just by the leading black bands but also by white musicians whose music lessons at the Sunset Café and elsewhere were paying off. OKeh’s decision to bring in Lonnie Johnson may reflect an awareness of the expanding field of competition. The Hot Five was designed to be funky and down home, but after two full years of recording there may have been a feeling that the regular formula was wearing thin. In any event, there were changes for the next go-around in June.

  By December 3, 1927, Armstrong had left his job at the Metropolitan Theater, and he apparently had already left the Sunset as well. His only words on that were that “the old boss man [Joe Glaser, the manager] got tired of looking at us.” Hines said that the Sunset closed down in 1927, putting them out of a job. In any event, they were both unemployed, except for the studio sessions with OKeh.

  Initially, being out of work seems not to have bothered Armstrong. He was riding high as one of the most famous musicians on the South Side. Zutty Singleton was working at a place called Club Baghdad, at Cottage Grove and 64th Street, an area Peyton called the “highbrow district.” Two large bands, one white and one black, alternated sets every evening. Armstrong took to stopping by every night to sit in with the black band for one number, performing Big Butter and Egg Man to great applause, then driving his friend Singleton home.

  With brimming confidence, he, Hines, and Singleton decided to form what they called a “little corporation.” Why not cut out the middlemen and reach for bigger paychecks? Lillian would be their manager. They booked a place called Warwick Hall, at 543 East 47th Street, diagonally opposite the brand-new Savoy Ballroom. They brought in three other musicians and called themselves Louis Armstrong and His Hot Six. Carroll Dickerson had been doing something similar at Warwick Hall, playing on Sundays. Armstrong boldly signed a lease for one year.

  “Man we didn’t do nothing!” lamented Singleton. “It was a floperoo.” The Savoy Ballroom, a beautiful and sparkling facility, was pouring lots of money into advertising, with full-page ads week after week in the Light and Heebie Jeebies.78 The little corporation didn’t stand a chance. By late December failure was obvious. Finally, the owners of the hall offered Armstrong a settlement on his one-year lease and he agreed to pay it off. “He was a long time paying,” Singleton admitted.

  Warwick Hall (Jelly Roll Morton Book Photographic Collection, MSS 508, F. 127, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Armstrong reasoned that the Hot Five series had made him popular, so the corporation planned a tour through eastern states organized by the Ike Dixon Amusement Company for the first week in January, with stops in Harrisburg, Martinsburg (West Virginia), Richmond, Norfolk, Newport News, and Wilmington; it is hard to know whether or not the tour actually came off.79 They tooled around Chicago in a yellow Ford roadster they called “the covered wagon,” but they couldn’t afford to have it repaired. Not having enough money to fill the tank, they bought one gallon of gas at a time. They took gigs that paid as little as three dollars per person. “Things gotten so tough with us until fifteen cents looked like fifteen dollars,” Armstrong remembered. They took comfort in their shared misery. “We were starving to death,” insisted Hines. “I’ll never forget, old Louis and I and Zutty Singleton were sticking together. If you wanted to hire one of us you had to hire all three of us.”

  Finally, a decent offer came in. Clarence Jones was now back at the Metropolitan Theater, and in mid-February Armstrong and Singleton joined his band. In mid-March, Jones took the entire unit over to the Vendome, the place that had provided Armstrong with such tremendous support for 18 months or so, ending in the spring of 1927. He was now the star once again. Jones worked up an arrangement of some “haunting melodies” that he called A Trip Through Southland, including a featured number for Armstrong on a tune called Mississippi Mud (James Cavanaugh and Harry Barris, 1927). But the Vendome was struggling, facing steep competition from the beautiful, 3,000-seat Regal Theater, which had opened in January right across the street from the Savoy. Four large venues, the Regal, the Savoy, the Metropolitan Theater, and Warwick Hall, now formed a cluster of entertainment around the corner of 47th Street and Vincennes, drawing crowds away from the old hubs at 31st and 35th Streets. On April 7, Peyton lamented the reduction of Clarence Jones’s Orchestra at the Vendome to four pieces. “Our leaders should stop and think how long it takes to build a reputation and defend the fruits of their labor by refusing to satisfy promoters who will not gamble a while,” he grumbled.80

  Savoy Ballroom, Chicago, 1938 (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 59, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)

  Carroll Dickerson, scheduled to begin work at the Savoy on Wednesday, April 11, approached Singleton and cleverly offered him a job if he could bring Armstrong along with him. There may have been bad feelings between Dickerson and Armstrong, as there certainly were between him and Hines, who said that Dickerson blamed him for the Sunset dismissal a year earlier. Hines apparently was in New York City at this moment, and when he got back to Chicago he was upset to find that Armstrong and Singleton had accepted a job without him, thus breaking their pact. “It’s rough out here,” Armstrong pleaded, “and I gotta make them payments on the house.” On April 11, Armstrong started work at the Savoy, where he would enjoy tremendous success during the next ten months or so. As Red Saunders put it, “Armstrong at that time really took over.”

  The heavily funded Savoy had been going strong since opening the previous November. Its size was unprecedented for the South Side, and so was the elaborate decor, with high-polish maple floors with mahogany inserts and a triple subfloor to support the dancers. The checkroom accommodated 6,000 hats and coats. From the entrance on South Parkway it was 400 feet to the bandstand on the other side of the dance floor. The building housed a barbershop, beauty parlor, shoeshine stands, and an outdoor pavilion for dancing during warm weather. Boxing matches, basketball games, and various kinds of contests were hosted there. The payroll included chaperones, dance “hostesses,” a house doctor, and a registered nurse. Ethel Waters performed during the inaugural week (though the Defender complained that it was difficult to hear her), Percy Venable was brought in to stage a revue, and Brown and McGraw stopped the show with eccentric dancing.

  Like many large dance halls, the Savoy employed two bands every night. When Armstrong and Singleton joined Dickerson, they were complemented by Clarence Black’s band. Dickerson’s band was “more on the high spirit, peppy plan,” reported a reviewer, and Black’s “more of a subdued sweet music atmosphere, which gives the Savoy patrons all that they could expect in a ballroom.” Armstrong immediately tilted public opinion toward Dickerson. Peyton praised his “cyclonic figures” that “stopped the ball”—given the image of Armstrong as a jazz concert king who inspired people to listen, this may have literally happened. Radio broadcasts streamed out nightly from 11:00 p.m. to midnight (extending until 1:00 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays) over WCFL, “The Voice of Labor,” reaching as far as Baltimore. In April 1928 the ballroom claimed attendance of 15,000 customers per week; patronage w
as overwhelmingly (and perhaps completely, most of the time) black.

  One promotional article explained that it was Armstrong’s renditions of Some of These Days, Irish Fantasy, and Savoy Blues that made him the “radio fan’s delight.” In a battle with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, guest artists from Detroit, Armstrong earned victory with the help of Dickerson’s arrangement of Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum. On another occasion Erskine Tate’s band made a guest appearance. The climax of the evening was a performance by all three orchestras—Dickerson’s, Black’s, and Tate’s—of Savoy Blues. Armstrong was featured, of course. “The crowd gathered around him and wildly cheered for more and more,” Peyton reported. Perhaps this was the night pianist Arthur Hodes witnessed Armstrong being carried across the dance floor on the crowd’s shoulders.

  Thrills were put on pause in late April with the sudden death of Ollie Powers, age forty-one, whom Armstrong had first met in 1923, when Lillian trotted him around to the cabarets and showed him how to request a song from the very large tenor. Services were held at Liberty Congregational Church, with people standing in the aisles and spilling onto the sidewalk. Armstrong played a trumpet solo (unaccompanied, I assume)—Dvořák’s melody from the slow movement of the New World Symphony, widely known as Going Home. This may have been done in the manner of a New Orleans funeral with music, such as Armstrong witnessed on a nearly daily basis throughout his youth: playing the melody straight, with no embellishments, bold and clear and confidant. Powers could not have asked for more.81

  In early May some entrepreneurs lured Armstrong to St. Louis for a visit with the promise of $100 per night for two nights, plus expenses, to play with Floyd Campbell’s Orchestra, “an unheard of figure to pay a colored musician for a gig in those days,” according to Campbell. Local interest was undoubtedly fueled by radio broadcasts from Chicago. In June and July, Peyton started calling him “King Menelik,” the late-nineteenth-century Ethiopian king who drove the Italians from his country, thereby becoming a hero to African Americans. It was a powerful analogy, made in the context of increasingly frequent white claims to jazz superiority. H. L. Mencken, for example, had argued a year before that “the best jazz of today is not composed by black men but by Jews: and I mean best in every sense. Why did the Negro composers wait for George Gershwin to do his ‘Rhapsody in Blue’? Why, indeed, did they wait for Paul Whiteman to make jazz a serious matter?”

  If jazz was going to be a contested area of racial supremacy, Peyton knew where to turn. He was not the most obvious candidate to defend Armstrong’s music, being firmly placed in the note-reading camp; a defense of Fletcher Henderson along these lines would have come much more naturally to him. But Peyton must have understood that it was King Menelik, and not Henderson or Sammy Stewart or even Duke Ellington, who had redefined the terms of competition. Armstrong “slaughtered all of the ofay jazz demons appearing at the Savoy recently,” he wrote in July (“ofay” being familiar African-American slang for whites, pig Latin for “foe”), fully aware that there were no white rivals to his kind of jazz anywhere in sight.

  If we are wondering what Armstrong’s weapon of choice for the Savoy slaughter was, there is no better candidate than West End Blues, which was recorded on June 28, 1928.

  Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five recorded eight new numbers in late June, with one more to follow on July 5. In spite of the band’s name, there were now six musicians: Armstrong, Singleton, Mancy “Peck” Carr on banjo, Fred Robinson on trombone, and Jimmy Strong on clarinet and tenor sax were all drawn from Dickerson’s Savoy unit, with Hines, apparently having reconciled with Armstrong and Singleton, joining on piano. Of the nine titles, West End Blues is the only one for which we have testimony confirming performance at the Savoy Ballroom.82

  The slaughtering starts right away. Armstrong’s opening statement—it has been called both a cadenza and a fanfare—is one of the most famous introductions in all of jazz, right alongside Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Though there were several mild precedents in the Hot Five series, it is safe to say that no one had ever heard music quite like this before.

  The introduction is analogous to a break (in fact, the last part of it closely resembles one of Armstrong’s breaks from 1924), the brief musical eruptions that had long provided opportunity for African-American performers to assert an individual identity. Putting such a statement at the beginning and expanding it to 15 seconds makes the effect very different from a break, however. Armstrong’s display of individual power reaches the level of a proclamation of military victory, with a buglelike ascent, a bravura hold at the lofty peak, speed and extended range to communicate technical strength, precise and intricate passage work, brilliance of tone—it all comes across as a heraldic flourish appropriate to a battlefield, which is precisely what ancestors of the trumpet were invented to do.

  Here is fresh articulation of the cultural distance Armstrong had traveled since his arrival in Chicago; by their identification with him, the dancers who carried him on their shoulders at the Savoy Ballroom came along with him. The 15-second introduction demonstrates mastery over both worlds—black and white. Few trumpeters could match his technical brilliance. Lillian said that the basic material for the introduction came from trumpet exercise books she and Louis had been drilling, a spectacular application of his lessons at Kimball Hall in his efforts to improve himself and advance his position.83 He has mastered white technique and made it his own.

  The title of the piece alerted all New Orleanians in attendance to expect music that “really relates to us,” as Milt Hinton put it. The West End was the last stop on the trolley line that transported people from downtown New Orleans out to Lake Ponchartrain. The location hosted a popular resort, a place to escape the summer heat. The music of African-American New Orleans is immediately recognizable in the fantastic bravura, the attitude Amiri Baraka called “brassy, broad and aggressively dramatic” that had been a central part of jazz all the way back to the famous Buddy Bolden. This begins with the percussive articulation of the startling first three notes.

  That much, however, is not qualitatively different from the flashy bugle call that opens Cornet Chop Suey, the most direct antecedent. The wonder of the West End Blues introduction is that its character is so different from a straightforward military call or a display of finger-busting runs. Armstrong has infused this fanfare with the kind of musical expression he explored in Savoy Blues, that delicate, reflective energy now taking shape as a gesture designed to fill the Savoy Ballroom with breathtaking, majestic splendor.

  As with Savoy Blues, he skillfully mixes hesitation, metric changes, acceleration, and rhythmic patterns that easily move in and out of an elastic flow of melody. The elasticity is not only rhythmic but harmonic: the phrase never settles into a single direction but is peppered with a series of small twists and turns that constantly shift direction. Rhythm and harmony thus work together to keep the sense of musical order in constant motion.

  Traditional fanfares are not like this. They are designed to communicate stability and political strength, a position of social control that is seemingly eternal and beyond challenge. Armstrong aims instead for the supple quality of throbbing life itself, a feeling of movement where nothing is fixed and everything is dissolving into something else. His fanfare is all about the pliancy of blues, about a cultural attitude of relaxed detachment, a transcendence of the pain of any worldly situation that is beyond one’s control.

  Virtuosity, precision, strength, and Eurocentric credentials combined with fluidity of motion, elegance, and blues-based detachment—all of it, put together, makes Armstrong one of a kind. There was, literally, no one else on the planet who could play like this. There was no room for doubting that it was the African-American vernacular that was being represented. The introduction could not have been created through musical notation. It is a flamboyant assertion of the ear-playing tradition that was so relentlessly and caustically belittled and that the black New Orleanians c
ultivated so proudly. It was easy for Armstrong to notate the introduction to Cornet Chop Suey because the rhythms were straightforward. No one in the 1920s ever would have thought to notate the introduction to West End Blues.84 The ofay demons were slaughtered, as Peyton and everyone else in the Savoy Ballroom must have understood, because the music could only have come from deep immersion in the African-American vernacular, from a world where performer-centered means of expression reigned supreme. A lot can happen in 15 seconds.

  Carroll Dickerson Orchestra, Savoy Ballroom (The Frank Driggs Collection)

  We know that Oliver was in Chicago in June, so perhaps this was the moment he witnessed from the sidelines, dressed in his best clothes, tears streaming down his cheeks, reflecting on his similar glory, perhaps, at Royal Gardens ten years earlier. Oliver was the composer of the tune and then song called West End Blues, with assistance from Clarence Williams, who added lyrics for the published sheet music. King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators recorded the piece as an instrumental number in Chicago on June 11, 1928; they were followed by Armstrong’s Hot Five on June 28. Then came song versions by Ethel Waters (August 21), Hazel Smith (August 29), and Katherine Henderson (November). The five performances make it clear that Oliver wanted the piece performed in a very slow tempo; Armstrong’s performance is right in the middle, at 90 beats per minute. Only a few of his recordings before this move so slowly (Lonesome Blues, Wild Man Blues), and one is even reminded of the extremely slow pace of St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith, from 1925. The song that would emerge from Oliver’s tune is about a wronged woman, full of gin, who grabs a gun to hunt down her man, who had gone off with her best friend down to the West End. The tempo puts the performance in a world far removed from the fast, bright, and slick moves of the high-rolling 1920s.