Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  “When Louis started blowing the introduction to West End Blues (man was it mellifluous) everybody in the ballroom started screaming and whistling,” remembered George Wettling. “And then Louis lowered the boom and everybody got real groovy when he went into the first strains of West End.” In the first chorus, Armstrong’s trumpet delivers Oliver’s opening phrases with boldness and panache. As the strain unfolds, his filigree becomes increasingly animated, leading naturally into a restatement of the vigorous ascent from the introduction. The second chorus features a subdued trombone solo, with Hines playing tremolo figures in the background.

  Chorus three introduces an equally subdued and very effective series of calls and responses between clarinet and Armstrong, now scatting. The richness of the clarinet in low register, combined with the simplicity of the lines (was this played by the clarinet section in the Savoy Ballroom?), inspires vocalizing that is surprisingly tender and delicate. Again Armstrong becomes more animated as the chorus progresses, eventually releasing delicate and carefully sculpted blues filigree with a quality that is perhaps unprecedented in his recordings. It is essentially a new vocal style for him.

  So the question needs to be raised: assuming that the recording reflects the Savoy Ballroom, what was Armstrong doing singing delicate phrases like this in such a massive hall? The answer directs us not only to the special qualities of West End Blues, but to the impact of technology on the new vocal style that would play a huge role in his stunning innovations during the next few years, carrying him to national fame with audiences black and white: the microphone.

  Armstrong “had to stand back from the mike to avoid blowing the roof off the Savoy Ballroom,” reported Art Hodes, confirming that there was, in fact, a microphone on the stage. His trumpet did not need it, but the new electronic gadget became his voice’s best friend. The vocal style that we are familiar with through recordings up to this point was designed to fill up large spaces, sometimes with the assistance of a megaphone. Musical expression was conditioned by the need to self-amplify. Heebie Jeebies was not about nuance and tenderness but vigor and surprise, his voice transmitting danceable energy with forceful attack, rough delivery, and only slight ornamentation. “There was none of this whispering jive,” said Buster Bailey about singing in the premicrophone era. Armstrong began singing into microphones in recording studios in May 1927, when OKeh first used them for the Hot Five series, but he probably did not use a microphone in public performance until he entered the Savoy Ballroom. Thus, the large-venue style carried through into the studio, in spite of the presence of an electronic microphone there, until June 1928.85

  The microphone (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)

  Sugar Foot Strut and A Monday Date are both excellent and fully texted examples of the new vocal style.86 A Monday Date features nuanced shadings of loud and soft and varied styles of initial attack, some very soft and gradual; gone are the relentless explosions of Heebie Jeebies. Each of the first two vocal phrases ends with a light and effective vibrato (“date,” “Tuesday,”) that quickly fades until the syllable melts into silence. The touch is all light and mellow. The scat break at the end of the vocal chorus (CD 1:35) begins as a burst of energy, like the scat of old, but quickly relaxes into a more casual and softer delivery. There are few flubs from the musicians and a lot of brilliant playing from Armstrong and Hines.

  A Monday Date may be a direct reference to Whiteman’s From Monday On, which Armstrong heard performed in Chicago and which must have been released on disc during the spring of 1928. From Monday On features playful scat dialogue combined with crooner-style solo singing, backed by close male harmonies; the latter appear for the first time in the Hot Five series in Squeeze Me, recorded two days after A Monday Date.87 This little cycle of scat dialogue and barbershop-style harmonies moved from the African-American vernacular in New Orleans into white popular music and then back into Armstrong’s performances, closing the same circle that we tracked in Copenhagen from 1924 (see Chapter 4).

  In late December 1929, the Harlem Tattler praised “Louis Armstrong, whose cornet and individual style of crooning a ballad have made him a Broadway and recording sensation.” Today the word “crooning” is heavily associated with white vocals from this period and later, but racial connotations were more complicated in the 1920s. In 1925, twenty-three-year-old Langston Hughes won a poetry contest with The Weary Blues, which describes a musician on Lenox Avenue performing a “drowsy syncopated tune” and “rocking back and forth to a mellow croon.” Perhaps the primary association of the word was with lullabies sung by southern “mammies”; from there it could be applied to any soft singing. Gene Austin, a white southerner who in a sense launched the crooning period with his extremely popular recording of My Blue Heaven in 1927, said that he patterned his style after black cotton pickers he heard during his youth.88

  The early history of what could be called “crooning blues” is poorly documented on recordings, which drew on star performers with big voices who filled big venues and could project into acoustic horns in the recordings studios. White crooning gave Armstrong a model for his own more bluesy microphone style, but it would be a mistake to assume that this was the only, or even the most important, antecedent. The microphone was the technological innovation that brought crooning into all three of the major communication technologies for transmitting music—movies, radio, and phonograph records. As a reviewer of a new movie called Four Sons, from February 1928, observed: “For a picture of some pretensions its defects are singularly noticeable. In the scene where Joan Crawford sounds the Indian love call several close-ups show her in the act of crooning in a drawing-room manner whereas, in order to have made her voice carry to the distant mountain where her lover awaited the signal, the vocal force of a Wagnerian prima donna would have been in order.” The microphone changed other instruments, too, but it would change singing most dramatically.89 It became an essential component of Armstrong’s second modern style.

  West End Blues had immediate and far-reaching impact. It made a huge impression on thirteen-year-old Billie Holiday in Baltimore, who was running errands for a prostitution madam in exchange for access to her record collection. West End Blues was Holiday’s first exposure to scat. “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba and the rest had plenty of meaning for me—just as much meaning as some of the other words that I didn’t always understand,” she remembered. “But the meaning used to change, depending on how I felt.” Five years later Holiday made her first recording in a New York studio where, just three days before, Bessie Smith had made her last recording. Thus it was that the greatest blues singer of what we might call the megaphone era (though I know of no evidence that Smith used megaphones) symbolically yielded to the greatest jazz singer of the microphone era. Holiday’s style is unthinkable without a microphone, and the fact that West End Blues was one of her first inspirations adds sparkle to the reception history of Armstrong’s performance.

  After the vocal-clarinet duet comes a beautifully crafted piano chorus for Hines, which a reviewer in the British magazine Melody Maker praised for being “as rhythmical, as clever in construction, as perfect an example of originality in harmony, phrases and general style” as Armstrong’s own solo playing. Sixteen-year-old pianist Teddy Wilson learned this solo note for note. “I had never heard that style of piano before—the melodic improvisation, the off-beat bass, the eccentric rhythm, and the ideas in the right hand like a trumpet would play,” remembered Wilson.

  Finally comes the climactic trumpet chorus. The rapid and complex introduction creates a dramatic atmosphere in which anything can happen; this chorus is now the fourth and final answer filling that space of possibility. There is nothing particularly flashy about it, yet it is full of dramatic intensity. The long high note is held for a full 15 beats, the simplicity seeming to balance the flashy fanfare of the introduction. Spinning out from its peak, the line communicates an effortless sense of pliancy, as five bluesy descents move through the same set of pitches,
each one subtly different from the others. Armstrong’s allegiance to the principle of variety has led him to a new standard of blues resilience. The bluesy trumpet chorus caps off this masterful demonstration of a rich range of the African-American vernacular.

  The eclecticism of West End Blues, its many points of discontinuity and surprise, expose the fallacy of thinking in terms of a “total unified conception” better than any other performance by Armstrong does for the simple reason that it was so successful.90 Jazz solos in the 1920s are much more about variety and discontinuity than unity and coherence. The explosive introduction, the inscrutable and tender scat-clarinet dialogue, the spritely piano chorus, and the majestic trumpet chorus—contrast is far more important than unity. (A better place to find unity would be in Oliver’s June recording or Ethel Waters’s from August.) Armstrong’s West End Blues resembles a “fantasy” or “rhapsody,” a type of piece that makes no pretense of integrating the parts into a coherent whole but, rather, offers delight in the unpredictable unfolding of different sound images, one after the other.

  Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was the reference for all rhapsodies in the 1920s, but Black and Tan Fantasy by Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley, first recorded in April 1927 (and again in October and November), became the main reference in Armstrong’s circles for fantasies. Black and Tan Fantasy frames the vernacular with sophistication but without a trace of condescension, putting it at the center of expression rather than holding it back as ancillary spice. Ellington took the move of jazz from dance music to music that rewards listening a step further and encouraged reflection. He brought to the task the skills of a composer who understood contrast and emotional complexity. Like West End Blues, Black and Tan Fantasy is a succession of relatively slow choruses, most of them in blues form, one after the other. The piece includes a passage with trumpeter Bubber Miley holding a long high note (16 beats on the October recording, compared with Armstrong’s 15), followed by very bluesy, speechlike phrases.

  If Armstrong had been more interested in crafting an image for himself as a composer, he might have called his recording West End Fantasy. There is no direct evidence that he and his colleagues were thinking of Ellington when they put together West End Blues, but we do know how important Ellington was to them. Zutty Singleton remembered going over to Carroll Dickerson’s house to listen to Ellington on the radio, with Armstrong and the whole band, and hearing Bubber Miley play East St. Louis Toodle-Oo. “It was sort of a special deal,” Singleton remembered. Ellington was expanding everyone’s sense of what was possible in jazz, and it would not be surprising if his impact on the Hot Five’s West End Blues was direct. Radio and phonograph recordings were now fully imbedded in the unfolding of jazz history, with influences crisscrossing the country quickly through radio and repeatable through recordings. Whatever trappings of primitivist degradation were attached to Black and Tan Fantasy at its point of origin, in a venue not too different from the Sunset Café, these were sprung free by radio and records, which allowed the music to work its magic in unprescribed social settings.91

  The mood of West End Blues has often been described as deeply pensive, but perhaps things are not quite that straightforward. This is true of Armstrong’s playing generally. He mixes in emotional signs—blue notes, dramatic gestures, fierce and complex licks, forceful attacks—but the mood is not simple or uniform. Billie Holiday said it well when she described how, with West End Blues, “the meaning used to change, depending on how I felt.” This can be true of any music, yet some musicians deliberately exploit the possibility. The emotional climate of Armstrong’s solos during this period is quite different from popular songs, for example, which wear feelings on the sleeve and make it easy for the listener to align with them. Armstrong’s intellectual-musical play with the materials of sound does not necessarily forbid that kind of simplistic engagement, but it definitely suggests alternatives.

  Oliver and Bessie Smith specialized in blues of unmistakable emotional weight; Armstrong uses the same markers of expression and places them in a stream of melody that directs attention elsewhere, toward intellectual complexity. So many writers have classified Armstrong as a nonintellectual, intuitive musician, but what I hear instead is a formidable musical intelligence that is very much in the foreground. In the case of West End Blues, the terms of expression have more to do with blues pliancy, made possible by extended technique (and by the microphone), than with blues weight. When Armstrong was growing up, blues in New Orleans was already diversified; in Chicago he carried that tradition forward. Hoagy Carmichael insisted that “West End Blues was his real beginning as an artist.”

  Quite a few musicians learned from, imitated, reproduced, and responded to the recording. Even King Oliver got into the action. His band’s playful recording from January 1929 is essentially a parody, with references to Armstrong (and Hines) from beginning to end; the tone of the performance resembles the Henderson band’s parody of Dipper Mouth Blues, recorded as Sugar Foot Stomp in 1925. Jabbo Smith, an explosive player who specialized in quickness and high notes, memorized a lot of Armstrong’s solos, including West End Blues. His Take Me to the River, recorded in March 1929, is very much a response to Armstrong’s celebrated performance. Smith was not always able to match Armstrong’s standards: “he had a tendency to play one degree above his capabilities as if he was seeking to prove something,” explained a fellow trumpeter. Punch Miller’s contribution to Down by the Levee with Wynn’s Creole Jazz Band in October 1928 was another response to West End Blues, though Miller wisely stayed away from the introductory fanfare. Violinist Stuff Smith said that West End Blues first sparked his interest in jazz. Critic Leonard Feather, in England, heard West End Blues at age fifteen, and the performance gave him “a sense of direction, a lifestyle, an obsessive concern with every aspect of jazz, as nothing had before.”

  Birds of a Feather

  When he first arrived in Chicago, in 1923, Earl Hines had already worked out a way of playing melodies with his right hand that he himself referred to as “trumpet style” piano. His large hands made it easy for him to play octaves in his right hand, doubling the melody, and, with a punching attack, help the piano cut through the texture of a band. He was two years younger than Armstrong. Armstrong said that the first time he heard Hines play, at the musician’s union on the South Side, he was “speechless.” Their musical partnership during the 1920s, amply preserved on recordings, is one of the great treasures of jazz history.

  Hines convinced Armstrong to join him at the Sunset Café in the spring of 1926, and by September Hines was also playing at the Vendome, the two of them doubling up there before going over to the Sunset. Like Armstrong, though perhaps not to the same degree, Hines was a draw with his eccentric solos, which stood out in a piano environment that, for the most part, leaned more toward notebound playing.

  Together they endured the strains of a musician’s life—the long hours, seven days a week, with a completely inverted schedule, sleeping during the day and working all night. Hines remembered how Armstrong would sometimes lie down on the floor and take a quick nap when they were out carousing. One day he noticed Armstrong picking at a scab on his lip, and he asked him how his lips felt. “Well, they’re rare!” Armstrong quipped. “He was always a trouper,” Hines remembered. “He knew how to get by, but many times I knew he must have been playing in pain. He never showed it. He was all smiles.” One day Armstrong went out shopping for a new instrument at Lyon and Healy’s music store, at Wabash Avenue and Jackson Boulevard, with Hines tagging along. Hines sat down and started playing piano, so Armstrong joined him, testing out the trumpet. In short order, a crowd gathered outside, listening to the two of them jam.

  When Singleton arrived in the fall of 1927, they became the “unholy three.” Singleton had an odd sense of humor. Walking home from work, early in the morning, Singleton would approach men carrying lunch pails on their way to work and ask them, “Where’s the picnic?” Or he might walk up to a girl and say, “You loo
k beautiful today, but where did you get those pimples?” Armstrong was the celebrity, but he was three years younger than Singleton and deferential to his friend. “Whenever at night Zutty and I would walk into those nightclubs, he was the star and I’d walk behind him,” he remembered, adding bitterly, “but I always paid the bills.”

  The three friends rented an apartment two blocks away from the Savoy that they called ”The Ranch,” a place for trysts with women, parties with friends and visiting musicians, and poker, black jack, and craps. The wife of Gene Anderson, pianist at the Savoy, was hired to “run” the place, which must have meant cleaning and stocking it with food and liquor. Zutty cooked big pots of gumbo. A woman named Mrs. Circha supplied them with homemade gin, which was commemorated for eternity in the opening banter for the June 1928 recording of A Monday Date. As the musicians tune up, Hines says, “That sounds pretty good,” and Armstrong comes back, sarcastically, “That sounds pretty good. I’ll bet if you had half a pint of Mrs. Circha’s gin you wouldn’t say ‘that sounds pretty good.’”

  Their social world included mainly the people they worked with—chorus girls, dancers, singers. Some musicians, Jelly Roll Morton, for example, were drawn to faster crowds of prostitutes, pimps, and gamblers, and Fred Keppard liked to hang out with a group of professional athletes, including baseball players from the Negro Leagues and prizefighters. Armstrong was a local celebrity, but he stuck to being a “regular guy.” “That was the difference with musicians,” said Howard Scott. “You were either regular or you weren’t.”