Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  Their shared musical intimacy is captured frequently in the 1928 recordings. Musical dialogue had been a fundamental fact of Armstrong’s life since childhood, in church and in the collective improvisation of street bands and dance bands: sounds interacting with sounds, sounds with movement, and movement with movement. Musical dialogue was professionalized and standardized in the texture of collective improvisation, the New Orleanian specialty. Hotter Than That, from December 1927, provided a fresh articulation of direct exchange with the plaintive, out-of-tempo dialogue between Armstrong and Lonnie Johnson, and something similar happens in the second chorus of West End Blues. The recordings with Hines in 1928 also take this procedure to a level not previously documented on commercial recordings.

  There are many examples, some brief, some buried, and two foregrounded.The June 1928 recording of Skip the Gutter was arranged to give Armstrong and Hines a full chorus of direct exchange, all by themselves, with no ensemble accompaniment. Beiderbecke and Trumbauer had played similar choruses, for example, in Borneo, recorded in April 1928 for OKeh. But in Skip the Gutter Hines and Armstrong elevate the format to a kind of musical “doing the dozens,” the public display of dueling wits that was so popular in the African-American community and that Oliver, for one, was very good at.

  Hines gets to go first. One has the feeling for the rest of the chorus that Armstrong is reacting to him, figuring out how it will be possible for a trumpet to compete with Hines’s wide-spanning and nimble hands. Hines begins with two bars of double-time passage work, laced with light chromaticism, and Armstrong answers in kind. Aiming for variety, Hines then slows down; Armstrong again follows in step. After this, the arrangement calls for six full measures from Hines. He fills them with a brilliant descending run from the top of the piano, followed by a sweeping and tricky ascent before breaking into trumpet-style bounce, only to back away from that with a mysterious dissolution before firming up the harmonic direction just in time to pass the challenge back to Armstrong. It is a lot of variety—textural, harmonic, rhythmic—in a brief period of time. Armstrong’s response this time is a smart one: he shifts the terms of exchange to a play of opposites, countering Hines’s stunning variety with half-valve slurs, idiomatic for the trumpet, understated and bluesy.

  Their best-known collaboration is Weather Bird, recorded December 5, 1928. Here it is just the two of them from beginning to end. Armstrong wrote the piece some seven years earlier, during his time on the Mississippi riverboats, and after he joined Oliver’s band in Chicago his mentor agreed to include it in an April 1923 recording session as Weather Bird Rag. We hear nothing about it again until this performance in December 1928; Hines made it clear that he had never heard of the piece before he walked into the studio to record it. Here is yet another indication of OKeh’s contractual expectations that their performers play their own compositions and sign away rights to the company. Running out of product, Armstrong dug into his “little book of manuscripts” (probably the same one that he showed to Don Redman in New York City in 1925) and dusted off Weather Bird Rag. The recorded performance, in spite of its reputation in recent decades, does indeed suggest that Armstrong had not looked at the piece for quite some time.

  In other words, Weather Bird should be put in the category of studio-generated performances that made good, along with Gut Bucket Blues in 1925 and Heebie Jeebies in 1926. In this case, however, success was considerably delayed. The recording was not released until around the middle of 1930, suggesting that the admiration it enjoys today was not shared by OKeh decision makers. Certainly, it would have surprised everyone involved to see a transcription of the performance included in a 1975 anthology of classical repertory entitled The Virtuoso, rubbing shoulders with one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.

  The first two minutes of the performance (which lasts two minutes and 42 seconds) are conventional—strikingly so. Armstrong plays the melody he composed seven years earlier with only slight ornamentation and no departures. Certainly, he was reading from a lead sheet, which must have looked a lot like the one Lillian wrote out for him in April 1923.95 They both play with the easy swing, full of confidence, precision, and verve, that marks virtually all of their recordings in 1928. Hines’s skill as an accompanist is on display as he “stays under” the lead, keeping the beat in a light and steady way, not dwelling on a relentless stride and adding just enough eccentric phrasing to keep things lively.

  “Louis had some ideas and I soon grasped the chord structure,” remembered Hines. In fact, Hines makes virtually no reference to the original melody throughout the performance. Armstrong was looking at a lead sheet that included melody and a formal plan of repetitions, while Hines had probably written out a simple sequence of chords; it would have been a waste of time to write out the melody for him. The arrangement called for Hines to take the second statement of the second strain by himself, so he improvises on the chords, producing a fresh departure from the notated tune. His playing is full of dazzling little touches. Especially effective is a driving chordal passage (CD 0:50) that segues into a burst of trumpet style in the right hand (CD 0:56). Armstrong then reenters for a conventional restatement of the first strain, with slight but effective ornamentation. A brief interlude sets up the third strain, which is again given over to Hines.

  Hines said late in life (after Weather Bird had been elevated), “When we were playing together, it was like a continuous jam session, like when we made that record of Weather Bird Rag.” Among the charms of virtually all their 1928 recordings are the fleeting musical conversations that flicker in and out of the texture, in a more informal way than the organized dialogue of Skip the Gutter. Weather Bird has this, but really no more than many of the other recordings. Hines was a sensitive accompanist, just as good as Armstrong was at filling in. Since Armstrong carries the lead, it falls on Hines to contribute sparkling commentary and exchange.

  But the mutual jamming does not really begin until the second statement of the third strain (CD 1:42). Now there will be organized dialogue in the manner of Skip the Gutter; this was perhaps one of Louis’s “ideas,” mentioned by Hines. Again Hines livens up the texture with his driving chords (CD 1:45). The C strains have been prearranged to feature a two-bar solo break plus six-bar ensemble. But Hines creates an effective moment with what we might call a “false break” (CD 1:49): he stops, as if framing another break for Armstrong, but then, as Armstrong plays, adds a little countermelody. This is the kind of moment that makes Weather Bird more interesting than Skip the Gutter, where the two of them simply take turns. For his next break, Armstrong ascends into the high register, arriving at his peak on an off-beat, a gesture that recalls the great final choruses from December 1927 (Struttin’ with Some Barbecue, Hotter Than That, and Savoy Blues). But now the effect is completely different: instead of riding above a thick final chorus of collective improvisation, his glorious peak is totally exposed. Whether planned or not, it is a beautiful moment. Still, in this strain Armstrong does not seem to have found his bearings fully; to close it off, he falls back on conventional figuration.

  The real fun begins in the third statement of the third strain, with Hines as protagonist once again. Out of the blue, he pounces on a rhythmic-harmonic dislocation of the kind that had been his fond focus in the QRS sessions. He suddenly plays (CD 2:11) two full measures of wide and jarring leaps, all over the piano, an augmented octave leap harmonized by an augmented chord, dissonance piled on dissonance. Without missing a beat, he then blithely and smoothly returns to trumpet-style texture and the harmonies of the tune. There is enough harmonic logic here to make this hold together, and enough strangeness to make the entire event seem like a high-level magic trick. Armstrong holds tight, offering a lightly paraphrased lead and carrying the show forward as if he were the magician’s assistant. It is this little passage, I believe, that largely accounts for the recent fame of this recording. The whole thing is handled flawlessly, almost as if it were planned, but the only thing planned was the space of a
two-bar break for Hines. He is able to fill it with such splendor because he had, in recent weeks, been carrying out an extended exploration of gestures like this in the December recordings—and, one might assume, in live performances around this time as well.

  Hines’s 3-second, dislocating splash suggests that anything can happen, and the 23-second coda does not disappoint. The passage may have been unprecedented in recorded jazz. Now they take turns with two-bar breaks, followed by a quickened exchange of one-bar breaks. But the breaks are nothing but jagged fragments of melody, full of tension and unpredictability and making a strong effect after the stability of Armstrong’s lead. It is all held together by the periodicity of the exchange and the harmonic logic. An assertive diminished-seventh chord from Hines immediately electrifies the texture, and Armstrong follows with a simple arpeggiation. Hines does it again, this time in ascent, and Armstrong’s response is to sit on a single note; this is essentially a complementary gesture, recalling Skip the Gutter. The time of exchange is now quickened and the entries overlap, to exciting effect. Armstrong caps everything with a slow rubato ascent to his final high note, which is embellished harmonically and rhythmically by his buddy, who, while still staying under, has nevertheless found a way to shine.

  Weather Bird is fun and exceptional, a worthy document of a unique musical friendship. Perhaps because of that, it has been easy to overstate its excellence. Armstrong composed the piece and carries the lead; in this case, that was an invitation to Hines to carry the creative work, which he did splendidly. The performance is a special testament to their collaboration and also something of a farewell. At the end of December Hines took a job at the Grand Terrace, where he stayed for a long time. A few months after that Armstrong had his sights set on New York City. The two of them made a few more recordings together in December, but after that they would not record together again until February 22, 1948.

  Tight Like This: It’s All About Sex

  That musicians hold powers of sexual attraction exceeding those of normal people is a cliché. Willie “The Lion” Smith described a formula for picking up women: “You had to be real sharp in the way you dressed, the manner in which you approached the piano, and in the originality of your ideas.” Women indicated interest by standing alongside the piano or sometimes in cruder ways. Billy Eckstine remembered singing Sophisticated Lady with the Basie band at Carnegie Hall, and “some bitch way up in the gallery hollered, ‘Billy you’re making me come!’ ‘Maybe the lady isn’t so sophisticated,’” Eckstine quipped. A mix of musical-sexual attraction was undoubtedly an important part of Armstrong’s music, both in a general sense during the 1920s and in particular with his extraordinary performance, recorded with His Savoy Ballroom Five on December 12, 1928, of a piece entitled Tight Like This.

  James Baldwin insisted in 1961 that “there is probably no greater (or more misleading) body of sexual myths in the world today than those which have proliferated around the figure of the American Negro.” In fact, the phenomenon we are discussing here was certainly not limited to African-American musicians or to jazz. Yet it appears to have been a prominent feature of the social landscape Armstrong was moving through in the mid-and late 1920s. There has been some reluctance to talk about this dimension of his music, partly because the dominant discourse about him has been hagiographic and partly, perhaps, because of the lingering resonance of Norman Mailer’s notorious equation of jazz with orgasm. But Mailer’s crude generalization doesn’t mean that the topic of jazz and sex is irrelevant.

  In fact, the relationship between music and sex was strong for much of Armstrong’s life. It began in New Orleans, where the musicians he knew often stretched their earning power by working as pimps. Armstrong gave that a try, and he used his emerging powers as a blues soloist to draw women to a local hotel, where he had ongoing arrangements with a clerk. The masculine world that he was stepping into during his teenage years included exploitive views of women. “Ever since I was a little boy in New Orleans hanging around those ol’ hustlers and pimps down there,” he remembered, “and they used to tell me, ‘Never worry over no one woman—no matter how pretty or sweet she may be. Any time she gets down wrong, and ain’t playing the part of a wife—get yourself somebody else, also.’” Serial monogamy and promiscuity were not unusual in New Orleans and also in Chicago, where womanizing was part of the social world he shared with Hines, Singleton, and the other musicians.

  What got the ladies so interested? Certainly, the musicians were making good money. Earl Hines believed that it was the luster of the stage spotlight that did the trick. James P. Johnson said that an ability to dance was helpful, and he claimed that Armstrong was one of the better dancers among the musicians. But Willie “The Lion” Smith probably summed up the core of the matter best: “The women always wondered if the piano man was as good in bed as he was on the keyboard. Playing music, fighting and loving have all got to be done the same way to be any good. The way you feel while doing these things is what counts. You’ve got to put a lot of feeling into these activities to get favorable results.” For Cootie Williams, the energy flowed fruitfully in both directions: “All great jazz musicians, every one of them, have had many loves and girls in their lives. People don’t read about these things in books, but a girl is jazz music. They throw something into the mind that makes you produce jazz.”

  Percussionist Art Lewis explained how “sometimes you might play to a woman. You might see a certain woman in the audience and you do try to project to her.” Something like that happened to Armstrong at the Vendome. A nineteen-year-old girl named Alpha Smith got in the habit of attending twice a week, following the change of movies, and she placed herself in the front row, right in his line of sight. “And she had big pretty eyes, anyway, I couldn’t keep from diggin’ her,” he remembered. “There were times when Lil would be in the Vendome at the same time as Alpha. Well, on those nights we couldn’t flirt so much.” Alpha eventually became his third wife, in 1938.

  Apparently, things weren’t going so well with Lillian anyway. The tension created by their dissimilar backgrounds and social aspirations was relentless. Armstrong held a special disdain, all of his life, for pretentious people, and Lillian had her share of pretentions—“a certain spoon for this and a certain fork for that,” he complained. “I think you an educated fool,” he told her. “’Your ego making an ass out of you chick, ’cause my schooling was down there in New Orleans, playing cards, laying around and always eat, sleep and stay clean. I was taught things like that, and my mother, Mary Ann, was the same. She didn’t give a damn what you had; didn’t make no difference to her… . And that’s my life.”

  His nephew Clarence was an additional source of conflict. Back in New Orleans, when Clarence was a baby, Armstrong was taking care of him one day when Clarence fell from a second-floor balcony, injuring his head. He needed special attention for the rest of his life. Armstrong made arrangements for Clarence to be sent to Chicago to stay with him and Lillian. Lillian and her mother sometimes lost their tempers and yelled at the child, infuriating Armstrong. The situation must have been hard on everyone.

  “Well you can knock me down, knock me up and even kick me, or black both my eyes but Daddy, please don’t quit me”—that’s what Lillian sang to Louis in May 1927, in a recorded performance of That’s When I’ll Come Back to You. It was a comic number, Armstrong explained, but the reality is that he did in fact hit her during the summer of 1926.

  The direct cause of their fight was money. After his success in the spring of 1926 with Heebie Jeebies, OKeh arranged an exclusive contract for him. Meanwhile, Tommy Rockwell of Columbia Records asked Lillian to put together a couple of sessions in July under the names “New Orleans Wanderers” and “New Orleans Bootblacks.” George Mitchell played cornet and Armstrong did not participate, but Rockwell wanted Armstrong’s name to appear as composer for three of the tunes. When the records were released, Armstrong was credited as composer on all four of the numbers, even though (according to L
illian) she had written them all. Since the method of identifying composers was simply to put the name in parentheses, directly under the title and above the name of the performing group, the precise nature of his participation was ambiguous. In this way Columbia manipulated Lillian and her husband, using his name to boost sales and enraging him so much that he slapped her after OKeh confronted him. He had already been reprimanded for playing on a Vocalion session organized by Lillian in May, so he must have felt that the situation jeopardized his favorable arrangement with OKeh.96

  Louis and Alpha (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)

  As a child he grew up in an atmosphere where violence between friends and lovers was not unusual. He had violent spats with his girlfriend, Nootsy, and his first wife, Daisy. When his mother noticed blood on the back of his shirt and found out that Nootsy had taken a knife to him, she chased the girl down and throttled her mercilessly. “That taught me a lesson,” Armstrong remembered. His memoirs of his childhood include plenty of violence between women and men, women and women, men and men. It is perhaps notable, as historian Bruce Boyd Raeburn has observed, that he only slapped Lillian once. Unsurprisingly, Lillian, too, was straying from the marital bed during these years, “running around with one of the Chicago pimps while I was at work,” according to Armstrong.

  Nineteen-year-old Alpha must have looked pretty good as she flirted with him from her front-row seat at the Vendome. Armstrong described her as a “poor girl, not near as fortunate as Lil was when I first met her.” She did domestic work for a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Taylor in Hyde Park. At first, she invited him over to the Taylor home and cooked meals for him while her employers were out. One evening the Taylors unexpectedly dropped in on them, sitting in the parlor, tapping into the whiskey and dancing to phonograph records. But the Taylors grew to like him, as did Alpha’s mother, Florence. He soon realized that he was happier at the Smith apartment at 33rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, humble as it was with a wooden bathtub and cramped quarters, than at the nice home he owned with Lillian. He brought Clarence over to visit and the child was so happy that it seemed to make sense for both of them to move in. He bought an expensive blue coat with a lamb collar for Alpha and some diamonds.