Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  “I became quite a figure at the Vendome,” he explained, “especially with the gals.” It is in this context or something like it that we might think about his extraordinary solo on Tight Like This. The title was a direct reference to It’s Tight Like That, a song composed by pianist Thomas Dorsey and Hudson Woodbridge. “The suggestive songs always sold well,” remembered Dorsey. There were a lot of pieces like this with titillating double entendres. It’s Tight Like That was first recorded in September 1928 and did extremely well. McKinney’s Cotton Pickers recorded an instrumental version in November, and a few weeks later their arranger and clarinetist-saxophonist, Don Redman, Armstrong’s friend from the Henderson band, was in Chicago, working with Armstrong for the OKeh sessions on December 11 and 12. Redman brought with him a takeoff composed by Cotton Picker trumpeter Langston Curl called Tight Like This.

  When the Cotton Pickers recorded Dorsey’s It’s Tight Like That, they dropped the words and substituted a vigorous scat chorus. In place of the suggestive lyrics, they came up with an idea that was just as titillating, if not more. In dialogue with the scat, sung by a male lead, another male voice enters in falsetto voice: “Oh it’s tight like that,” the female impersonator shouts out. The effect is obviously sexual and comic. A pleased female, played by a “cross-dressing” man, urges on her male lover, whose inarticulate scat, in this context, depicts the aroused vocalizations of the sex act. The band had first worked out this concept in its performance of another suggestive tune, Four or Five Times, recorded the previous July.

  The Cotton Pickers’ arrangement of It’s Tight Like That inspired trumpeter Langston Curl to replace scat with his own trumpet in his knockoff, Tight Like This. My guess is that Armstrong’s solo had little or nothing to do with Curl’s original solo; in any event, the results are magnificent. Some writers have been reluctant to discuss the obvious sexual connections. Putting scat eroticism to the side gave Armstrong a chance to demonstrate what he could do with his trumpet—which must also be taken as a suggestion of what he could do in bed.

  These erotic markers are obviously pertinent, but it is important not to be seduced by them, so to speak. The necessary response to Norman Mailer and anyone else who overemphasizes the relationship between jazz and sex is to insist that superior jazz always carries the workings of superior musical intelligence. White observers in the 1920s were hardly thinking in this way: “It is only within the last two or three years that intelligence has been brought to bear upon [jazz’s] musical development,” wrote Henry Osgood in 1926, and he was clearly not giving the credit to ear-playing African Americans. Even today one often reads how Armstrong was a nonintellectual musician, an intuitive improviser who preferred not to think too much.97

  In Tight Like This his intelligence manifests itself as a dazzling display of blues figuration, splendidly varied and nicely framed over three choruses according to a pattern of increasing intensity. His solo starts (CD 1:31) with bare and simple gestures, but quickly grows more animated. By the end of chorus one he is showing his stuff, with elaborate sawtooth descents and double-time syncopations. A falsetto voice urges him on, “Oh it’s tight like that, Louie.” Chorus two (CD 2:06) features a simple but assertive rhythmic figure in the accompaniment, almost identical to the accompaniment used in his famous chorus, three years later, on Star Dust, which musicians at one time referred to as the “fucking rhythm.”

  The blues were what did it for him in New Orleans, and they do it for him here, with a strong role for rhythmic pliancy. The piece is in the minor mode, which takes away the impact of the blue third and leads him instead to a poignant lowered fifth (CD 2:37). Chorus three (CD 2:40) amounts to a sustained climax. Again and again the trumpet pounds on its high note, finally collapsing into a lowered fifth (CD 3:12) and then the home pitch. There is nothing subtle about this sexual metaphor. Storytelling in Armstrong’s music is rarely as explicit as it is here. One can only wonder why the falsetto voice descends to the normal male register for its final two interjections; maybe the performer was simply distracted by the magnificence of Armstrong’s trumpet, or perhaps there was a decision to soften the sexualized context for the OKeh businessmen.

  Can the solo stand on its own, without a sexualized narrative? Of course it can. But this context certainly stimulated and shaped his creativity. We may prefer a pure and “classic” Armstrong, but for him, musical and sexual power were probably conflated more than we can possibly know.

  It was his old friend Don Redman who delivered Tight Like This from Detroit, along with several arrangements for the December sessions. The group recorded on December 5 and 12 as “Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five,” then on December 4 and 7, with only slight changes in personnel, as “Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra.” Armstrong was probably leading one of the Savoy bands himself and needed some fresh arrangements; all six of the numbers recorded by Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five were probably arranged by Redman.98

  Beau Koo Jack (an amusingly frenchified way of saying “lots of money”) is a spritely arrangement that would have been at home with many modern jazz orchestras. Armstrong and pianist Alex Hill share credit as co-composers. Hill had arrived in Chicago in early October and was playing “eccentric piano” (according to the Defender) at the Dreamland with Jimmy Wade’s band. A copyright deposit for Beau Koo Jack reached Washington, D.C., on November 23, with Redman listed as the arranger.99 The piece is full of breaks and moves at a very fast tempo. Armstrong’s contribution to the composition was almost certainly limited to his solo, which is written out in the arrangement and played note for note by the trumpet section of Earl Hines and His Orchestra in a recording made two months later. The solo itself features five two-bar breaks. Beau Koo Jack is a rare example (along with Cornet Chop Suey) of one of Armstrong’s mature solos that seems to have been conceived with notation, copyright, and publication in mind.

  Alex Hill bounced into town and talked Armstrong into cowriting a piece with him, dangling the possibility of good returns from copyright and sales of a stock arrangement. The result was a notationally conceived solo that has a nice shape but it is out of sync with the bluesy pliancy of Savoy Blues, West End Blues, and Tight Like This. With its fast tempo, emphasis on two-bar, breaklike modules, and relatively stiff rhythmic profile, it is a somewhat of a throwback to the Henderson days, four years before.

  The Redman sessions also included an Armstrong composition entitled Heah Me Talkin’ to Ya?100 At the beginning of the performance he speaks those very words; the rest of the recording is purely instrumental. “Hear me talking to you” has been associated with him ever since, as a dash of his inventive jive talk. But in 1928 the phrase firmly referenced a comedian named Marshall “Garbage” Rogers, who was popular on the South Side that summer. Rogers made it the centerpiece of a comedy routine for which he became well known. Rogers and his partner called themselves “The Savoy Twins,” and they performed nightly in the spring of 1928 with the Savoy Ballroom Orchestra. On June 23, 1928, Garbage married Gladys Mike in a “syncopated wedding” at the Savoy Ballroom. The Light announced the wedding on its front page with the huge headline “Oh, Heah Me Talkin’ ta Ya.” Armstrong obviously conceived his piece for the Savoy, where he could connect to Marshall’s humor by simply speaking the phrase. It is easy to believe that the piece was even created for the Savoy ceremony on June 23—who else would the successful Garbage have turned to in order to create a syncopated wedding?

  The “non-Redman” December recordings feature bluesy work from Armstrong in loose arrangements, a sign of hasty assembly. Nevertheless, there is some stunning music here. His filigree on No and Basin Street Blues is beautifully crafted, bold, and multidimensional, with shadings of dynamics, varied range, and a heightened sense of drama. The relaxed cool-blues-crooning style first documented in West End Blues comes to the fore in these sessions. No One Else but You gives Hines a chance to stretch out with his eccentric harmonies, and Armstrong negotiates Redman’s changes with a strong
trumpet solo. Armstrong’s vocal solo for Save It Pretty Mamma, another Redman composition, elicits lovely accompaniment from Hines.

  When Armstrong finished the December 1928 recordings, he probably did not know that he would soon be leaving his own personal “second city.” Chicago, after New Orleans, is inseparable from his musical achievement. In each place his accomplishments were built around a strong African-American identity, Chicago’s being somewhat dependent on New Orleans, with the transformative power of the Great Migration accounting for much of the difference. His career for the next few years would be more peripatetic—a year in New York City, a little less in California, a summer in New Orleans, some time in England, and so forth. No other place would have the impact of Chicago, where he apprenticed with Oliver, broke away and married, stepped into the spotlight as a great soloist at premiere venues, and generated a long and rewarding series of recordings. Most of the places he knew in New Orleans are now gone forever, and even less survives as material witness to these glorious years in Chicago. The surviving witnesses are mainly the discs, cheaply made products that provide priceless access to a monumental musical achievement now recognized as one of the world’s great flourishings of artistic production.

  EIGHT

  The White Turn

  Honey, colored people ain’t gonna do nothin’ for you. Let some of them whites hear you and you’ll get someplace.

  —Singer Lil Green to Clyde Bernhardt, 1944

  You follow the people who are on top, you can’t help it.

  —Eubie Blake

  In October 1928, Armstrong enjoyed an extraordinary moment of recognition in a white nightclub, courtesy of bandleader Guy Lombardo. Lombardo and His Royal Canadians were seated for an extended gig at the Granada Inn, 6800 Cottage Grove Avenue, “one of the swellest white night clubs in the country,” as the Defender put it, the band billed as “the sweetest jazz band this side of heaven.” The popular Lombardo invited Armstrong and Singleton to attend the Granada as his special guests. He went so far as to cue their entrance into the club with a special chord from the band, then have them escorted to a ringside table near the bandstand. Later in the program Armstrong was asked to stand up and sing a number with the band. “Louis says he was never lauded and treated any better anywhere in his life as he was by this famous orchestral group,” reported the Defender.

  As impressive as Armstrong’s rise was during the second half of the 1920s, he was still small potatoes compared with the big-name white bandleaders. There was Paul Whiteman, of course, who is best known today. Paul Ash enjoyed tremendous success in Chicago, with an estimated four million people walking through the doors to hear him during a 17-month run. Lombardo was beginning to accumulate that kind of momentum, and Armstrong liked to listen to him with his Savoy Ballroom colleagues, huddled around a radio set late at night in their shared apartment.

  It was even possible, under quirky circumstances, for a few of the elite black musicians to perform with white bands. Ash made a single-night appearance at the Savoy in April 1928, and when he invited Armstrong on stage to sing, “the effect was just simply too obstreperous,” according to the Light and Heebie Jeebies. Ash wanted to feature Armstrong with his band at the Roosevelt Theater, downtown, but the white musicians’ union blocked him. During an extended stay at the Hotel Sherman, a singer with the Whiteman Orchestra had worked up a specialty number with violin obbligato. When the violinist, Joe Venuti, suddenly quit the gig, the singer insisted on bringing in Eddie South to replace him. South was hired, but management insisted that he stand behind a portable screen, making it impossible for the audience to see who was playing. “If only you were white … ,” Whiteman used to say to Hines.

  Lombardo was a specialist in “sweet” jazz, with little or no syncopation, emphasis on elegant and legato melody, and polished ensemble playing. Armstrong’s interest in Lombardo’s music—which remained strong throughout his life—has seemed incongruous to jazz purists, but he was not alone among black jazz musicians in admiring high standards of musicianship, no matter who was playing and in what style. Respect for expert control of the instrument became one of the distinguishing markers of jazz early on, and it remains so to the present day.

  It is especially easy to understand his interest given the combination of polished musicianship and tremendous financial reward. Armstrong wanted what Lombardo had—big-time success, beyond the South Side of Chicago. Capturing the Lombardo sound would become part of his white turn in the second half of 1929. “When I had my first big band I always tried to get my sax section to sound like theirs,” he explained, and he mentioned, in particular, choruses from When You’re Smiling (recorded September 1929) and Sweethearts on Parade (December 1930).101 When he was a teenager, Oliver had given him a recipe for commercial success: avoid too much variation and stick to the lead. In the late 1920s he understood that a path to greater (white) success would be careful study of this latest master of the melodic lead.

  The appreciation was happily mutual. Though they were experts in the sweet style, at least some of the Lombardo men were also passionate about the kind of jazz Armstrong specialized in. They enjoyed jamming with black musicians on the South Side, telling them how sick they were of playing what they called “surfing” music. “I come down here to be reborn,” Lombardo told Earl Hines. Thus it was that Lombardo went out of his way to honor a black musician in a place that Armstrong would not normally have been allowed to enter. Armstrong made a point of never forgetting personal favors (or slights, for that matter), and his moment at the Granada Inn clearly meant a lot to him. He put up with racist bigotry for virtually his entire life—stopped entry through the front door of a hotel, not receiving invitations that everyone else on a movie set got, announcers refusing to introduce him on the radio, bombs exploding outside of a venue where his integrated band was playing, and so forth. Lombardo from Canada made up for some of that in October 1928.

  In the spring of 1929 Armstrong was continuing his gig at the Savoy, and he also appeared occasionally as a guest at the Regal Theater, across the street. Dave Peyton was leading the house band there, the Regal Symphonists, and his featured hot soloist was the twenty-four-year-old trumpeter Reuben Reeves, who had arrived in Chicago a year or so earlier, just in time to take Armstrong’s place at the Vendome.

  When the Regal opened in January 1928, it quickly upstaged the Vendome as the primary place to hear classy music, enjoy great entertainment, and see a movie to top it off. As the Light explained to its readers, the opening of this enterprise was “fraught with a definite racial significance.” Fess Williams was lured from New York City to direct the orchestra. “For a performer or musician who appreciates class, this was what you could call a dream engagement,” explained Williams, who waved his arms in such a way while conducting that people started calling him the black Ted Lewis, another popular white bandleader. The Regalettes, the house dancers, were choreographed by none other than Percy Venable. The orchestra accompanied the movie from the pit, but moved onto the stage for its featured segment of the program. Reeves was the leading hot soloist from virtually opening day. Peyton, who was initially in charge of hiring at the Regal, greatly admired Reeves, whom he identified in April 1928 as “now the cornet jazz king of America.” Peyton knew that Armstrong was about to begin a stint four days later at the Savoy, right across the street, and the hyperbole would certainly have been taken by Armstrong as a direct challenge. Reeves was probably as much of a spur to Armstrong’s accomplishments in the spring and summer of 1928 as Oliver had been the year before, when the two of them were battling across the street from one another at the Plantation and Sunset.

  In late April 1929, Armstrong appeared at the Regal for a week as guest artist. The visit gave Peyton a chance to put his theory of Reeve’s superiority to a test.102 Instead of the typical light classic overture, he put together an arrangement designed to show off Reeves’s various strengths. Since Armstrong was the featured guest, highlighting Reeves like this was a
blatantly aggressive gesture; in Danny Barker’s opinion, it was “vicious.” Peyton waved his arms, urging Reeves into a frenzy with the kind of playing generally reserved for a finale, not the opening of a program.

  The number that won the day for Armstrong was I Can’t Give You Anything but Love. A review of his performance at the Regal called this tune his “favorite,” which suggests that it was a regular repertory piece for him at the Savoy and Regal. He sang it with his “great big jovial smile” and “characteristic style.” The last chorus was given to a cornet solo, and the audience demanded five encores.

  It is no surprise that he was performing I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, for the song ranked among the big hits of 1928 and 1929, having emerged from the very popular Blackbirds of 1928, a show produced by Lew Leslie for the Liberty Theater on Broadway, where it hung around for an unprecedented (for an all-black production) run of 518 performances. Lots of musicians, white and black, were performing and recording I Can’t Give You Anything but Love; one advertisement touted it as “the song success of the Nation.” We have seen on a number of occasions how Armstrong, like everyone else, sang and played current hits at the cabarets and theaters on the South Side, and this is simply one more example. Those current hits didn’t get recorded because they didn’t fit OKeh’s business plan—until now.