For in March 1929 Armstrong made a brief trip to New York City. The visit was organized by OKeh executive Tommy Rockwell, who was stationed there. Perhaps Rockwell recognized that Armstrong had been selling well enough on OKeh’s “popular” series (as I will soon explain, OKeh had been issuing his records on both the race series and the popular series) that it was worth trying out tunes that had genuine national status. I Can’t Give You Anything but Love was recorded on March 5.
What is most distinctive about the performance is how Armstrong harnesses the breathy, silky quality of voice he had been cultivating, with the assistance of the microphone at the Savoy Ballroom, in service of the tender sentiments of the song. The sexuality communicated by his voice is rather different than the full-throttled aggressiveness of his trumpet in Tight Like This. His imaginary lover is treated to the sensual caresses of mellow ornamentation and delivery, which verge on gestural (in the first phrase, the words “love, baby”). Exaggerated articulation (in the second phrase, “of”) is followed by slurs (“guess”) and then effortless movement between words and scat (“all those things you’ve always pined for”). The latter combination is a new technique, one he had not previously put on record. It would now become standard for him.
I Can’t Give You Anything but Love is another example of a piece for which he had time to work up his own distinctive version, leading to an achievement that defines him as a great melodist. The opening chorus, rendered by saxophones in the low register and by Armstrong on muted trumpet (the trombonist completes the chorus for him), serves as an indirect reminder of the connections of early jazz to heterophonic practices of the black vernacular: the saxophones play the melody straight while he simultaneously ornaments it and adds fillins. But the dialogue doesn’t sound like heterophony, since he usually delays a beat or two behind the saxes and sometimes paraphrases the tune to form a counterstatement.
In the vocal chorus that follows he uses the same strategy, but now his version of the tune is completely recast. The saxes play the melody straight, and what he sings is an obbligato, not a paraphrase. The formula allows him to have things both ways: it relieves him of the burden of carrying the lead while simultaneously providing that lead in the background, where it can still serve as an organizing principle. He can move between a feeling of being in synchrony with the sentiments of the words and playful, dancing detachment. The fluid style of verbal articulation contributes to the same feeling. The line “gee I’d like to see you looking swell, baby” is arranged in a way that is almost comic; perhaps the idea came from Chicago.
The trick of this performance is the inversion of the “second” part—the kind of ensemble line that he used to play with Oliver and that was the heart of collective improvisation—and the lead: the unadorned lead is put in secondary position, played by subdued saxophones, while the sung second part grabs your attention. Since virtually his first vocal on record Armstrong had been singing similar transformations of the given tune; Heebie Jeebies is an excellent example. What is new for him (at least on recordings) is the straight lead in the background. The same format had been used for many years with hot instrumental solos, but there cannot have been many precedents for doing it with a vocal. Perhaps this was Rockwell’s attempt to make his singing more accessible to white audiences unprepared for his radical transformation of the melody.
The performance ends with a beautifully conceived trumpet solo that was probably worked out at the Savoy and Regal.103 It is full of the design details that we have seen him experimenting with during the past few years—double-time figuration, a phrase of bluesy pliancy moving through the same set of pitches, sudden and dramatic gestures, and varied phrase lengths. The principle of varying phrase lengths is extended more than ever, with short and subdued phrases followed by longer and unpredictable ones, irregular placement of phrase beginnings and endings, and constant variety of rhythmic-melodic detail. The solo is one more magisterial realization of the fixed and variable model as he conceived it in the late 1920s. We could regard this entire performance of I Can’t Give You Anything but Love as a farewell song of appreciation to his adoring African-American fan base in Chicago, a way of recognizing that what mattered most for his musical development was this: the loving dialogue between his creative engagement with the black vernacular and the rousing, sustained endorsement of the results from his African-American audiences.104
The recording was noticed by Hoagy Carmichael in California, by Doc Cheatham in Europe, and by Bud Freeman in Chicago. Ethel Waters parodied him in her 1932 recording of the same tune. “When we were bored we could always listen to Louis Armstrong recordings,” remembered Carmichael. “They were lifters and gave life meaning again.”
Coincidentally, this foray into the national distribution of current hits happened alongside what may have been the last studio-generated piece Armstrong ever recorded. Knockin’ a Jug, with composer credit to Armstrong and banjoist Eddie Condon, is a simple blues. (Kaiser Marshall remembered that the name came from a gallon jug of whisky the musicians had brought along to the studio.) Armstrong plays a bluesy solo and Jack Teagarden, who had admired him ever since the release of Cold in Hand Blues in 1925, plays a trombone solo. It was Armstrong’s first interracial recording session and an appropriate welcome to New York City, since his stay there for the next 12 months would involve whites to unprecedented degrees and in various ways.
For I Can’t Give You Anything but Love and the third tune recorded on March 5, Mahogany Hall Stomp, Rockwell used the Luis Russell Orchestra, which he was currently managing. Russell, the pianist and leader, was born in Panama but started work in New Orleans in 1919. The studio was full of New Orleanians. There was guitarist Lonnie Johnson, with whom Armstrong had so much fun recording Hotter Than That; Paul Barbarin, with whom he coauthored Don’t Forget to Mess Around When You’re Doing the Charleston in 1926; Albert Nicholas and Luis Russell, with whom he had played in New Orleans; and Pops Foster, his buddy from the coal-cart days. Mahogany Hall Stomp, composed by Spencer Williams (who literally grew up in the famed house of prostitution on Basin Street), is a joyous celebration of music from home, made new in New York City.
The rhythm section is especially effective. Beginning with Armstrong’s solo (CD 1:32) it is all flat 4/4, a groove led by Foster’s prominently plucked bass. To this Armstrong responds with relaxed playing, full of charm and economy. Foster claimed that the recording made a big impression in New York. “I thought it wasn’t anything, but Mahogany Hall, that’s the number that made the string bass famous. Louis just holds that note and I’m just walking behind it. Then everybody started buying string basses.” “Jazz is happier music than any other,” said Foster on another occasion, “the beat and the tempo make it,” and he could have cited Mahogany Hall Stomp as a classic manifestation of those qualities.
Savoy Ballroom, New York City, 1936 (The William Russell Photographic Collection, MSS 520 F. 241, Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection)
This brief visit to New York included two appearances at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem on Saturday and Sunday, March 9 and 10, accompanied by the Russell band. People lined up on Lenox Avenue to enter the 5,000-capacity hall and many were turned away. The Savoy management honored Armstrong with a banquet, with Fletcher Henderson as master of ceremonies and speeches from Rockwell, Jimmie Harris, Chick Webb, and Bennie Carter. When he got back to Chicago, he assured everyone that he was happier there, that New York was too fast for him and dangerous with cars rushing through the streets. He rejoined Dickerson at the Savoy and made appearances at the Regal in early May alongside comedian Marshall “Garbage” Rogers of Heah Me Talkin’ to Ya? fame. Both venues were experiencing a downturn. The owner was persuasive but kept stringing the musicians along. “Every time pay day come around, oh, oh, another hard luck story,” Armstrong remembered. His mortgage payments were past due. He and Zutty talked it over: if there’s no money this week, we quit, they agreed, several weeks in a row.
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sp; In fact, the glory years of jazz on the South Side were coming to an end. Oliver had left a year before, when the Plantation was shut down. Federal agents were now stepping in aggressively. Raids became so frequent that Earl Hines got in the habit of racing to the paddy wagon so that he could get a seat and didn’t have to stand. Theater orchestras were hit hard by the introduction of talkies, known by the commercial name for the sound system, “Vitaphone.” Unemployed musicians joked to one another, “Could I have a cigarette until the Vitaphone blows over?” String players took the heaviest blows, but all the musicians suffered; Loew’s announced that it would not even be hiring organists anymore. On top of all of this radio was picking up, with more options for listening and more radios purchased every year. It is not surprising that more than a few Chicago musicians headed for New York City.
Meanwhile, Tommy Rockwell had his mind set on bigger things than just a couple of recording sessions. What he really wanted was to manage Armstrong in New York. His next move was to lure him back with the offer of a movie as well as a new show by Vincent Youmans called Great Day. Armstrong thought about it and talked it over with his friends.
They decided to take the trip together, the whole Dickerson band. He divided up the advance from Rockwell and they patched up their cars. Armstrong got his Hupmobile repaired, Dickerson bought a used Marmon, Gene Anderson had his Essex, and Fred Robinson bought something new and relatively lightweight. Lillian borrowed some money through a pawn. Zutty gave his wife, Marge, half of his share and told her that he would send for her in a month. Lillian planned on staying in Chicago. (Alpha’s activity at this time is not known.) She did eventually go to New York, at least for a bit, but for now her place was here. While Armstrong was in transit, she performed a piano recital on May 27 in celebration of her studies with Louis Victor Saar at the Chicago College of Music, with Mozart, Weber, Chopin, Saar, Debussy, and Scriabin on the program. “I always did feel more at home with the longhair stuff, anyway,” she once admitted.
With Singleton’s vibraphones strapped to the roof of a car, the musicians wound their way across the country. They were astonished to hear Armstrong’s records being played in some of the towns they stopped in—Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo. People knew him thanks to his records and also the radio broadcasts from Chicago. When Dickerson’s car broke down, they all squeezed into the remaining three cars. They wanted to see Niagara Falls and got lost, driving 200 miles in the wrong direction. When they finally straggled into New York, the radiator cap on Armstrong’s Hupmobile blew up at 42nd Street and Broadway, steam spraying out in all directions. A policeman noticed their Chicago license plates and asked them with a grin if they had any shotguns in the cars. “No Suh, Boss,” they replied. Tired, hungry, and broke, with a rusty set of vibraphones, they plopped themselves down in Rockwell’s office.
An irritated Rockwell insisted that he had invited only Armstrong, not the whole band. Armstrong kept his composure and simply answered, “Just the same, my boys are here in New York, so find something for us to do.” Great Day, with a pit orchestra built around none other than Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, turned out to be not for him. At the rehearsal, run by the composer and arranger of the show, Armstrong was asked to change chairs from first trumpet to second. They rehearsed the number again and the results were still unsatisfactory, so “the decision was made that Armstrong was not adapted to the show business,” as the New York Age delicately put it. It was not the first time he was deemed lacking in “legitimate” abilities, and the event might have reminded him of his first rehearsal with Henderson in the fall of 1924.105
He and his friends stopped by the Rhythm Club, which was run by one Bert Hall. Hall had recently reopened the club in a lovely new building at 163 West 132nd Street, working with painter Aaron Douglas on the interior decorations. Hall was from Chicago, and Armstrong and his bandmates certainly knew him already. The Rhythm Club was the natural place for them to socialize and find gigs.
Trumpeter Rex Stewart described a “caste system” of black professional musicians in New York that dated back to the 1910s and the heyday of James Reese Europe. Europe was a major figure in society orchestras and one of the founders of the Clef Club, which assumed an exclusive position servicing musicians suited to the talented-tenth vision. The name itself indicated the kind of place it was—a place for note-reading, legitimate musicians. Armstrong was hardly a Clef Club musician. His place was the Rhythm Club, which catered to newcomers; he probably could have figured it all out just from the names.
Niagara Falls with Homer Hobson (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)
Several musicians left rich descriptions of the Rhythm Club, its jam sessions, and its social atmosphere. With bookers stopping by regularly to see who was available, musicians were eager to sit in with the house band and show what they could do. Danny Barker remembered them standing in line, waiting for a turn to improvise a chorus on Gershwin’s Liza, with Pops Foster slapping his string bass. The main activity was very late; the regular slot for the house band was 3:30 to 7:30 a.m. Jelly Roll Morton, dressed in candy-striped silk shirts, liked to give “lessons” to anyone who would listen, predicting what music would be like in 20 or 30 years and explaining how he had created jazz. When no house band was scheduled, the pianists took over. Willie “The Lion” Smith liked to provoke competitions: “‘Lead me to a piano my fingers are itchin’, I’m rearing to go. I’m the Lion.” Morton retorted from across the room: “‘Man let the kid go and practice. Let him go and practice man, he don’t know what he’s doing.” Hot dogs and hamburgers were sold for 25 cents. Gambling was in the rear, with five pool tables. Morton and Bill Robinson liked to play pool together, bantering back and forth.
The first job Armstrong and the Dickerson band landed was at the Audubon Theater, 3950 Broadway, as a substitute for Ellington’s band, which had to pull out at the last minute. Their assignment was to accompany Letha Hill, who kept turning around to glance at the band, distracted by Armstrong’s fancy playing. He was not in the mood, apparently, to stay under. The band’s featured number, performed from the stage, was St. Louis Blues, and Armstrong laid on the high notes, astonishing everyone. Even the pit band, with its large violin section and classical players, stood up and joined the applause when he finished, something Zutty Singleton had never seen before. A glimpse of this moment must have been captured on the December 13, 1929, recordings of St. Louis Blues by Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra.
Next the band opened for a week at the Savoy Ballroom, between 140th and 141st Streets on Lenox Avenue. They tried out for a Ziegfeld production called Show Girl, with Florenz Ziegfeld himself sitting in the front row, checking them out, but the job went to Ellington. Within a few weeks Rockwell placed them at a premier, long-term spot, Connie’s Inn, which would become Armstrong’s stepping-stone to Broadway. Working at Connie’s and on Broadway placed him in the central axis of black entertainment for white audiences in New York City. For the most part, the expectations were nothing new: these venues thrived on exploitive white primitivism, a conception that simultaneously glamorized and demeaned black music. But the scene was very different from South Side Chicago in the extent to which it was organized, with a lot of money pouring into a diverse and highly controlled industry. The exposure ultimately opened up huge white audiences for him.
Hot Chocolates
Trombonist Clyde Bernhardt, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was astonished when he got off the train at 125th Street in 1928 and opened his eyes to Harlem for the first time. His family had advised him to wear his Sunday suit, but that did not prepare him for the upscale dressing on Seventh Avenue. Tall women who worked as chorus girls strolled around in furs, pulling little dogs on long chains. Others wore small hats and semi-flapper dresses with the belt low in the back. Men favored form-fitting Oxford gray suits with pinstripe pants, short jackets, vests, spats, shiny black patent leather shoes, buttonhole flowers, breast-pocket handkerchiefs, derby hats, and homburg hats. Th
ere was clearly some money in Harlem.
A good chunk of it was coming from wealthy whites who streamed in for evening entertainment. Since 1925, especially, white tourism had become big business; pianist and composer Eubie Blake called it a “heat wave.” The Negro was in vogue, as Langston Hughes put it.
Armstrong had plenty of experience with white slumming, but he had never seen anything quite like this. Black entertainment in Harlem was so popular and fueled by so much money that some clubs found it profitable to become whites-only. Others were not exclusively white but predominantly so. In 1927 writer Rudolf Fisher returned to Harlem after being away for five years, and he was shocked by the demographic changes in his favorite clubs. He wrote an article for the American Mercury and called it “The Caucasian Storms Harlem.” Whites had become “spellbound” by Negro music and “that endemic Negroism, the Charleston dance,” he wrote.
The Cotton Club was the elite black and tan that notoriously prohibited black admission. As at all of the Harlem clubs, everyone working there was black. Someone like Bill Robinson or Ethel Waters could get in, but such exceptions were few. “Nobody wants razors, blackjacks, or fists flying,” explained entertainer Jimmy Durante, in defense of segregated policies, “and the chances of a war are less if there’s no mixing.”
Danny Barker wrote about the “crafty night people” who made a living producing the racial fantasies of the black and tans. “Harlem could be a farce,” he wrote. “It was a place of wretched poor black people making believe they were happy, putting on an act, dancing and singing on the outside but all tangled up with misfortunes and degradation on the inside.” Slumming whites called out, “Come on, monkey! Entertain me!” Barker thought of these places as “special slave quarters.”
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism Page 38