Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  These few examples suggest that while music closer to the black vernacular—talking cornet music with mutes and the blues of Bessie Smith—was not suited to the normative musical flow of a Broadway show, it could occasionally be worked in as a supplement. Music like this was best presented to white audiences as a novelty, set off to the side of the main musical production. This must have been the logic that guided Immerman when he asked Armstrong to sing Ain’t Misbehavin’ from the pit before the start of Act 2. Immerman’s hunch was right: Armstrong turned out to be a “decided sensation,” as the Interstate Tattler reported on June 28.

  We can only imagine how loudly he had to sing to get everyone’s attention and be heard. There was certainly no microphone, and the first thing one notices from the recording made on July 19 is that he is using not his mellow crooning voice, developed with the assistance of the microphone at the Chicago Savoy and the Regal, but the barking, explosive voice that went over big in Chicago with Heebie Jeebies and Big Butter and Egg Man. All signs suggest that this July recording substantially preserves his performance from the Hudson. It even includes Carroll Dickerson’s violin, an echo of the string section that was seated in the pit orchestra.

  Fats Waller (Library of Congress)

  Armstrong once described a formal approach that he liked of moving further and further away from a tune: “On the first chorus I plays the melody, on the second chorus I plays the melody around the melody, and on the third chorus I routines.” That is a pretty accurate description of Ain’t Misbehavin’. The performance opens with a fairly straight rendition of the tune, followed by his vocal chorus, where he reconceives the melody without straying too far. Waller constructed his riff-based tune out of bright bursts of melody that circulate through different chords and different pitch levels, all nicely balanced and appealingly rich; he also came up with a terrific bridge (about which Dizzy Gillespie said, “I haven’t heard anything in music since that’s more hip, harmonically and logically”). Armstrong punches out the riffs with the vigor that worked so well in Heebie Jeebies and Big Butter and Egg Man. His adjustments “around the melody” are largely reductive, limiting its contours, just like Heebie Jeebies, and, indeed, like blues singers in the tradition of Bessie Smith.

  In the vocal chorus, his “play around the melody” is a dancing commentary on the tune, again like Heebie Jeebies and also I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, and a world apart from the preaching aura of Bessie Smith. He dances and he jokes. Waller and Razaf created a funny song, and Armstrong figured out what to do with it. His first witticism is to take the descending line in the fourth measure and exaggerate it (CD 1:05), as if he is filling in between phrases rather than carrying the lead. This is but a warm-up for the shocking outburst of scat at the end of the phrase, taken as a double-time break. Few people in the Hudson audience would have heard anything like it before.111 The next break is simpler, but no less effective, with bluesy strokes. His diction throughout is clear, with scat and blurred syllables mixed in at the breaks.

  The trumpet solo that follows is free of the tune, another excellent “special chorus” filled with bluesy filigree, eccentric phrasing, and double-time breaks. Highlights include a dramatic ascent for the bridge (CD 2:33), a lovely, relaxed riff (CD 2:49) for the last phrase, and a nice series of fancy breaks for the ending. It is one of his great solos from 1929, right there with I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Indian Cradle Song (not recorded until 1930, but probably developed in the summer of 1929), and St. Louis Blues.

  Humor erupts again in the break at the end of phrase one (CD 2:14), which is a quotation of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Rhapsody was the most famous piece of music from the 1920s, at least for the Hudson audience; it had its premiere five years before at Aeolian Hall, some 20 blocks away, on West 43rd Street. This is Armstrong’s first documented musical quotation, which comes, appropriately enough, at a break, adding wit to the usual element of surprise. You can almost hear the murmurs and chuckles from the audience: “Clever boy … It’s Gershwin!”

  The quote departs from his supposedly extemporized (that is how it would have been regarded) trumpet solo to form a musical pun. The listener is not sure, for a moment, how to parse the gesture: is it part of the stream of improvisation, or does it belong to a different musical discourse? Is it a verbal pun, too?—by which I mean, is there some significance in the title, in Gershwin, in race relations, class relations, and so forth? As always, the listener is free to provide such an interpretation, though there is no evidence that Armstrong thought in that way. At the minimum, the quotation carried the message that Armstrong might be a hick from down South, but he knew what was going on in midtown Manhattan.

  In an insightful and elegant study, Gary Giddins suggests that what I am calling Armstrong’s first modern style made entertainers like Bojangles Robinson old-fashioned. There may be something to that, but in 1929, in New York City, the ranking was clearly set up in exactly the opposite direction. At age fifty, Robinson was neither the flashiest nor the fastest dancer around, but it didn’t matter. In Blackbirds of 1928 he hit the right combination for white success. This was basically a matter of three things: first, a style that was clearly black, with vivid connections to the vernacular; second, superior stage presence and professionalism; and third, a sense of how to make it easy for white audiences to appreciate him. Armstrong was now in command of a similar formula. In New York, “I got to be around actors like Bill Robinson,” he remembered. “So I found out the main thing is live for that audience, live for the public.”

  “Bo’s face was about 40% of his appeal,” said dancer Honi Coles, in a testament to his strong stage presence. The details of how he made his act appealing to white audiences are more elusive, but we can clearly sense this in statements from the white press, for example, a review from The New Yorker, which was not atypical: “Bill Robinson just goes right ahead—one-two-three-four-one-two-three-four—in the regulation beat, slow measured, and indescribably liquid, like a brook flowing over pebbles, and … satisfies every craving for rhythm… . It is very simple, once you realize that it isn’t speed and that it isn’t complexity and that it isn’t acrobatics that make a satisfying tap. All you have to have is a God-given genius and take your time.” From the platform of Blackbirds of 1928, Robinson jumped into films and fortune.

  “He always did things in eight bars, and he loved those breaks”—that is another analysis of Robinson that could be applied to the Armstrong of Ain’t Misbehavin’. Armstrong could be as blisteringly acrobatic as any trumpeter (or dancer), but what did it for him at the Hudson was his vocal paraphrase, with black touches mixed in—double-time breaks for fun and surprise, bluesy gestures for the down-home touch, a dash of scat for something really exotic. Plus musical wit. It was all coherently delivered according to the formula of increasing distance from the tune that almost everybody in the cast had a crack at that evening, making it easy for the audience to appreciate his originality.

  What I am imagining, for the black Broadway productions of the 1920s, is a steady and not always obvious process of negotiating and renegotiating the details and the degree of cultural (and even physical) blackness.112 This was happening elsewhere in the country, too, but in Manhattan, with its extensive press commentary and high monetary stakes, the process was especially vivid, the results widely influential. Armstrong complained that it took Broadway five years to accept him. Mainstream tastes in midtown Manhattan had indeed changed between 1924 and 1929, and so had he. Henderson wouldn’t let him sing in 1924, and Henderson knew what he was doing. The success of Copenhagen in late 1924 was a marker of changing attitudes, as the black vernacular from New Orleans started to leave its stamp on civilized dance music. Five years later, Armstrong did something similar with Ain’t Misbehavin’ with a voice that was as different from the normative style of Broadway show singing as black from white.

  The musical negotiations were not exactly the same as those for dance or humor. Pit musicians in Shuffle
Along memorized their parts because white audiences liked to think that they were unable to read. Eubie Blake had to find the balance of enough but not too much blackness in his tunes; he got it right and set a model for others to follow. “The best scenes are those of darktown extraction,” wrote one white reviewer of the 1927 show Africana, and by 1929 Armstrong had arrived at a singing style that could satisfy that expectation, mixing scat, blues, double time, and witty paraphrase, keeping things black, humorous, and accessible, just like Bojangles Robinson. I doubt that he could have made the same splash at the Hudson singing Heebie Jeebies. What made Ain’t Misbehavin’ work was the paraphrase of the (overly) familiar tune; his own musical invention was spice, sprinkled into the main dish. The concept was not all that different from the Henderson–Redman arrangements of 1924 and 1925, with their polished ensemble playing and hot solos.

  As much as we value today the special choruses of Armstrong’s trumpet solos from the mid-and late 1920s—Potato Head Blues, Savoy Blues, Hotter Than That, Struttin’ with Some Barbecue, and so on—it was the vocals that gathered the most attention. And of the vocals, the funny ones were the blockbusters. The humor of Heebie Jeebies put him on the map in Chicago, and the humor of Ain’t Misbehavin’ did it for him on Broadway. For more than a century humor had been making it easy for whites to relate to black culture on the minstrel stage. These two songs, along with Big Butter and Egg Man, were his biggest hits of the decade, by far. Much later, there would be tension in jazz over humor, with younger musicians disdaining it and demanding respect; Miles Davis criticized Dizzy Gillespie in this way, for example. But that was a debate for the future. In 1929, Armstrong’s humor made it easy for white audiences to accept his transformations of familiar melodies, his raspy voice, and his scat. “When you get people relaxed [with laughter], they’re more receptive to what you’re trying to get them to do,” explained Gillespie. “Sometimes, when you’re laying on something over their heads, they’ll go along with it if they’re relaxed.” Armstrong understood this fully.

  There was one more comic number from Hot Chocolates that turned out well for him. (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue belonged to a robust tradition of making fun of dark skin. Lyricist Andy Razaf provided what was called for, but he simultaneously made the song a poignant lament on the plight of African Americans. Pool Room Papa, Traffic in Harlem, and Black and Blue were Edith Wilson’s comic numbers. Black and Blue is about the obvious difficulties—obvious to both whites and blacks at this time, apparently—confronting a dark-skinned woman in her efforts to lure a man. (Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, a novel about the sorrows of a female protagonist with dark skin, was published at the beginning of 1929.) The Hudson Theater audience laughed openly at the first lines of the verse, which describe the protagonist, left alone because of her complexion.

  It was a cruel but commonplace kind of humor.113 Making fun of dark skin was the foundation of blackfaced minstrelsy. “Give me a light my color,” Bojangles Robinson liked to quip, and the house lights shut off instantly, leaving the audience in darkness and laughing uproariously. “Lokka here, my Man Tan’s coming off!” joked Armstrong in later years as he wiped perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. Wilson originally delivered Black and Blue from a breathtaking stage set, sitting on a bed with pilings of white sheets, surrounded by white stage props including a white carpet, and dressed in a white satin negligee, her dark skin glowing out in stark contrast.114 She jokingly pleaded that, even though she was white inside, the situation was hopeless, and sang the break with an over-the-top, melodramatic flair (CD 2:25).

  A scene from Hot Chocolates (Photo by White Studio © Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

  Armstrong performed Black and Blue with a touch of humor until the end of his life. “Way I sing it now with a little chuckle, get a big reaction,” he said in 1966. It is easy to imagine him delivering the lines with exaggerated grimaces and facial muggings, gestures Edith Wilson must have used, too, to make people laugh at her dark skin, which, according to the caste system of the United States, placed her inescapably beneath everyone else. But he also struck a note of sincerity with the lamenting, less funny lines of the chorus.

  When stripped from the Broadway context and from all visual cues, delivered with Armstrong’s bluesy touches, the song sounds like a powerful indictment of color prejudice, which is how Ralph Ellison framed it in Invisible Man, where the novel’s protagonist smokes a reefer, turns on 1,369 light bulbs in the basement where he lives, puts on a recording of Armstrong singing this song, and contemplates the horrors of slavery.

  The reception history of Black and Blue testifies to the power of the phonograph, which dislodges the performance from the racist trappings of 1920s Broadway, from the “aura” (as Walter Benjamin famously put it) of a century of minstrel savagery. Armstrong simplifies the melodic contour and sits on a plaintive blue third, dropping down to the main pitch only occasionally. He slows and stretches the title phrase (CD 1:50) until it is out of phase with the beat, a statement of pronounced sorrow. The break (CD 2:37) is more like a brief cadenza, with the meter suspended. He acknowledges the impossibility of hiding his face with just the right touch of complexity while keeping sincerity of tone (the contrast here with Wilson’s melodramatic perfomance is pronounced). For Armstrong everything is understated and declamatory; the phonograph produces a lament, absent the comic.

  Ultimately, Hot Chocolates did for Armstrong what Blackbirds of 1928 did for Robinson. His triumph signaled the increasing reach of the black vernacular into the white mainstream. It put him in a position where he could experiment with techniques of paraphrasing popular songs, sometimes radically, and in the process create another fresh musical modernism, riding that energy into an expanding range of white success, against all odds.

  Crooning a Ballad

  One critic found it hard to imagine how the cast of Hot Chocolates was able to run uptown to Connie’s Inn every evening and ramp up for another performance. The show was simply too draining. “If they always pour as much energy into their work in the theatre as they did last night, I cannot for the life of me see how they can do anything more uptown [at Connie’s] than stagger across the floor,” warned the Amsterdam News. In fact, a number of the performers refused to double up: Immerman was eventually forced to find substitutes for the chorines, Paul and Thelma Meeres, Baby Cox, Edith Wilson, and a few others. It is unlikely that he heard any complaints from Armstrong, who was used to long hours and doublings from his days in Chicago. “Had to get my sleep coming through the park in a cab,” he quipped. “Didn’t exactly feel I had the world at my feet, but it was very nice that everyone was picking up on the things I was doing.”

  At Connie’s the band was called Louis Armstrong’s Chocolate Drop Orchestra, with Dickerson conducting. He and his friends kept the gig going through November. Meanwhile, at the Hudson, his act was expanded and moved up on the stage. In the summer of 1929 the Amsterdam News carried display ads dedicated to his recordings only, without the typical mix of other entertainers. Reporting on a June performance from the Lafayette Theater, the News applauded his “rousing snappy jazz and sweet, tender melody,” and the writer described him as a “genius,” probably the first time that had happened in print.

  The Lafayette gig turned his doubling into a formidable tripling. In Chapter 4 we noticed the twofold nature of his earlier year in New York City: Henderson paid him well to play in the premier African-American dance orchestra performing for whites, yet he also settled into an extended series of race records organized by Clarence Williams, which called for funky collective improvisation and blues. The Lafayette Theater became his main point of contact with black audiences in 1929. He tripled up there for significant stretches from June through November, somehow sandwiching the job between the Hudson and Connie’s, facilitated by the proximity of the cabaret and the theater.

  The Lafayette had long established itself at the cente
r of vaudeville entertainment for African Americans in Harlem. It had some history of African-American management, and it was one of the first theaters in Harlem to desegregate its seating. The black press showered it with attention. Talented-tenth critics complained about crude humor and seminudity, but overwhelmingly black audiences regularly filled the 2,000 seats. The Lafayette was a rowdy place that made special demands on performers and, in turn, compensated them with special rewards.

  John Bubbles, Armstrong’s tap-dancing friend from Buck and Bubbles, talked about doubling from the Lafayette to the Ziegfeld Theater downtown. “It was like going from the ridiculous to the sublime,” he remembered. Downtown everyone sat attentively, while at the Lafayette it could be hard to hear yourself. “In Harlem the audience practically dared you to dance, and you had to swing,” Bubbles remembered. “I danced loose and rhythmic uptown.” “When you appeared in the all-colored theaters of those days you had to grab ’em fast,” added Willie “The Lion” Smith.

  In early October Armstrong’s new manager, Tommy Rockwell, helped put together a show at the Lafayette called Louisiana, with Armstrong as the headliner. The Amsterdam News applauded the “sweet musical score, some hilariously funny comedy situations and really splendid chorus and specialty dancing.” The audience broke into ecstatic applause as soon as the orchestra started Ain’t Misbehavin’, even before Armstrong walked onto the stage. He sang, played his trumpet, and also danced to this tune. At a performance on October 8 he presented six numbers altogether, going strong until the curtain mercifully refused to raise for another encore.