Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  The legal status of marijuana was unstable, even more than liquor, with varied laws from state to state. “The law [i.e., police] didn’t give a damn” about pot smoking, insisted pianist Jess Stacey. Budd Johnson, who played saxophone with Armstrong beginning in 1933, said that musicians smoked pot from the bandstand and were not harassed but rather protected by police. Cartoonist E. Simms Campbell’s beguiling 1932 NightClub Map of Harlem, designed to lure white slummers to the cabaret scene, noted the open sale of marijuana. The movie Murder at the Vanities from 1934 featured a song called Sweet Marijuana, sung by the tragic lead and accompanied by smiling Mexican musicians strumming guitars and wearing sombreros. “Sooth me with your caress, sweet marijuana,” Gertrude Michael sang.

  Armstrong wasn’t the only one who thought marijuana was a thousand times better than whiskey. During this period “viper clubs” were forming around the country. Armstrong defined a viper as “anybody from all walks of life that smoked and respected gage.” “When you’re with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special kinship,” he explained, and he seems to have had plenty of friends. Vipers were waiting for him on his tours. At a gig in St. Louis, in 1933 or so, the musicians were surprised to discover joints on their music stands. Six identically dressed men gently walked up to Armstrong, who greeted them warmly. “We want to present you with this,” they said and handed him a giant joint, one foot long, inscribed “To the king of the vipers, from the vipers club of St. Louis, Missouri.” As the decade wore on, he and Billie Holiday became the reigning monarchs of a loosely knit, national society of vipers, affectionately known as Queen Billie and King Louis.

  This society may have been built on marijuana, but music gave it a sense of national coherence. There were dozens of viper songs, including Stuff Smith’s If You’re a Viper, Don Redman’s Chant of the Weed, Leon Roppolo’s Golden Leaf Strut, J. Russell Robinson’s Reefer Man, Richard M. Jones’s Blue Reefer Blues, Mezz Mezzrow’s Sendin’ the Vipers, Pha Terrell’s All the Jive Is Gone, and Armstrong’s Muggles (discussed in Chapter 7). In November 1931 Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra recorded a comic number, The Lonesome Road; at the end of it Zilner Randolph says, in a high voice, “Bye bye, all you vipers.” In 1933 Budd Johnson had the idea of doing a recorded performance of Sweet Sue—Just You in viper’s language, identified as such by Armstrong for the audience just before he “translates” Johnson’s gibberish.

  Cab Calloway’s famous Minnie the Moocher was designed to titillate white slummers while Calloway worked hard to police pot smoking in his band, firmly wishing to avoid scandal and keep songs like that in the realm of fantasy. On the other hand, one has the feeling that for Armstrong the primary role of viper music was to invite vipers to join his club.

  He was adamant that musicians should not drink on the job—“it makes it too hard for him to keep that beat going,” he observed. It is hard to know exactly how extensively he coordinated pot with his stage work. It certainly could have been something that he enjoyed before and after performances and at intermission, as the arrest at the Cotton Club demonstrates. The lifestyles of professional entertainers, who travel constantly and are separated from the stability of family and home, often involve psychoactive crutches, some mild and some crippling. Coping strategies become normalized among one’s peers, the group that sustains the entertainer’s life. The degree of emotional fragility and instability that can accompany addiction is probably no greater among professional entertainers than it is among the general population, but the pressures to deal with a challenging lifestyle through psychoactive substances are many times greater, hence the association.127

  John Hammond, the record producer and critic, thought that marijuana had a negative impact on Armstrong’s music, that it was the primary cause of an exhibitionist streak that Hammond detested. That causal relationship seems highly unlikely. Using the instrument in exhibitionist ways was built into jazz from the beginning, and it was completely compatible with 1920s expectations of entertainment. Armstrong played for the crowds as well as those in the know. What is worth pondering, however, is the impact marijuana might have had on his creativity and stylistic choices during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

  Hoagy Carmichael believed that marijuana fostered a state of mind in which time stands still, where “everything seems easy to do,” with inhibitions thrown to the side and creative urges given a wide berth. Mezzrow was even more adamant: “Tea puts a musician in a real masterly sphere,” he wrote. “You hear everything at once and you hear it right. When you get that feeling of power and sureness, you’re in a solid groove.” Armstrong pushed marijuana on the young Charlie Carpenter, who remembered him recommending it as a creative aid. “Puff it, puff it!” he told Carpenter. “You want to write those songs?”

  Artists of many kinds, from many times and places, have used psychoactive substances as creative aids, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hector Berlioz with opium to Sigmund Freud and Igor Stravinsky with cocaine to John Lennon and Paul McCartney with LSD. The drugs are not the cause of creativity; they are simply one way to open up the possibility. It is easy to believe that Armstrong experienced something similar with marijuana.

  What is harder to assess is the impact of pot on his second modern style. The first modern style is bold and aggressively dramatic, while the second is cooler, more detached, floating. It is too facile to attribute the change to marijuana, which, after all, is associated with many different kinds of music (Willie Nelson comes to mind). Armstrong’s new style was shaped by a thickly interwoven set of conditions—his training in blues and ragging the tune, the microphone, crooning, the turn toward slower tempos in the early years of the Depression, his reach for the largest white audience possible, and his ambition to present himself as an innovative African-American entertainer. Marijuana was not an essential part of this set of conditions.

  What can definitely be said is that Armstrong was a tremendously disciplined performer. If he had a pot-smoking habit, he had it under control. His work ethic was second to none. “Bill Robinson used to tell me, ‘it don’t matter whether there’s four people out there or four thousand, you got to give them your best show,’” he remembered. He mastered every skill required, not only musical technique but also reading, memorizing, rehearsing, and concentrating, and performed flawlessly, night after night, year after year. He was the consummate professional. His ideal death would have been similar to James Baldwin’s, the latter’s in the middle of a sentence, the former’s on stage. Dizzy Gillespie said about Earl Hines (another marijuana smoker) that he was “a true bandleader. He doesn’t let anything come between him and what he calls a certain level of perfect. Leaders like him are real classy every time you see them, ready to act, to perform, right then.” The same was true of Armstrong. Marijuana was his “assistant” in bringing great music to the public. It is no wonder that lumping pot together with narcotics infuriated him. “A man such as myself who’ve played nothing but good music for his public all over the world… . Never has let them down during the whole forty-five years,” he grumbled.

  Creator of a Song Style

  In Armstrong’s first modern style the primary unit of expression is the special chorus for trumpet inserted into the performance of a song. The standard features of popular songs—regular periodicity, strongly determined points of arrival, the unmistakability of their forms—these are what he needs to anchor his fiercely original inventions, with their variety and density and little conversations of notes that come and go. Since his solo is primarily shaped by the workings of the fixed and variable model, its nature is radically different from the melodic idiom of popular songs. The first style was both “strictly Negro” and very modern, and it represents a major intervention in the history of American music.

  The second modern style is very different. Its point of departure is not the fixed and variable model but the African-American tradition of ragging the tune. This was an accommodating practice that allowed room for everything from the first
modern style. Nevertheless, the allegiance to ragging the tune creates a fundamentally different outlook.

  An early description of this venerable practice comes from a northerner who happened upon the African Baptist Church in Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1863 and found himself stunned by the congregation’s performance of William Tansur’s hymn St. Martin’s with “crooks, turns, slurs, and appoggiaturas, not to be found in any printed copy.” Early jazz from New Orleans was closely aligned with this tradition. Lawrence Duhé, a clarinetist born in 1887 on a plantation near LaPlace, Louisiana, moved to New Orleans in 1913 and subsequently to Chicago, where he played with Lillian Hardin at Royal Gardens. Duhé explained how, on the plantation, “we’d rag all pieces … Turkey in the Straw I can remember.” In New Orleans Armstrong heard ragging in church, in marching bands, in bars where men sang barbershop harmonies, and in dance halls. Along with blues and the fixed and variable model, it was one of the foundational practices in his community.

  Ragging the tune gave the black musician several advantages when called to perform white music for white people. Asked to play a familiar tune, the musician applied the techniques of the black vernacular. The performance became an opportunity to display not just a beautiful voice and quick fingers, but creative transformation. The player could trump white claims of composition and copyright, adding his or her own identity to form a distinctive rendition. It was another way to “take advantage of the disadvantages.” This is the tradition Armstrong was given free rein to explore in California, and he did so with all the energy and skill he had dedicated to his first modern style.

  Because it had been around so long and was practiced in so many places, ragging the tune carried a strong African-American identity. Armstrong delivered songs “in typical Negro fashion,” as one 1931 reviewer put it, but he also did much more than that. Essentially, he created a second modern style through an expansive set of techniques that included “crooks, turns, slurs, and appoggiaturas, not to be found in any printed copy,” as well as conversational blues, scat, eccentric dashes, a surprising mix of dense variety and more spacious gestures, a blend of passionate intensity with detached cool, and a dazzlingly inventive relationship to popular songs.

  The basic assumption of ragging—that the listener knows the tune and can identify what the performer has added and subtracted—must have been Armstrong’s assumption, too. That was why I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, the song success of the nation in 1928 and 1929, and Ain’t Misbehavin’, virtually the theme number of Hot Chocolates, had such big impact. People knew the tunes and they could follow his radical transformations. This was how the boldest innovator in the African-American vernacular during the 1920s found a way to make his searching creativity acceptable to white Americans. He took what he wanted from the crooner phenomenon, just as he took what he wanted from popular songs in his determined and sustained effort to create a new kind of distinctly African-American music.

  Ragging the tune in jazz is often called “paraphrase.” It can be hard to put your finger on what makes a paraphrase solo so attractive, as flickering details come and go.128 Fractional adjustments in timing and phrasing can make a big difference, as all great singers know. With the first modern style our task was to identify the workings of a coherent system for organizing music; the second is less systematic and more quirky, with each tune offering a different set of possibilities. Gestures pop out of nowhere: “She loves me body and soul,” Armstrong interjects at the end of a chorus, one of many glittering outbursts of joy that help make the early 1930s so special.

  In Lazy River (recorded November 1931), he sings two choruses. In the first he sits on a single pitch, radically reducing the contour of Hoagy Carmichael’s tune while keeping the lyrics intact. This serves as a foil for the second chorus, where he is all over the place, up and down through imaginative arpeggiations, with a torrent of trumpetlike scat. Chorus two is interrupted with a self-congratulatory aside, one of several commentaries sprinkled into this performance: “Oh you dog! Boy am I riffin’ this evening, I hope something!”

  “Riffing” was the word he and his friends in New Orleans used to identify scat. He does, indeed, do a lot of riffing in the early 1930s. The first thing scat did for his white audiences was to identify him as very black, culturally speaking, a firm association that it is easy to lose sight of today. Carmichael described Armstrong’s “blubbering, cannibalistic sounds” that “tickled me to the marrow”—and Carmichael was one of his biggest fans.

  Often he integrates scat into a more or less “normal” rendition of the lyrics, the procedure we first heard in I Can’t Give You Anything but Love. In Confessin’ That I Love You, scat is saved for little outbursts that mimic breaks at phrase endings. Verbal and musical departures are often synchronized: scat signals his melodic invention, while straight lyrics coincide with more or less straight versions of the tune; there is even a sort of middle ground of partial lyrics, partial scat, and partial melodic invention.

  Clearly, Armstrong does not consider his duty to be direct conveyance of the original song. Scat combines with melodic invention, with smeared and dropped lyrics, with spoken asides—the performances overflow with a dizzying array of indirection, a nearly constant subversion of any reasonable interest a listener might have in hearing a straightforward presentation of the original. It all begs the question: when Armstrong sings these songs, what is his relationship to them?

  Songs like these usually trade in the conventions of love lost, love desired, love in jeopardy, love under attack, and love leading to bliss. They are user-friendly vehicles that carry the listener into a light emotional fantasy. Richard Wright wrote about white waitresses at a restaurant where he worked in Chicago in the late 1920s. Observing them helped him understand the psychological gap separating whites and blacks. He noticed a superficiality that was foreign to his black community, though he found himself wishing that “Negroes, too, could live as thoughtlessly, serenely as they.” Wright understood that the psychological texture of the waitresses’ lives differed as much from his as blues differed from the popular songs they were drawn to and which he equated with “radios, cars and a thousand other trinkets.” As Wright saw it, the popular songs provided “the words of their souls.” It is a harsh view, perhaps, but it says something about how these songs could function.

  It is the job of the melody to lift the lyrics into a flow of sonic emotion, with the chords enhancing that emotional texture. As Wright suggests, the terms of emotional engagement should not go very far or very deep. Quality arises from some creative twist in melody or chords, or from an interesting interplay between words, tune, and chords. Body and Soul is a good example, with unusual harmonies that toss around the words and tune, hither and thither, imparting a melancholy feeling.

  White crooners delivered these musical trinkets with blushing sentimentality. When Rudy Vallée sang You’re Driving Me Crazy and Confessin’ That I Love You, for example, he did his best to paint an image of humility and submission by falling off the ends of phrases with fluttering vibrato, landing on high notes with a distinct retreat in volume and a light and delicate tone, hesitating just a little in his rhythm, now and then, and phrasing with a gentle legato throughout. “Tenderly, coaxingly he sings love-songs to every romance-silly female in these U.S.A,” wrote one commentator. Armstrong obviously could not enter the white market in the same way. When he performed You’re Driving Me Crazy, he sped up the tempo, injected a humorous exchange with his bandmates, replaced the lyrics at the bridge with cannibalistic scat, and finished his vocal chorus with a series of trumpetlike outbursts of joy. As one reviewer put it, “he picks music to pieces and reconstructs it at his own pleasure.”

  If popular songs belonged to what James Baldwin called the “sunlit playpen” of mass culture, then Armstrong was finding a way to refract that comforting light into a strange and radiant display. “Whatever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston, and in the early 19
30s Armstrong was leading that tradition into uncharted territory. As Rudy Vallée put it, “In so many ways Louis and I are direct opposites.”

  Armstrong sang some good songs in the early 1930s, but the quality of the originals did not really matter. The strength of Eubie Blake’s Memories of You, for example, lies in the melodic arc of its first phrase, which the harmonies enrich unconventionally.129 The line ascends and sounds more urgent, which sets up a descent into the relaxed, warm glow of the memories. (To hear what can happen when a great singer completely embraces this melodic logic, listen to Frank Sinatra’s recording from 1961.) Armstrong’s response to this line is the classic one of flattening it out, the technique perfected by Bessie Smith before him and Billie Holiday after.

  Inside the Cotton Club, October 1930, Charlie Jones, Henry Prince, Marvin Johnson, Les Hite (kneeling), Lionel Hampton, Joe Bailey (bass), Armstrong, George Orendorff, Bill Perkins, Harold Scott, Harvey Brooks, Luther “Sonny” Craven (The Frank Driggs Collection)

  More important than carefully crafted details of the original was the song’s popularity, which gave him the chance to pick apart and reconstruct without bewildering the audience completely.130 Sonny Rollins’s image of Armstrong finding the Rosetta Stone for interpreting popular songs is felicitous, but the standard idea of “interpretation” does not precisely fit. In truth, we are never quite sure what his relationship to the original actually is. Is he embracing the sentiments or ridiculing them? When his own invention takes over, how does that affect meaning? The questions are, themselves, the answer: in his second modern style, expressive ambiguity is part of his conception.