Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  While it is valuable to observe commonalities—lack of sentiment, a turn toward abstraction, techniques of assemblage, shifting point of view—a deeper comparison would take account of very different social positions. Picasso looked down on primitive inspiration from a secure place as master of an elite lineage of European artists, but Armstrong was singing his ballads looking up at the next rung on the ladder of his career. Each was a master in his culture of origin. Armstrong’s early training included tips on how to enter the white market in a place where African-American musicians stood only a very slight step above domestic servants. In 1929 this kind of outreach became a full-time occupation for him.

  It is unlikely that anyone at Sebastian’s thought of Matisse when they shuffled to the medium fox trot tempo of Sweethearts on Parade, but the analogy came more easily to Europeans. The paper record of Armstrong’s first trip to England in the summer of 1932 shows British critics articulating the primitive-modern contradiction with special flare. His innovations were “ultra modern,” yet he was said to have received them through dreams and played them with “natural ability.” One Hannen Swaffer, writing for the Daily Herald of London on July 25, 1932, gleefully complained about Armstrong’s perspiration and, under the heading “Mr. Ugly,” compared him to a gorilla: “He might have come straight from some African jungle and then after being taken to a tailor’s for a ready made dress suit been put straight on the stage and told to ‘sing.’” Swaffer counted the “young Jewish element at the back” of the Palladium among the few enthusiasts. But Swaffer also thought the trumpet playing was as revolutionary as Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra had been in 1909. Comparisons like this turn up in several British reviews, one mentioning James Joyce and insisting that Armstrong’s “is the only kind of music being written today that has any importance at all,” while another reminded readers that Matisse, Wagner, and van Gogh each had their detractors, too.

  Back in the United States, it must have been clearer than ever how the African-American musical vernacular was providing the charge that helped middle-brow American modernism break free of Victorian sentiment, as Seldes observed. The more African the product, the stronger the dose of the modern. Controversy over the word “jazz,” discussed in Chapter 4, was on one level a debate over just how far white America could go in this direction. In the early 1930s Armstrong emerged as one of the winners as he carried jazz and a considerable market share of the country along with him into uncharted territory.132

  His was advertised as the “highest paid colored band in the world,” and that may not have been an exaggeration. In November 1931 the Defender listed bands led by Ellington, Henderson, Armstrong, and McKinney as the outstanding African-American units, with Ellington and Armstrong making the most money. His record sales were soaring. In the spring of 1932 OKeh sued to stop his move to RCA Victor, which planned to “replace Ruddy [sic] Vallée with the colored troupe.” Time magazine explained what all the fuss was about: Armstrong had sold more than 100,000 records in the past year. It had been barely three years since Rockwell decided to market him with current hits, in the spring of 1929, and now he was being courted as a replacement for Vallée, one of the biggest names in the business.

  Records had become huge for him, but radio may have been even bigger. Radio was the medium of choice for the crooners, with Vallée leading the way, and it was now doing its work for Armstrong. Radio was alive and personal, yet powerful through its extraordinary reach, and it carried a modern glow. “Are your new neighbors modern people?” rang a little quip in a 1922 edition of the Buffalo Express. “Modern? Say, they sent in last night to borrow our Radio set!” was the answer, which immediately located both neighbors on the modern scale.

  When Armstrong arrived in California in 1930, the African-American newspaper California Eagle mentioned how his local reputation had been established through records. By the time he left a year later, radio may have been more important. In Los Angeles he was heard nightly on stations KMIC and KPVD, with broadcasts distributed nationally to Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Detroit. “Everybody in California for miles and miles around catching our programs, which were the last words,” he wrote, with emphasis. Radio certainly extended his reputation within the African-American community, but it worked even more dramatically with whites. The black vernacular had become an increasingly familiar presence in white living rooms and bedrooms, which made it easier for whites to accept his stunning modernity.

  Did Armstrong have more impact on musicians in the early 1930s than in the mid-and late 1920s? Some observers have speculated that he did, given his far greater exposure. Yet a quantitative surge for the influence of his trumpet playing seems unlikely, simply because so many musicians had been tracking him for quite some time. Bud Freeman was exaggerating when he said that every musician in the world knew of him by 1929, but by how much? In the early 1930s younger players encountered his solos for the first time, while older players struggled to catch up. Bunny Berigan regularly stopped by his local music store looking to buy new Armstrong records, memorize them, and play them on his next job. Jimmy Maxwell spent hours one summer figuring out the solo from When You’re Smiling, and twenty-year-old Roy Eldridge was stunned when he first heard Armstrong in 1931 at the Lafayette Theater in New York City. Nat Gonella freely acknowledged his debt to the recordings he was able to find in England, explaining that “short of being a musical genius … the next best thing is to model oneself on the lines of someone who is.” In New York City, Ward Pinkett was noticed sitting next to a jukebox with his horn in his lap, listening to Armstrong, tears of admiration in his eyes. Secure and confident in his ability to adapt, imitation never bothered Armstrong. “Pops, a lotta cats has copied the Mona Lisa, but they still line up to dig the original,” he once quipped.

  With his voice, however, the trajectory of his impact was, without question, very different, as he was now much more widely imitated. Cab Calloway’s Dinah from 1932 is almost a compendium of Armstrong’s techniques. Whites could come that close to his vocal style only as parody, as one Norman Selby did in blackface makeup. More important than wholesale imitation was the gradual absorption of the various components of his style—scat, sudden outbursts of unscripted melodic joy, rhythmic punch in effervescent service of the fixed and variable model, tendencies toward melodic reduction, bluesy phrasing, and swinging detachment from the beat. The popular Boswell Sisters told the press that they modeled their style on his. Bing Crosby, who liked to stop by Sebastian’s after work at Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood, was catching on. And so was Billie Holiday, whose first recordings, at age eighteen in 1933, make clear her debt to Armstrong, especially the behind-the-beat phrasing of Riffin’ the Scotch.

  There has also been much discussion through the years about whether or not Armstrong’s step into the white market was a sellout of tragic proportions, a surrender to the “creepy tentacles of commercialism,” as Gunther Schuller vividly phrased it.133 John Hammond insisted that Armstrong “made his greatest recordings, the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, in the mid twenties,” after which came deterioration. This was a deeply ingrained way of thinking for one small but influential swath of jazz fandom during the swing era, and it has played out in writings about jazz history for many decades.

  In the swing era, the main ingredient of selling out was too much emphasis on popular songs and not enough on hot solos. Armstrong’s embrace of popular tunes put him on the wrong side of jazz authenticity, conceived in this way, and for many years the value of his second modern style was downplayed as a result. Needless to say, he did not think this way, and there were few in the early 1930s who did. It would have baffled him to elevate the scrambling and funky Hot Five recordings, most of them impromptu versions of hack tunes made and sold cheaply, above the big-band recordings of the early 1930s that were selling more than 100,000 copies in a single year. Today it is easy to see that his turn to big bands and mainstream popular hits was no tragedy but rather a step that presented a new set of limi
tations and possibilities, to which he responded beautifully. The whole point for him was dynamic dialogue between his radical, ragging invention and the popular tune.

  The real tragedy came next, when he climbed another rung on the ladder of his career: it came with movies, which were loaded with a Faustian bargain.

  A Manager’s Fit

  Released from jail on March 19, 1931, and wary of further skirmishes with the California justice system, Armstrong turned down a lucrative offer from Sebastian. He may also have had the first inklings of a serious managerial problem that would follow him to Chicago and come to fruition there. McKinney’s Cotton Pickers stepped in at Sebastian’s, followed by Les Hite’s new orchestra, who billed themselves as “Louie Armstrong’s boys.”

  On Sunday, March 22, he arrived in Chicago, greeted at the house he and Lillian still owned by five young men with guitars and ukuleles who had come to serenade him. They played some music and then pulled out a huge joint. “That moment alone helped me to forget a lot of ungodly, unnecessary, you know, all that shit that happened on the coast,” he remembered. Lillian stayed in California.

  The South Side of Chicago was now very different from the glory years of the mid-1920s, when people were spending money left and right on his compelling music. Banks had closed, work was scarce, and evictions were commonplace. The Defender was advising its southern readers to stay home and forget the northern promise. This dramatic decline had little effect on Armstrong’s return, for he immediately stepped into a one-week gig at the Regal Theater, which sold out every night. After that he took a nine-day break, “having a little fun, etc.,” as he put it later. His strong memory of a nine-day vacation is notable, and we should remind ourselves how special a break like that was in a working world where even a celebrated musician hesitated to put his horn down for more than a few hours. He bought a two-door, yellow Model A with rumble seat for cruising around town and hired young Charlie Carpenter as his valet, plus a friend from New Orleans as his chef.

  Meanwhile, a visit to the OKeh studios was arranged. He put together a band of local musicians and the first person he hired was trombonist Preston Jackson, to whom he was still grateful for playing at his wedding reception seven years earlier. Tubby Hall, Mike McKendrick, and Charlie Alexander, all from New Orleans, were brought in. He brought parts with him, and the band learned the tunes he already knew, rehearsing for two weeks and recording eight new sides in late April. I Surrender Dear, another of his majestic ballads, was later singled out by Rudy Vallée for special praise. When It’s Sleepy Time Down South would soon become his theme song. The sessions included a wonderful transformation from Armstrong (and also a fine arrangement) of the uptempo Them There Eyes, another performance that Billie Holiday surely knew well. Being back in Chicago may have inspired his introduction for Blue Again, a fond—though not nearly as successful and probably extemporized, or nearly so—nod to the introductory fanfare for West End Blues. I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You, which Armstrong had first tackled back in January, was also included. “It has some pretty risqué lines, but the censors are not kicking,” noted the Defender.

  On April 8 he opened at an after-hours, whites-only walk-down called Show Boat (formerly My Cellar) at Lake and Clark Streets, inside the Loop. He and the band were hooked to a live broadcast, every night, on WIBO beginning 12:15 a.m. and ending sometime around 3:00, with a network that reached New Orleans. “The best musical minds of the city” attended the premiere, reported the Defender, to hear him play Confessin’, Rockin’ Chair, If I Could Be with You, Peanut Vendor, and multiple choruses of Dinah and Tiger Rag, ten of the latter, “each in a different style,” the aesthetic principle of variety still reigning supreme. Each chorus of Tiger Rag was greeted with applause on the magnitude of “a victory cheer at a football game,” the next chorus then treated as an encore. Johnny Naitland jumped up and said that he was going to give up trumpet playing. Louis Panico was moved to tears. Bud Freeman was impressed with his playing “at the top of the horn, not just for an effect, but as a regular thing,” along with a new sense of economy in the design of his solos.

  Johnny Collins, a booking agent Armstrong had met in California, was now making arrangements and claiming to be his manager. Armstrong was told that Collins had made a deal with Tommy Rockwell to take over management, but it would soon become clear that those two were in volatile disagreement. “Come to think of it, I sure had a manager’s fit,” Armstrong wrote later, with understatement.

  With Johnny Collins (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)

  The Show Boat, “all glitter and glass,” as saxophonist George James described it, was controlled by criminals and doubled as a major bookie operation during the day, a cabaret at night. Milt Hinton said that the place scared him, even though the gangsters tended to be good tippers. Preston Jackson never saw so many guns in his life as the evening when a gangster insulted the girlfriend of a rival. Armstrong continued playing through the incident, while most of the musicians ducked for cover. According to Jackson, Louis Panico leapt up from his table to stand in front of Armstrong, guarding him during the ensuing fight in a heroic gesture. This was the environment in which, a week or so after the gig began, Armstrong’s life was threatened with the aim of returning him to Rockwell’s management and to Connie’s Inn in Harlem. “I knew that it was [Rockwell] that did it,” Armstrong confided to friends years later.

  Frankie Foster, a notorious gangster associated with Al Capone, helped deliver the threat. Armstrong and Collins were defiant. They hired bodyguards to protect Armstrong, solicited help from any underworld connection they could think of, brought in the police, and blitzed the media. “The more they scare him, the better he plays the cornet, gets those shivery, shakery, tremolo effects like the girls love,” Collins quipped in one newspaper.

  But the pressure did not relent, and Collins soon realized that the best strategy would be to get out of town. He and Armstrong left Chicago in mid-May, accompanied by two bodyguards who would continue to stay by his side for many months. Collins put a tour together, complete with chorus girls. They stayed in Detroit for a full week (May 24–30), playing opposite McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, led by his old friend Don Redman, at the Graystone Ballroom. At Ohio State University in Columbus, they played an extravaganza opposite Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, and two other bands. In Louisville, a white woman called from the dance floor, “Louis, oh sweet Louis.” Armstrong wisely hid in his dressing room at intermission. Disappointed by his retreat, she scolded him, pointing out that Paul Whiteman did not act that way. The next day they were able to watch the Kentucky Derby. After a series of one-nighters in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Lexington, Indianapolis, and West Virginia, they returned to Louisville, where they caught a train for New Orleans.

  Plans were to go to New Orleans for two weeks, followed by a return to California and some more movie making. Those two locations were about as far from Chicago and New York City as Collins and Armstrong could get and still stay in the United States. A year later they dropped that limitation and escaped to England. The Show Boat replaced him with Jabbo Smith, who could play the introduction to West End Blues note for note, along with strong versions of Beau Koo Jack and St. Louis Blues. Armstrong took at least one firm lesson from his manager’s fit and his brush with gangsters: “You needed a white man to get along.” It was a principle he had long understood. “Always have a white man who likes you and can and will put his hand on your shoulder and say ‘this is my nigger,’ and can’t nobody harm you”—that was the advice that his older friend Black Benny Williams had given him before he left New Orleans. The problem was getting the right white man, which was not easy.

  The irony was that in order to escape the manager’s fit he would have to return to the “disgustingly segregated and prejudiced” city of his birth, where the structures of white supremacy played out in vivid ways. The high rungs on the ladder of his career put him in a position where he coul
d blow his horn and cultivate his unusual singing style on his own terms, and that was a rare and treasured luxury. But this new position did not help him escape the traps of racism, which were magnified rather than reduced. When he eventually returned to the North, there were even more traps waiting for him. They were not quite as deadly as the gangster threats in Chicago, but they were insidiously powerful, in a different way. The next ladder on the climb of his career brought him fully into the twisted imagery favored by the most modern media in their treatments of African Americans, disguised in humor and glamour but requiring him to apply his intelligence, charisma, and musical power to an especially degrading set of conditions.

  TEN

  Sleepy Time Down South

  Music is such a tremendous proposition that it probably needs government supervision.

  There does not seem to be any proper protection for anything in this line.

  —Jelly Roll Morton

  The cultural impact of the Great Depression included drastic consolidation of the music industry. Phonograph recordings and vaudeville, two dominant institutions in the 1920s, fell into steep decline, yielding to the cheaper mediums of radio and movies. Around 100 million records were sold in 1921, 2 million in 1933. Ironically, this decline coincided with Armstrong’s triumph in the national market, as he became the bestseller in a sinking field. The fancy orchestras of the movie houses became, in most places, a distant memory, and so did the glitzy blues divas. Black musicals on Broadway folded often and quickly. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously put it, “Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.”