Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism

by Thomas Brothers

  In attendance for the Austin dance, October 12, at the (still-standing) Driskell Hotel was sixteen-year-old Charles L. Black Jr., who would go on to teach law at Columbia and Yale and contribute to the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Black said that Armstrong seemed possessed by some spiritual force, playing with his eyes closed. “Steam whistle power, lyric grace, alternated at will, even blended,” wrote Black years later. It was the first time Black had ever seen an African American in any role but servant, and he considered his encounter with this evident genius to be part of what turned him toward civil rights law. “One never entirely knows the ways of the power of art,” he observed.

  After Tyler came Waco and then San Antonio, where they met up with Don Albert’s band from New Orleans. Saxophonist Budd Johnson remembered a performance in San Antonio with Armstrong’s band in 1933. The band had lodgings in a black neighborhood, but a white man walked up to them while they were sitting on the front porch in the middle of the afternoon. “I found out where you guys live,” the man told them. “I just wanted to come and talk with you and say hello… . I heard the band last night, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything to you, so you guys were great. But you don’t mind if I say something, do you?” The musicians invited him to say what was on his mind. “Well you know one thing?” the white man said. “In talking with you fellows, you’re not niggers. You’re different from what we’ve got down here. These are niggers down here. They’re not as intelligent as you guys are. You know, you are not niggers.” It took a moment for the musicians to realize that he was sincere. They didn’t reveal that they had all come from the South. “I got used to people asking me all sorts of, well, crude questions,” remembered Armstrong in an unrelated discussion. “Maybe I was the first of my kind that they’d ever talked to.”

  Next came Galveston, where they hung out with King Oliver’s band. Oliver had been touring, sometimes following in Armstrong’s footsteps, and he was irritated that admission for Armstrong was $1.25, 25 cents more than for his band. From Galveston they traveled to Shreveport, Louisiana, where they spent some time with guitarist Snoozer Quinn, and from Shreveport they headed for Jackson, Mississippi, where Armstrong boarded overnight with blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery. The temperature in Jackson was 100 degrees in the shade.

  The next day they set out on a chartered Dixie-Greyhound bus to Little Rock, via Memphis. What they didn’t know was that the driver had been instructed to stop in Memphis and change busses; apparently, someone else had requested this particular vehicle, which had reclining seats. Manager Collins had returned to New York and left his wife, Mary, to travel along and supervise the arrangements. They arrived in Memphis at 1:00 p.m., and Mary Collins refused to accept the inferior vehicle. The bus company called the police, who were outraged to see Armstrong chatting with a white woman in the front seats and surrounded the bus.

  The scene was tense, since it had become known that several band members were carrying guns. They were hauled to jail with the police talking loudly about a need for cotton pickers in the area. In jail Armstrong passed marijuana cigarettes around for the inmates. “Man, Louis could make the best of a bad situation,” quipped George James. The Commercial Appeal of Memphis reported smugly in its October 7 issue about what a pity it was for the Negro population of Little Rock that the musicians, decked out in “fancy plus fours, bright hued golf socks and just below vari-colored berets, worn in the latest Jimmy Walker style,” could not “perform for their edification.” But in fact the manager of the Little Rock theater had arrived on the evening of the arrest and put up bail. The musicians were released on condition that they return the next day to play a benefit concert. When they pulled in to the gig at Little Rock at 11:00 p.m., the audience was still waiting for them.

  Back in Memphis the next day, for the benefit matinee at the Peabody Hotel, Armstrong decided to dedicate his performance of I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You to the Memphis police force. “It was then that I really thought that Louis had lost his marbles,” remembered Jackson. “When it came to my solo I was all confused because all I could think of was cotton.” But the policemen did not understand the words and were flattered by the gesture. Mezz Mezzrow, listening to the radio broadcast from New York, got the message clearly. Mezzrow had been sending packages of marijuana to Armstrong through the mail, and he dialed in his hero whenever he could. He was delighted to hear Armstrong call out, while the band played the introduction to I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, “Dig this Mezzeerola!”

  Meanwhile, Collins had booked the band for a tour on the RKO vaudeville-movie circuit through St. Louis, Ohio, Kentucky, and Chicago; this would be followed by TOBA time in Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and New York.134 These gigs were often booked for a full week, with one-nighters mixed in here and there. This made the tour less enjoyable than the lengthy stay at Suburban Gardens, but far more relaxed than the relentless one-nighters through the Deep South. The Defender reported that Armstrong’s unit was pulling in $2,250 per week from the Keith Vaudeville Circuit. In between movie showings the band accompanied other featured acts, while lesser acts supplied their own music; they were also a featured act themselves, with a coveted position in the program. They played four to six shows a day, with one day per week off for travel. George James remembered the RKO tour as “first class work though it was a hard grind.”

  The start of the RKO tour on October 17 in St. Louis, at the St. Louis Theater (today known as Powell Hall), did not begin smoothly. Vigorous and relentless booing streamed down from one section of the theater each and every time the band played. Apparently, Rockwell and Immerman had hired someone to sabotage the act. A vice president of RKO was called in to solve the problem. In St. Louis the band also played the Chauffeur’s Club, where Charlie Creath directed the house band.

  The next stop was Cincinnati and the 3,500-seat Albee Theater, opposite a band led by Zack Whyte. “There isn’t the shadow of a symphonic touch, a legitimate musical approach in a bar of the band’s music,” snorted the Enquirer. “It’s pure and strictly jazz.” In Cincinnati Armstrong occupied the headliner position, which put him at the top of vaudeville’s classiest circuit. Nevertheless, their hotel rooms at 6th and Mound Streets were blighted with rats as big as cats.

  The rats, however, were not his main problem. Louis and Lillian had parted bitterly when the band left New Orleans on September 1. It was, by now, a familiar story: he left for New York City without her in 1924, then left for New York City without her again in 1929, then left Los Angeles without her in 1930. Alpha was now traveling with him, and Lillian had been following them in a small yellow Ford, accompanied by a man. Somehow she enticed the local police to raid his hotel room in Cincinnati, where they caught him in flagrante delicto with Alpha.

  Whatever the flaws in their relationship, Lillian had been good to him. In 1923 she helped him notate his pieces for copyright, co-composed the breakthrough of Tears, and urged him to the breakthrough of Cornet Chop Suey; in 1924 she convinced him that it was time to leave Oliver and accept Fletcher Henderson’s offer in New York City; on his return to Chicago she had his name put up in lights, helped co-compose for the Hot Five series, and woodshedded the classical exercises that made his trumpet solos glow so brilliantly. But those are only the obvious musical results: it is impossible to gauge the psychological role Lillian played as Louis climbed higher and higher on the ladder of his career. She did not give up and file for divorce until 1938. In 1935, Lee Collins saw them at a club in Chicago and thought that they were getting back together, they looked so happy. Natty Dominique always expected them to end their lives together, back on 44th Street at the house they bought together, where she lived until the end. Lillian died on August 27, 1971, after collapsing at the piano during a performance in memory of Louis, who had died on July 6.

  After Cincinnati came Chicago and the Palace Theater (151 West Randolph Street, today called Cadillac Palace) in late October. A review in
the Tribune (November 2) singled out a “musical rampage that included the jungle fantasia called Tiger Rag.”135 Four months later Armstrong and many of the same musicians recorded New Tiger Rag for his last OKeh session. An even more important artifact is a video recording made in Copenhagen in October 1933. The video, which also includes Dinah and I Covered the Waterfront, presents him directly in front of the camera with a band of European musicians in a concert setting. It is the closest we can get to the visual side of his performances from the early 1930s.

  Lillian Hardin Armstrong (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)

  During the introduction, while the clarinetist solos, Armstrong moves around unpredictably, schmoozing with the audience and acknowledging each break with a rhythmic bow. Hilda See wrote up a description of his performing style around this time, a taste of which can be sampled in the video: “When his orchestra is playing, no man works harder than Louis Armstrong himself. He is in there, all motion and rhythm, from start to finish. When in the execution of a number he fairly hypnotizes his audience by his motions of the body and with his interpretations of the numbers being played. It seems as though harmony oozes from him in visible waves of contagious energy.”136

  This is the visual counterpart to the steady stream of sonic indirection—the asides to band members, to himself, and to the audience, the puzzling shifts of mood, the blurred, smeared, and broken lyrics, the weaving between original tune and its narrative and imaginative forays. When most people first see this footage from Copenhagen, they are stunned by the strangeness of the visual performance, which was unquestionably the point. “One feels that a Negro’s expression is not quite free from the matrix of the earth from which he is extricating himself,” wrote George Tichenor in 1930. “His to-be subconscious self is not yet out of sight.” It took a lot of work to conform to expectations like that, years of experiment, imitation, and practice.

  Then, in the Copenhagen video, he talks to the audience: “Now ladies and gentlemen we’re going to take a little trip through the jungle at this time, and we want you all to travel with us. That tiger’s running so fast, it’s going to take a few choruses to catch him. So I want you all to come with me, yes sir, seeing that this Selmer trumpet’s going to get away for you in time. Get out there boys, I’m ready.” He is all business as he and his trumpet take on the tiger, his trim body positioned diagonally to the audience now, in full concentration. The choruses build from simple repetition to more complicated obbligato playing, spliced with musical quotations, glissandos, bends, rips, held high notes, extended eccentric patterning, ending inevitably and explosively in the high range.

  It was indeed a little novelty, as he says on the OKeh recording from March 1932, a jungle fantasia that carried little offense. This is vaudeville-minstrelsy soft and lite. Tiger Rag was the finale for his act at the Palace in Chicago, which opened with When It’s Sleepy Time Down South, followed by Dinah, I’m Confessin’ That I Love You, and Shine. All of these songs had been issued on record, suggesting that the phenomenon of audiences wanting to hear what they knew from recordings was in play.

  In Chicago (Thursday, November 5) he also made a sold-out appearance at the Savoy Ballroom, with 5,000 in attendance. The hall was too crowded for dancing so everybody rocked from side to side. “According to the crowd there is no such a thing as depression among dancers at least,” snapped a reviewer. The Chicago visit revived the gangster threats, and Armstrong was routinely accompanied by police protection, continuing on to Cleveland.

  The RKO tour was more than just another string of gigs sandwiched between a long series of dance halls and the TOBA circuit. RKO theaters were huge and classy venues with sophisticated entertainment, and many are still standing today. Positioning Armstrong as headliner was a big step for RKO. Reviewers bluntly admitted that they were not used to this kind of music. “If you like lowdown, dirty-hot jazz, you’ll go nuts over this outfit; if you don’t you’ll wonder how they ever got into vaudeville”—that comment from Cincinnati was not isolated. A “fast and loud session of what has come to be expected from colored bands,” wrote another, who also lamented the “forget-it-as-soon-as-possible singing.” Not all the reviewers from the RKO tour were negative, but many were clearly perplexed. “Apparently this reporter was the only person in the theater not particularly entertained by Armstrong’s trick solos, so I bow to an overwhelming majority,” was the word from Columbus.

  None of that bothered Armstrong, who was absolutely thrilled. In his scrapbooks he uniquely sprinkled little prideful commentaries over the mixed RKO notices. “Look! Do you still see me topping the bill?” he scribbled in the margins of a clipping from Cincinnati, with an arrow pointing to his name, “last day and still heading the bill!” next to a clipping from St. Louis. “Very good for a cabaret at 3 o’clock in the morning but not much entertainment on a vaudeville bill,” wrote a reviewer in Cleveland, and for Armstrong that was exactly the point: headlining the Keith Circuit probably meant more to him than his unqualified successes at Suburban Gardens or Show Boat, and much more than the one-night stands in Texas. It meant that he had arrived at the top of the entertainment world.

  Today that hierarchy seems very alien. The situation reminds us how jazz regularly moved through many kinds of venues. Sometimes people danced in huge auditoriums, and sometimes they listened in dance halls; sometimes they dressed as nicely as they could for the Vendome Theater, and sometimes they went slumming at the Sunset Cabaret; sometimes they wanted to be seen alongside the likes of Howard Hughes or with the best of New Orleans, turned out in white linens, and sometimes they went wild at TOBA theaters. That Armstrong’s music was difficult to pin down had something to do with his ability to move around through these different social niches.

  His ascent to the RKO headliner position paralleled his ascent to the top of the recording industry. OKeh sued to keep him from moving to RCA Victor, which wanted him to fill the gap left by the departing Rudy Vallée; RCA finally got him in December 1932. Legal wrangling between Collins and Rockwell led to court depositions, taken in September 1931, to decide whether he was a unique entertainer who could not be replaced. Paul Whiteman testified that, in his opinion, Armstrong was indeed unique, “not only by reason of the fact that his singing is on a par with his trumpet playing, which is superlative, but by reason of the fact that he is definitely a creator in the field of music … his style is individualistic, almost impossible of duplication.” Ed Sullivan chuckled in the New York Evening Graphic that Rockwell had solicited testimony to use against Armstrong, which Collins then used to promote him. In a deposition taken March 1, 1932, Eli Oberstein, artist-and-repertory man for RCA Victor, testified that “Armstrong is the largest selling artist on records today, bar none.” “Of all classes?” he was asked. “Yes sir.”

  After the RKO tour came the Theater Owners Booking Association, the black vaudeville circuit. Playing TOBA in Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and New York City was known as “going around the world,” and that’s precisely what the Armstrong band did in late November, December, and January.

  The RKO reviews were mixed, but TOBA reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, even complimenting his conducting. He was hoarse in Philadelphia, at the Pearl Theater, but he still delivered, and the show was held over for a second week, with I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You singled out as a highlight. Minta Cato was on the bill with him in Philadelphia, and Collins opened up discussions with her husband, Andy Razaf, Fats Waller’s collaborator for Hot Chocolates, to write a show that would feature Armstrong and Cato, though nothing came of it.

  After that they went to the Howard Theater (still standing at 620 T Street NW) in Washington, D.C., where he was billed as the “greatest sensation in the theatrical history of Washington.” Then it was off to the Royal Theater in Baltimore, where he personally handed out 100 bags of coal to anyone in need (no children, women preferred), as a Christmas gift. Prices at the Royal Theater ranged from 15 cents for a matinee to on
e dollar for a box. After Baltimore came Jersey City, where he shared a bill with dancer Peg Leg Bates.

  Then came the Lafayette Theater in New York City, where they started at 10:30 in the morning and played until 11:00 p.m. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge had heard some of the Hot Seven recordings, but he wasn’t truly influenced by Armstrong until he saw him at the Lafayette in early 1932. “Well I sat through the first show and I didn’t think Louis was so extraordinary,” Eldridge remembered. “But in the second show he played Chinatown, My Chinatown. He started out like a new book, building and building, chorus after chorus, and finally reaching a full climax, ending on his high F. It was a real climax, right, clean, clear. The rhythm was rocking and he had that sound going along with it. Everybody was standing up including me. He was building the thing all the time instead of just playing in a straight line.” Teddy Wilson later had Armstrong’s Chinatown solo transcribed and arranged for three trumpets in his big band.

  Armstrong’s recording of Chinatown from November 1931 preserves some of the excitement and momentum that got Eldridge’s attention. Multiple-chorus numbers like this, going back to Oliver’s performance of High Society and further still to New Orleans, pleased everyone. Zilner Randolph worked into his arrangement of Chinatown the conceit of a battle between the saxophone section and Armstrong’s trumpet (which he calls “that little devil”). He challenges the band with humor: “Oh get your chops together boys, while we mug lightly, slightly and politely.” The commentary continues even while he sings, interrupting one flashy riff with a spoken aside in the lower range, “Oh you rascal you,” then slipping back into singing without missing a beat. His trumpet solo is integrated with the accompaniment in a way that is unusual for Armstrong’s bands, though right in step with others who relied on complex arrangements. Charlie Carpenter remembered how Armstrong played the solo in the recording studio sitting on a table, swinging his legs back and forth.