Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Few ever dared to criticise Ellington for demeaning his black identity (except perhaps after he devoted an album to the songs from the Disney film Mary Poppins in the mid-1960s). Sadly, that fate could not be avoided by the jazz performer who was the polar opposite of Duke in almost every sense: Louis Armstrong. His genius was instinctive rather than ordered, like Ellington’s; his playing was raucous and sometimes excessive, where Duke’s was cool and restrained; his stagecraft was flamboyant and comic, while Ellington was the epitome of genteel dignity. Armstrong was criticised, both by his own race and (especially) by white jazz critics, on all these grounds; he was accused of ‘Tomming’fn2 when he showed off by hitting dozens of high notes in succession at the climax of his performances, or mopped his brow constantly between solos, or hammed up his stage dialogue and facial mannerisms. The audience that applauded these antics, so his detractors said, did not appreciate jazz; they simply relished a black man playing the fool. Nor were his critics impressed by his willingness, from the 1930s onwards, to record white pop tunes – somehow failing to notice that what he did to that repertoire was often a living definition of jazz itself.

  Others were equally scathing about another facet of Armstrong’s work: his scat singing, his pioneering use of his distinctively earthy voice to improvise riffs and runs as eloquent as anything that came from his cornet. And that instrument was the most significant in jazz history. It enabled him to create a new kind of jazz, in which the dense collective interplay of an ensemble would give way to the individual voice of an instrument; jazz as a personal statement, or as a succession of the same, if the musicians were capable of taking up the challenge. The shift was evident on ‘Muskrat Ramble’, the 1926 hit by his Hot Five which introduced his name to a national audience. Vamping around a melody that would carry a notorious anti-war anthem by Country Joe & the Fish forty years later, Armstrong’s quintet collectively laid back while each in turn handled a chorus, a structure that revealed talents and flaws with equal clarity.

  This wiped away at a stroke the old ethos of bands in New Orleans, where it was the interlocking of parts and the building of counterpoint that represented the body and soul of the music. It required the refinement of recording techniques (especially the electrical revolution of 1925) to make the change possible. But more than that, it needed an ego large enough to wrest control of the music, and a talent commensurate with that sense of ambition. Armstrong had both. With instrument and voice, he could do anything: improvise with the spontaneity of a child, construct epic solos like an architect, make music into a personal language.

  His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s – especially the likes of ‘Potato Head Blues’, ‘Hotter Than That’ and the high-wire act of Clarence Williams’s tune ‘West End Blues’ – remain among the most revered jazz recordings of the century. For some, they stand as the summit of the art form; others prefer the smoother but more mature recordings Armstrong made in the following decade. Those were the years when he tore apart ‘St Louis Blues’ with a ferocity that mixed the promise of Bill Haley’s rock ’n’ roll from 1954 with the vocal bravado of Bob Dylan from 1966; toyed with Hoagy Carmichael’s famous ‘Star Dust’ melody like a tiger with a mouse; and sauntered through ‘Rockin’ Chair’ (Carmichael duetting at his side this time) and ‘Lyin’ to Myself’ with the insouciance of a king. Along the way, he dropped seeds which grew into swing, R&B, rock ’n’ roll, trad jazz, even perhaps bebop, besides providing a role model for everyone from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra to Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. If Paul Whiteman was the interior decorator of popular music in the 1920s, Louis Armstrong threw open the door to everyone, whether or not they’d wiped their boots clean, or could even afford shoes at all.

  The subsequent history of jazz has its moments of seismic shift, one of the most convulsive not occurring until the 1940s. After Louis Armstrong, however, jazz no longer belonged to groups, but to soloists. The virtuoso couldn’t usually perform alone (pianists excepted); at the very least, he required a rhythm section. But the artists who commanded the loyalty of an audience, mass or cult, were the mavericks and maestri who could transcend their surroundings within the briefest of solos. Sometimes, as at the height of the swing era, several of those room-busting talents could be contained within a single band. More often, especially after the Second World War, all that the audience required was one instrumental genius: the role of his sidekicks was to set him up, and then keep out of his way.

  Armstrong’s fluency and daring enabled his peers and even his mentors, such as Fletcher Henderson and rag-piano pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, to cut some of their hottest jazz sides from the mid-1920s onwards. His influence also slipped over the racial border. Within the context of a dance band, for example, Eddie Lang could introduce the guitar as a viable jazz voice on Red Nichols’s ‘Washboard Blues’ and Frankie Trumbauer’s ‘Singin’ the Blues’. His accomplice on the latter was Bix Beiderbecke, a trumpet player who drank himself to death in 1931 at the age of 28. His friend Jimmy McPartland recalled that Bix could never repeat a solo the way he had recorded it. ‘It’s impossible34’, he was told. ‘I don’t feel the same way twice. That’s one of the things I like about jazz, kid. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?’ Bix’s unaffected spontaneity won him a coterie of dedicated fans, which transubstantiated into a cult after his early demise. Bix topped the pantheon of white instrumentalists whose contributions, however brief, to dance and jazz records in the late 1920s and early 1930s were relished and debated. Their lustre quickly spread to Britain and Europe, where in the 1950s aficionados would still be arguing over exactly which Paul Whiteman tunes Bix had graced with a few seconds of his magic.

  In the early weeks of 1928, some of the most remarkable American music of the era was released simultaneously, like a banquet in which every course appeared on the table at once. George Gershwin was in his prime, serving up such eternal songs as ‘The Man I Love’; Jimmie Rodgers was setting out on his first ‘Blue Yodel’; Bing Crosby establishing himself as the most mellow of jazzmen; Hoagy Carmichael satirising his own jazz obsession with Paul Whiteman on ‘Washboard Blues’; crooners, torch singers (Ruth Etting’s ‘The Song is Ended’ effectively defines that genre), hillbilly harmonisers – the whole gamut of American popular genres raising their flags in unison. Forcing their way to the front of this crowded stage were Bix Beiderbecke and His Gang with ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’, the leader for once outgunned by the baritone sax of Adriani Rollini, who sounded as if he had seen 1956 on the distant horizon and wanted to attract its attention. But there was another Bix on offer: the piano soloist of ‘In a Mist’, a composition that leaned upon the ragtime tradition but entered some realm of transcendent beauty which makes analysis irrelevant. Had he lived, he might have explored this landscape again; instead he left only the map for this solitary excursion, a tantalising glimpse of what jazz might have become, had Erik Satie rather than Louis Armstrong been its guiding spirit.

  ‘In a Mist’ wasn’t just a snapshot of a musical genius in repose; it was also a stunning illustration of everything that technological innovation had made possible. Five years earlier, only the harsh echoes of Beiderbecke’s piano would have survived on to disc. By 1928, musicians had entered a world in which sophistication and subtlety no longer had to cede centre stage to cacophony. Three years earlier, engineers had perfected the art of electrical recording, and ushered in one of the most dramatic reversals of mood in the history of popular music.

  * * *

  fn1 The French passion for American jazz would lead to the formation of such bands as the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, starring guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt.

  fn2 Or being unduly subservient to the white man, after the leading character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It did not aid Armstrong’s reputation amongst jazz aficionados that he declared his passion for grand opera, and for the sweet sonorities of Guy Lombardo’s white-bread dance band. But these c
hoices demonstrated his ability to find pleasure in music beyond his own milieu, with an openness rarely shared by his most ardent followers.

  1

  2

  THE INNOVATION WAS the Academy Gramophone Amplifier, one of a series of transformations in the way that records were manufactured and heard. Not for the last time, an entire generation of comfortingly familiar appliances and discs was rendered obsolete without warning. The Victor and Columbia record companies, who shared the licence for electrical recording via microphones, schemed to keep their new technology a secret from the public until the last possible moment, fearing that consumers would stop buying records while they waited for the revolution to occur. Scientists boasted about their inventions, journalists echoed their self-congratulation, and the public divided between those who leapt towards the future and those who clung loyally to the past. The British novelist Compton Mackenzie, who doubled as editor of Gramophone magazine, declared that his wife found the ‘new noise3’ of electrical recording ‘quite unbearable’, but that he had grown to enjoy it, ‘which may or may not be a good thing’. By 1930, he was of the opinion that ‘I do not believe any audience4 could sit still and listen nowadays to hours of electrical recording, and remain sane’ – a charge that would be repeated in the digital age.

  ‘Let It Rain, Let It Pour’ by the International Novelty Orchestra (featuring operatic tenor turned American folklore balladeer, Vernon Dalhart) is often cited as the first release of the electrical age, but two weeks earlier, in late February 1925, Victor had concocted ‘A Miniature Concert’, effectively an eight-minute variety show featuring their most popular vaudeville artists, though they delayed releasing it for five months. The biggest stir, in every sense, was aroused by a bizarre but technically superb recording of ‘Adeste Fideles’ (alias ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’), by the Assorted Glee Clubs of America, almost 5,000 vocalists in all. Several hundred thousand Americans hurried to purchase this Christmas carol at the height of summer, a triumph of marketing as well as technology. In Britain, the breakthrough in sonic fidelity was reserved for lighter fare: ‘Feelin’ Kinda Blue’ by the bandleader Jack Hylton in June 1925.

  What was the impact of electrical recording? According to an advertisement for Brunswick Records, it offered ‘Sound Photographed on to a Record5! … There are no “gramophony” noises whatsoever. Just pure sound with the value of every voice or instrument reproduced exactly.’ Tones that had been buried or distorted by primitive recording methods, such as instruments at the bass end of the scale or high female voices, were recognisable at last. Listeners were amazed by the ‘immense loudness6’. No longer would bandleaders or engineers have to restrict their arrangements in servitude to the recording process. Now they could place music at the top of their agenda, and leave the rest to the technicians.

  The electrical revolution provoked a more subtle realignment of thinking about music which passed the general public by. Bandleaders were now free to construct a collage of sounds that was not quite artificial – the musicians were there in the studio, after all – but which was certainly a form of fiction, rather than pure documentary. The days had gone when the only concern was to place the musicians so that their contributions could be picked up by the recording horn. (Louis Armstrong remembered that when he made his first recordings, his leader King Oliver would set him ten feet behind the rest of the band, because he played so loudly.) Now the advent of microphones and amplifiers enabled musicians, and what would soon become known as ‘record producers’, to paint textures of sound that would be almost impossible to replicate, with total fidelity, before an audience. This knowledge came slowly, and, like Eve’s fatal bite of the apple, it could not be taken back. There were many in later decades who bemoaned the loss of the old spontaneity, when the alternative was musicians devoting painful hours or even days to tapping a snare drum or striking a single piano note over and again, while engineers tweaked knobs and applied a feather’s touch to faders in the hope of achieving the fool’s destination of the ‘perfect’ sound. There was now no such thing as an ‘authentic’ recording of a musician; every reproduction of a performance was idealised and imaginary, whether or not it matched the expectations of its makers.

  The process of manufacture extended beyond the constituent musical parts. The record-makers realised that with a dextrous arrangement of sounds, they could create or enhance a mood that would spark a particular emotional reaction. In later decades, the range of feelings would extend to hatred, disgust and fear, as musicians catered for a youth culture swamped in self-loathing. In the late 1920s and 30s, the emotional aims of the musician and engineer were more positive, if still fabricated: to provoke excitement, joy, romanticism, comfort or the illusion of intimacy. The last of these represented the most striking interaction between music, technology and their willing accomplice, the listener. It introduced the musician, most often a vocalist, as the audience’s friend, lover or even potential seducer.

  Having been virtually absent from dance band recordings in the early 1920s, singers had begun to slip almost unnoticed into the formularised three-minute dance arrangements that were issued by the dozen every week. Their role was to add variety to a band; they were simply another feature, no more important than a trumpet solo. The vocalist seldom received credit on the label of a dance-band disc; at best, the company might add ‘Vocal chorus’ in small print as a promise or warning of what was contained therein. To emphasise the singer’s lowly position in the proceedings, he or she might have to wait until half of the performance had passed before being allowed a cameo, which would rarely extend beyond a single chorus. (Singers were given more licence on records that bore their name, rather than that of a band.) They didn’t emote, but delivered their allotted lines with the restraint of a pre-war BBC announcer, enunciation being considered more important than syncopated phrasing or a jazz sensibility.

  After the electrical dawn, microphone technique became part of the singer’s toolbox. The vocalist not only had to worry about pitch, timing and being word-perfect; he or she now needed to inspire the appropriate audience response, while infiltrating the ear of the listener without overloading the microphone. Until overdubbing became possible during the Second World War, band and vocalist always recorded together. One of the engineering skills that became most valuable was the knack of presenting a full orchestra alongside a singer who might be whispering the most delicate of sentiments to their imaginary lover, without sacrificing either end of the sonic spectrum. Meanwhile, the singer – once content merely to be heard – came to realise that every note and (potentially) breath issued near the microphone would be reproduced in all-too-graphic detail for millions to hear. Vocal power was no longer the sole requirement for stardom; warmth and dexterity were equally telling, and the purest, most perfectly pitched of singers would lose their audience if they could not connect with them on an individual basis.

  In 1924, the American passion for anything redolent of Hawaii resurfaced in the form of a renewed obsession with the ukulele.fn1 For British listeners, the instrument kindles inescapable memories of George Formby Jr. He was the son of a famous Lancashire comedian whose trademark was a hacking bark, followed by the doleful line: ‘Coughing better tonight; coughing summat champion.’ (Many music-hall careers were based on less.) After he suffered a fatal throat haemorrhage, Formby Sr’s name and repertoire were revived by the younger George. He worked the banjulele into his act and then found that his audiences insisted upon it. By the Second World War, his mock-innocent range of risqué comic songs, all delivered to the ferocious strumming of his ‘uke’, had made him one of Britain’s best-loved film stars and variety turns. The innuendo of his punchlines, mostly revolving around phallic symbolism and voyeurism, concealed the almost jazz-tinged fluency of his ukulele solos, invariably delivered with the grin of a gargoyle. This disguise did not always protect him from censorship: in 1933, ‘discretion won the day8’ when the release of Formby’s bawdy ‘With My Little Ukulele in My Hand’
was abruptly cancelled.

  The uke’s role in American music was far more restrained. A year before electrical recording was first used, Frank Crumit’s ‘Say It With a Ukulele’ – promising romantic success to anyone who could master the four-string shuffle – brought a new style of vocalist into the popular idiom. Cliff Edwards, otherwise known as ‘Ukulele Ike’, seized his moment, and prepared for the new era with his whimsical 1924 performance of ‘Somebody Loves Me’, sounding uncannily like an ancestor of the country-rock pioneer Michael Nesmith. Indeed, a whole parade of late-1960s troubadours – John Sebastian, James Taylor, John Denver – can trace their emotional and musical heritage back to the new melodians of the mid-1920s.

  While Edwards stretched himself to imitate horns amidst his playful love songs, his rival Gene Austin (notably on 1925’s ‘Yearning’) demonstrated that it was possible to be a jazz singer without demonstrating the least affinity with African-American music. If one man can be classed as the father of jazz phrasing in white pop, it is not Bing Crosby – who was arguably the master of the art – but Austin, for whom the sometimes derogatory but entirely accurate epithet ‘crooner’ was invented. He and Edwards sparred their way through the remainder of the decade, offering a mixture of romance, vaudeville showmanship and uncanny vocal control. Edwards’s gallop through ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ perhaps showed him to best effect, while Austin’s ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ epitomised his devastatingly easy charm. Gene Austin had another weapon at his disposal, however: his white spiritual tune, ‘End of the Road’, was delivered with a tired reverence that was beyond his peers.