Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism Read online

  LOUIS

  Master of Modernism

  ARMSTRONG

  Thomas Brothers

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York • London

  DEDICATION

  FOR

  Olly Wilson,

  Samuel A. Floyd Jr.,

  AND

  T. J. Anderson

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. “Welcome to Chicago”

  2. Oliver’s Band and the “Blues Age”

  3. Opposites Attract: Louis and Miss Lil

  4. The Call from Broadway

  5. “This Is What Really Relates to Us”: The Dreamland Café, the Vendome Theater, and the First Hot Five Records

  6. Melody Man at the Sunset Café

  7. “Some Kind of a God”

  8. The White Turn

  9. The Rosetta Stone

  10. Sleepy Time Down South

  Discography

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Source Notes

  Index

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  Louis Armstrong produced, during the glory years of the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, a musical legacy of tremendous richness and joy. Armstrong, to our great fortune, was also prolific in documenting his life through letters, interviews, and memoirs. To this material we may add autobiographies of and interviews with his contemporaries, as well as a vibrant collection of archival sources, including African-American newspapers of the day, some rare and some now available for web-based searching. The result is an extremely rich body of documentary evidence that allows us to view Armstrong, his life and his musical legacy, from the inside.

  To draw attention to the details of this legacy, I sometimes refer to specific timings in his recordings, indicated in parentheses (e.g., CD: 1:10). A brief discography of reissued CDs is published in the back for those who wish to listen along as they read. And since one of the aims of this book is to place Armstrong’s music within a broader historical context. I also include a detailed bibliography of my sources, divided into two parts, one for archival material and the other for general publications. The former are distinguished by an abbreviation for the archive where the document is held, inserted after the author and before the date (e.g., Keppard HJA 1957).

  The book provides two types of notes. Superscript numbers in the text alert the reader to explanatory material that appears in the Endnotes section in the back of the book. The Source Notes include brief citations, keyed to the main body of the book by page number and key phrase.

  Acknowledgments

  Compelled to make frequent research trips to New York City, I remain grateful for the hospitality of Giuseppe Gerbino, Krin and Paula Gabbard, and Jeff Taylor; I am equally indebted to Lewis Erenberg and Susan Hirsh in Chicago. At Duke, Roman Testroet, Karen Cook, Jason Heilman, and Dan Ruccia provided excellent assistance. No less important has been the archival help of Michael Cogswell (Louis Armstrong House Museum), Bruce Boyd Raeburn (Hogan Jazz Archive), Alfred Lemmon (Williams Research Center), Dan Morgenstern (Institute of Jazz Studies), Kelly Martin (University of Missouri, Kansas City), Deborah Gillaspie (University of Chicago), Linda Evans (Chicago History Museum), and David Sager (Library of Congress). Duke’s library staff—Laura Williams, Tom Moore, and staff at the Music Library and the staff at Perkins, Lilly, and Interlibrary Loan—has supported my work with precision and care for many years. Likewise I have constantly relied on Jos Willems’s amazing All of Me: The Complete Discography of Louis Armstrong; my thanks to Jim Farrington for introducing me to it. In William Howland Kenney’s indispensable Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, a splendid field of research was opened up for me. Now that it is gone, the amazing achievement that was Redhotjazz seems more special than ever. My thanks to Steven Lasker, who supplied me with material he collected on Armstrong’s California year, and to Chris Albertson and Ron L’Herault for photos. Two leading specialists in jazz of this period, Bruce Boyd Raeburn and Brian Harker, shared their knowledge and offered help at a number of turns. Without a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, combined with a Dean’s leave from Duke University, this book would not have been possible. Likewise without the support of my family, Leo and Roger, and especially Tekla, whose patience with my work habits has been immense. Maribeth Anderson Payne provided, once again, invaluable advice and editing, such as no musicologist can take for granted. At Norton, I am also grateful for the thorough and professional help of Michael Fauver and Harry Haskell. This book is dedicated to Olly Wilson, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., and T. J. Anderson, three musicians who have offered me so much support over the years, insights and mentoring that got me started, and encouragement and inspiration that have kept me going.

  INTRODUCTION

  He was just an ordinary-extraordinary man.

  —Doc Cheatham

  October 1931, Memphis, Tennessee

  Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra are performing at the Peabody Hotel, giving local jazz fans a chance to finally see and hear in person the singer-cornetist whose records they have been collecting and whose radio broadcasts they have been tuning in to. “Master of Modernism and Creator of His Own Song Style” is how he is billed, and no one dismisses it as mere marketing hype. Few performers, black or white, are more exciting or innovative. Armstrong has been packing them in on this tour of the South, in city after city, segregated white hall after segregated black hall, with an occasional thrill of mixed patronage now and then, carefully guarded by the police.

  Everyone in the audience is white, the ten musicians black. The modern master himself is very black—which is to say, first, that he has very dark skin, and second, that he is culturally very black. He does not disguise this cultural allegiance. To the contrary, he has found ways to glorify it while reaping tremendous financial rewards.1

  Armstrong announces that he would like to dedicate the next song to the Memphis Police Department. Turning to the band, he sets the tempo and they are off with their arrangement of I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.

  Trombonist Preston Jackson reacts with a nervous jolt, and with good reason. “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you!” Armstrong sings. “I’ll be tickled to death when you leave this earth, you dog!” he grins, shucks, and jives. He’s dedicating this song to the Memphis police? Not a bunch known for their sense of humor, and many are members of the Ku Klux Klan. What saves the moment is that while the band knows the words, the audience cannot easily make them out. For part of Armstrong’s modern song style is a weird way of mixing words and nonsense syllables, sometimes blurring the line between the two, just as the melody he sings is part original tune, part radical transformation of that tune, and part free invention. The policemen come up afterwards to thank Armstrong, and Jackson relaxes. No other band coming through town has ever honored them like this, they tell him.

  Some of the musicians were reluctant to take this southern tour. They would have agreed with the New Orleanian banjo player Danny Barker, who explained that “Chicago was considered to be the safest place near New Orleans … getting off a Chicago-bound train … before it reached its destination was like a ship’s captain, in mid-ocean, putting someone on a small raft to drift without provisions.” But this is the Depression, which causes people to do things they would not do under normal circumstances.

  The relationship of Armstrong’s band to the Memphis police was already loaded with tension, for the night before the Peabody Hotel gig they had all been thrown in jail. Their crime: Armstrong was discovered sitting next to
his white manager’s white wife on the chartered bus, the two of them talking over business. “Why didn’t you shoot him in the leg?” one officer demanded from his colleague when he witnessed this provocative scene. On stage, Armstrong displays a persona that is alternately confident, even cocky, with his powerful trumpet virtuosity, and seductive, with his innovative style of singing ballads. Artistically, he is at the top of his game, yet he is crippled by a society that seethes with brutally racist ideologies, laws, and practices.

  And thus it was that one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century made his living in 1931. Race was the ever-present elephant in the room. It affected Armstrong every day and every moment of his life, on different levels simultaneously. Today we live in a country that yearns for “postracial” harmony, which makes it comfortable to ignore this distant reality and concentrate instead on the astonishing splendor of his music.

  Armstrong’s career, the most successful jazz has ever known, spanned half a century. From the time he left New Orleans in 1922, at age twenty-one, until he died as one of the most famous people in the world in 1971, he trumpeted and sang his way through some of the greatest dramas in the nation’s history—nascent Jim Crow, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights era, and the Cold War. To see how a dark-skinned musician from the Deep South, whose formal education ended at age twelve, accomplished all of this is to witness one of the most compelling life stories of the twentieth century. A small man who controlled a powerful instrument, Armstrong first internalized and then transformed the African-American musical vernacular.

  Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism aims to tell this story for the period that includes the crowning glories of his musical achievement. It picks up where my Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans left off, with his arrival in Chicago in 1922, and ends ten years later. My main thesis is that the success of this nimble-minded musician depended on his ability to skillfully negotiate the musical and social legacies of slavery. Indeed, his career can be understood as a response to these interlocking trajectories. His quickness and sureness, so evident in his music, served him well in his encounters with racism. This played out both directly, through daily events in the life of a highly visible figure, and indirectly, through expectations imposed on African-American entertainers that conditioned many of their professional decisions. As black and white Americans responded to the ongoing drama of racial oppression, Armstrong’s music was in turn shaped by those responses.

  The legacies of slavery are sometimes hard to see. There is a long tradition of simply not wanting to look, of hiding in a kind of historical amnesia that has its own manipulative utility. One thing is clear: emancipation was followed by a century and more of systematic subjugation of people of African descent. The cultural legacy bequeathed by enslaved African Americans to their descendants may be hard to identify precisely, too. Yet most people, over the centuries, have intuitively sensed how music has occupied the thriving center of that legacy. During the decades after Emancipation, the African-American musical vernacular was bursting out of the plantations, from which it spread through the Deep South and then eventually to the urban North, laying the groundwork for the spectacular success of ragtime, blues, jazz, gospel, and other African-American idioms in the twentieth century.

  Armstrong was born in 1901 into a community of New Orleanians who were transforming vernacular culture in an urban setting that was hardly paradise but still carried a sense of possibility. By “vernacular” I mean the orally based traditions that were formed on the slave plantations of the Deep South and continued to provide the everyday basis for cultural expression among lower-class blacks. Armstrong was surrounded by and closely tutored in this culture, as it was transformed in New Orleans, for the first 21 years of his life. These traditions promoted resilience and flexibility, which was one reason he was able to hold strong to vernacular values until the very end, even when he was singing songs like Zippity Do Dah and Chimchimery.

  His earliest musical experiences were in church, where his mother took him as a boy and where he first learned to sing. Here he was exposed to music designed to invoke the Holy Spirit, characterized by rhythmic intensity, pitch bending, strained and emotional vocal production signaling release, and communal participation. Heterophony (multiple versions of a single tune, sung simultaneously) kept the community together while accommodating individual expression. The church gave the young musician a nourishing and enjoyable way to learn music.

  Armstrong’s early years also found him hanging out in the streets with a toothless man named Larenzo, who held him spellbound with his talk of music and with the blues that he played on a long tin horn. Larenzo had a lot of soul, he remembered later. Larenzo’s blues brought children running with scraps of tin and rags that they exchanged for small toys. Blues were everywhere, in the simple honky tonks on the block where Armstrong lived and in the casual singing of people he knew. Blues could be performed by ensembles, but it was primarily a solo idiom, a way for an individual to publicly identify himself or herself. It was no accident that when Armstrong eventually got a cornet, the first thing he learned to play was blues.

  He often skipped school to follow parade bands, which circulated daily. Funeral processions moved slowly through the streets for hours, broadcasting a range of musical expression, from deep mourning through the famous New Orleanian rejoicing after the body was “turned loose.” The rough heterophony of one marching band gave way to the polished sheet-music playing of another, but all wore uniforms and tried to look sharp. Sometimes the cornetist Joe “King” Oliver let Armstrong carry his horn, which was the license he needed to follow the band through neighborhoods that otherwise would have been dangerous for him. When there wasn’t a parade there was a funky advertising band, perched on a horse-drawn wagon and playing as audaciously as possible, in an effort to lure people out to look at the signboards on the side of the wagon. Spontaneous contests between bands on different wagons were routine.

  At age eleven Armstrong was sent to a home for juvenile delinquents and stayed there for 18 months. He loved playing various instruments in the marching band, working his way up to the cornet under the tutelage of the director, Peter Davis. After he left the home he started hanging around older musicians, asking if he could sit in and play with them. Eventually he knew enough tunes to substitute in a pinch. Oliver became his idol. Like Armstrong, Oliver had dark skin, was raised with church music and blues, and had no father in his life. Oliver noticed his progress and invited him to his house for lessons at his kitchen table, teaching him “the modern way of phrasing on the cornet,” as Armstrong described it. Oliver taught by example and by verbal instruction how to play a strong lead and not get lost in “figurations,” how to play second and thus contribute to collective improvisation, how to attack notes with punch and sustain them with fire.

  He gradually learned more repertory and made a place for himself in the New Orleans dance-band scene. His blues got fancier and more impressive. He learned to “fill in” and create obbligato lines that were the heart of collective improvisation. Earlier he enjoyed singing with his buddies in a little vocal quartet, improvising harmonies in the African-American tradition; now his ear for harmony led him to greater precision and experimentation. Cornetist Buddy Petit was doing this, too, playing second lines that were harmonically imaginative and gaining control of advanced formations like diminished chords. That was one way for a cornet player in this community to distinguish himself. Others played faster or higher, or made elaborate “freak music”—the talking effects produced by growls, mutes, and timbral distortion. This rich and multidimensional environment, competitive and with lots of low-paying jobs, was perfect for a developing talent.

  This complex musical culture thrived independently of musical notation; in fact, non-notatable features were emphasized. This was partly a matter of “taking advantage of the disadvantages,” as the old African-Ameri
can saying goes, and partly a matter of using music to strengthen group identity, since it was clear to everyone that these features had come from Africa. Armstrong grew up surrounded by freak music, pitch bending, heterophony, and collective improvisation. Most important was the format I refer to as “fixed and variable,” a musical model that is still ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa, from which enslaved people brought it to the New World. The model works like this: one instrument (or group of instruments) plays a repeated rhythmic figure. This “fixed” level orients the listener or dancer, while the “variable” instrument or group brings the music to life by departing from the repeated figure in interesting ways.

  Music in this multilayered format is easy to hear, but harder to talk about. It was poorly understood by early jazz scholars, who focused on the plurality of rhythms (or polymeters) instead of the rhythmic hierarchy based on a fixed pattern. This misconception obscured African music’s connection to the New World and to jazz. But the model is there, plain as day.

  The fixed and variable model became the key ingredient in Armstrong’s mature style. He internalized it so completely that he was able to think creatively in these terms, in the intuitive way that all great artists come to once they have mastered central forms of expression. This cannot be stated too strongly: all of his mature solos during the period covered in this book are governed by the fixed and variable model; furthermore, his creative extensions of it account for the most distinctive features of his style. No one in the 1920s wrote about this model. They simply understood it tacitly, then rejected or accepted its legitimacy. Even today it is rarely discussed in scholarly literature, and as a result the deep connections of Armstrong’s music to sub-Saharan Africa and to racially conditioned culture in the United States have not been properly understood. The model, as Armstrong uses it, applies to melody and harmony as well as rhythm. For this reason it must establish the ground for musical analysis, and ultimately social analysis, as well.