The History of Jazz (11 page)

Even within his own lifetime, the mythic elements in Armstrong’s biography began crowding out the facts. This conflation of truth and error begins literally with the details of his birth—usually given, by Armstrong and many later commentators, as the Fourth of July in the year 1900. One could hardly imagine a more fitting birthday for a legendary American figure, combining as it does both a symbolic commemoration of national independence and the dawn of the American century. Reality is less elegant. As Tad Jones and Gary Giddins have convincingly proven, the conventional account is exactly thirteen months out of synch. The baptismal certificate that Jones uncovered at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in New Orleans states (in Latin) that Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, the illegitimate son of William Armstrong and Mary Albert, and was baptized three weeks later.
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Armstrong’s own accounts of his parents’ role in his upbringing are not consistent, and statements by others are often equally incoherent. For example, Armstrong’s parents, according to some versions, were born into slavery; yet records clearly show that the birthdates for both came after the Emancipation Proclamation. All accounts agree, however, in indicating that both William and Mayann, as Armstrong invariably referred to his mother, were often absentee parents. William was soon living with another woman, and eventually devoted his energies to raising a family with his new lover. Mayann, who appears to have been only fifteen years old at the time of Armstrong’s birth, left Louis with his grandmother Josephine and moved to Perdido Street, at a time when that area was the center of prostitution in black Storyville— the implication being that Mayann earned her livelihood by that means.
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Armstrong did not return to his mother’s care until he was five; from that time on, he later recalled, a number of different “stepfathers” shared their living quarters. At the age of seven, Armstrong began working, selling coal to prostitutes in the red-light district.

The next turning point in Armstrong’s biography has also taken on the overtones of popular legend in narrative accounts of his life and times. Shortly after midnight on January 1, 1913, Armstrong was arrested for disturbing the peace. His crime: shooting six blanks into the air from his stepfather’s .38 revolver. Armstrong was placed in the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he remained for eighteen months. This punishment may have been a blessing in disguise: the youngster clearly flourished amidst the military discipline of the Waif’s Home. Armstrong had already played cornet before this period—again contrary to the usual accounts
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—as well as performed in a vocal quartet; nonetheless, the Waif’s Home presented a secure, structured environment, where music making in the military tradition was stressed, and where recognition for achievement was provided. In this setting, Armstrong steadily moved up the ranks, first playing tambourine, then alto horn, next bugle, and finally cornet.

At the time of his release, into his father’s custody in June 1914, Armstrong was reluctant to leave the Waif’s Home. Perhaps with good reason: he was soon employed in backbreaking labor, driving a coal wagon, an occupation he pursued until the close of World War I. But as older, more experienced brass players left New Orleans, opportunities for Armstrong to earn money as a musician were on the rise. Over the next several years, his playing graced a number of celebrated bands, including Kid Ory’s group (where he replaced Oliver, after the latter’s departure to Chicago), clarinetist Sam Dutrey’s Silver Leaf Band, Fate Marable’s riverboat ensemble, and Papa Celestin’s Tuxedo Brass Band. By the time Oliver sent for the young cornetist, Armstrong may have been unknown to jazz fans in Chicago; however, musicians in New Orleans were already taking note of this up-and-coming player.

The recordings made by Armstrong’s new ensemble, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, present a number of challenges to the modern-day listener. The most obvious one stems from the poor sound quality of circa 1923 acoustic recordings. This technology, while acceptable in capturing the sound of a single instrument or a human voice, was decidedly weak in presenting the delicate balance between different instruments in a jazz band. And few ensembles were less well suited to this technology than the Creole Jazz Band, with its passionate interplay between contrasting horn lines. But sonic authenticity is perhaps less of a stumbling block to modern ears than is the very unmodern aesthetic vision underpinning early New Orleans jazz music. Unlike later jazz, with its democratic reliance on individual solos, the New Orleans pioneers created a music in which the group was primary, in which each instrument was expected to play a specific role, not assert its independence. The most characteristic moment in these recordings of early jazz takes place when the lead instruments, usually cornet, clarinet, and trombone, engage in spontaneous counterpoint. The trombone takes over the low register, providing a deep, deliberate bass melody; the clarinet plays more complex figures, often consisting of arpeggios or other rapidly fingered patterns, in a higher register; the cornet moves mostly within the middle register, playing less elaborate melodies than the clarinet, but pushing the ensemble forward with propulsive, swinging lead lines. No early jazz band was better at this ensemble style of playing than Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band.

Oliver’s melodic vocabulary was primitive, almost simpleminded, by modern standards. His famous solo on “Dipper Mouth Blues” builds off a few notes, a concise melodic fragment played over and over with minor variations. Here, as elsewhere, the virtue of Oliver’s playing lies not in linear improvisation but in his seamless blending with the band and, especially, in the haunting vocal quality of his cornet work. King Oliver left behind no interviews with jazz historians, and we can only speculate about the specifics of his artistic vision; however, one comment that has come down to us is especially revealing. Oliver claimed to have spent ten years refining his cornet tone. This obsession with sound gets to the heart of the New Orleans revolution in music, and to the essence of Oliver’s contribution to it. Instead of aspiring to classical purity of tone, emulating an otherworldly perfection, the early jazz players strived to make their instruments sound like human voices, with all the variations, imperfections, and colorations that such a model entailed.

This was an approach to music that defied conventional notation and refused to be reduced to a systematic methodology. Richard Hadlock, recalling a music lesson given to him by Sidney Bechet, conveys something of this fastidious New Orleans attention to tone production:

“I’m going to give you one note today,” he once told me. “See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.”
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This admonition—“growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it”— could very well be a description of the rugged beauty of Oliver’s playing. His music is not about scales or passing chords; it is a celebration of color and texture.

From this perspective, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band provided an odd context for Armstrong to hone his skills as a jazz musician. Herein lies the oddity: Armstrong would soon emerge as the first great soloist in the history of jazz, yet he refined his talents in an ensemble that featured few solos. Oliver conceived of jazz as collective music making in which the instruments were interdependent, and no one horn was allowed to dominate. Armstrong, in particular, was especially constrained: as second cornetist, he was expected to add a supporting line or harmonic fill under Oliver’s lead line—and the recordings of the band show that, when so inclined, he was capable of doing this with great skill; nonetheless, Armstrong’s more powerful tone and greater technical facility made him a poor choice for such a subservient role.

At times, as on the OKeh recording of “Mabel’s Dream” or in his quasi-solo on “Froggie Moore,” the second cornetist clearly overpowers the bandleader—in New Orleans jazz, the equivalent of the chief steward’s mutiny. On the rare occasions when he was allowed to stand out from the rest of the group, on “Chimes Blues” and “Tears,” Armstrong presents poised and fluid lines that contrast markedly with the rest of the band. Even at this early stage, Armstrong was a player of consequence, demonstrating his ability to hear and adapt to the musical flow around him, as well as a rhythmic sensibility that was paradoxically both relaxed and propulsive. On the other hand, Armstrong would never match Oliver’s mastery of the mute, or be able to evoke the wide range of growls and moans the latter could elicit from his horn. His wife (and colleauge in Oliver’s band) Lil Hardin would later recall how Armstrong spent days trying to imitate his boss’s famous solo on “Dipper Mouth Blues”—a solo that, despite its melodic simplicity, he could never quite recreate. “I think it kind of discouraged him,” she noted, “because Joe was his idol and he wanted to play like Joe.”
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The sensation of listening to these performances is both exhilarating and disturbing. Armstrong’s musicianship was far beyond that of his colleagues—hence the exhilaration. It contrasts in the sharpest degree with Hardin’s penchant for muddling the chord changes, trombonist Honore Dutrey’s often uninspired melody lines, and Dodds’s hesitant approach to his parts (compare the King Oliver sides to Dodds’s carefree and superior work with Jelly Roll Morton or his fine performances with the New Orleans Wanderers). Armstrong’s mastery can only stand out impressively in such a setting. Yet, at the same time, his individualistic approach also comes across as disturbingly subversive. Is it not a deliberate undermining of a collective aesthetic? In the context of his later recordings, with their emphasis on solo playing, his charismatic and heroic stance is an asset, but in the setting of the Creole Jazz Band it disrupts the seamless blending of instrumental voices that is the crowning glory of the early New Orleans style. Here we encounter one of the grand ironies of jazz history—and a telling reminder of the rapid pace of change in the music’s development—namely that, because of Armstrong’s presence, the King Oliver recordings from the early 1920s stand out both as a paramount example of the New Orleans collective style and also anticipate its obsolescence, already hinting at the more individualistic ethos that would replace it.

The passing of the baton from Oliver to Armstrong also marks another decisive turning point in the history of American music. Oliver represents a more Africanized sensibility, in which musicians work with sound textures rather than pure and discrete notes. The idea of codified musical structures built on notes and scales is a distinctly Western idea, our legacy from Pythagoras and the Greeks, and quite alien to the traditions of Africa. For Western music to assimilate the jazz sensibility, it required an innovator like Louis Armstrong, a visionary who was more than just a sound painter, but a true master of licks and phrases and all the complicated combinations of notes that appeal to the Western musical mind. We see the same transition in the blues, when we move from the aural ambiguities of Son House to the precise constructions of Robert Johnson. This adaptation is never pure or complete. What an Armstrong or Johnson plays is never just notes. Even so, an important divide has been crossed, and the African heritage has now been schematized in a new manner, transformed through the impact of these masters in a way that allows the alien style to seep into the inner life of American (and eventually global) music.

By mid-1924, the core of Oliver’s band had left, primarily because of the sidemen’s suspicion that their leader was withholding money due them. By the time Oliver recorded again, with a new group named the Dixie Syncopators, the jazz world had changed as a result of the growing popularity of the big band format. Oliver attempted to adjust his music to this emerging sensibility with the addition of two or three saxophones and the adoption of more tightly arranged pieces. This later phase in Oliver’s career is often dismissed by critics for its abandonment of the more spontaneous New Orleans interplay between the horns. Nonetheless, Oliver might have successfully weathered the transition to the big band era with this new approach had not his playing begun to deteriorate in the face of continual embouchure problems. The extent of these and their chronology are a matter of debate, but the broad general trend is unmistakable: as time went on, Oliver played less frequently, and the quality of his work was inconsistent at best. By the mid-1930s, he could no longer play at all.

Various letters written by the cornetist toward the end of his life, and later published, have been rightly called by jazz critic Martin Williams “among the most moving documents which have been preserved from the past in jazz.”
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These, combined with anecdotal accounts of Oliver’s later days, serve as a disturbing reminder of not only Oliver’s plight, but also the degraded conditions of life for southern blacks during the Great Depression. Having outlived his fame, Oliver worked long hours in menial jobs—poolroom janitor, roadside vendor, and the like—struggling, without success, to raise enough money to purchase a railroad ticket to join his sister in New York. At his death, in April 1938, he was living in near poverty in Savannah, Georgia. His return to New York was posthumous: Oliver’s sister used her rent money to bring the cornetist’s body to New York, where he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in an unmarked grave, since no funds were left to provide a headstone. (A memorial was later put in place, courtesy of the New Jersey Jazz Society.) Louis Armstrong, Clarence Williams, and a few other musicians were in attendance.

By the late 1930s, Oliver’s music may have been all but forgotten among the general public, but through his protégé, Louis Armstrong, Oliver would leave a lasting mark on both the jazz idiom and the broader streams of popular culture. By this time, Armstrong’s influence was pervasive in the jazz world. But even more remarkable was Armstrong’s ability, then becoming increasingly evident, to extend his fame beyond the confines of jazz, to develop an international renown and status, with his visage and demeanor instantly recognizable even to those who paid little attention to jazz music. In this regard, Armstrong ranks with only a handful of figures from the first half of the twentieth century—Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Babe Ruth, Al Jolson, Shirley Temple, Winston Churchill—whose fame transcends the realities of time and place and blends into a mythic larger-than-life presence, one in which the border between image and actuality blurs.