The History of Jazz (12 page)

Armstrong’s status as cultural icon, however, is perhaps a mixed blessing for the student of jazz history. With such celebrities, the image threatens to overshadow the essence, or even to become the essence. To understand Armstrong’s role as jazz innovator, and not just as a mass market entertainer, requires us to look past the superficial trappings of his fame, and instead probe deeply into the body of work he left behind. It is here that we will uncover the vital core of Armstrong’s achievement as a jazz musician.

3 The Jazz Age

Revolutions, whether in arts or matters of state, create a new world only by sacrificing the old. With jazz, it is no different. To be sure, Louis Armstrong, who closed the book on the dynastic tradition in New Orleans jazz—putting an end to its colorful lineage of Kings Bolden, Keppard, and Oliver—stands out as an unlikely regicide. Armstrong always spoke with deference, bordering on awe, of his musical roots, and with especial devotion of his mentor Joe Oliver. Yet the evidence of the grooves does not lie: the superiority of Armstrong’s musicianship, the unsurpassed linear momentum of his improvised lines, could serve only to make Oliver, Morton, Bolden, and the whole New Orleans ensemble tradition look passé, a horse-and-buggy cantering by Henry Ford’s assembly line. The New Orleans pioneers exit stage left; Armstrong on trumpet enters stage right heralding the new Age of the Soloist.

Or so it seems in retrospect. But the ebb and flow of any history seldom match the rigid categories and sharp delineations we apply after the fact. In actuality, the revolution initiated by Armstrong took place in fits and starts, and with little fanfare at the time. After Armstrong’s departure from King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, over a year would pass before he would record as a leader. And even when those famous recordings were planned—the classic “Hot Fives”—the record company considered enlisting a better-known leader to front the band. Most accounts stress that Armstrong’s talents may have been neglected by the general public, but were amply recognized by the musical community—“his playing was revered by countless jazz musicians,” runs a typical commentary
¹
—but even this claim is suspect. Fletcher Henderson, Armstrong’s first major employer after Oliver, made the trumpeter accept a cut in pay to join his band. Many accounts suggest that Henderson, in fact, preferred the playing of cornetist Joe Smith, and that Armstrong was hired only because Smith was unavailable.

Could this be true? The recorded evidence bears out the claim: when Smith rejoined the Henderson band in the spring of 1925, an increasing number of solos went to him, not Armstrong. Smith, to his credit, performed admirably: though he lacked Armstrong’s rhythmic drive, his warm sound and ease of execution could hardly be faulted and may have been better received by the average dance hall patron, circa 1925. Henderson was even less enthusiastic about Armstrong’s singing, an attitude that greatly frustrated the new band member. Years later he would exclaim: “Fletcher didn’t dig me like Joe Oliver. He had a million dollar talent in his band and he never thought to let me sing.”
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Armstrong may not have taken New York, or even the Henderson band, by storm, but slowly and steadily he exerted his influence on the musical community. Brass players were the first to feel the heat of Armstong’s rising star; but, as with Charlie Parker’s innovations twenty years later, Armstrong’s contributions eventually spread to every instrument in the band. Don Redman’s arrangements, Coleman Hawkins’s saxophone work—one by one, the converts were won. Armstrong the sideman? Not really. Armstrong was a leader, if only by example, during his time with the Henderson band. In an eight-bar passage from his solo on “Shanghai Shuffle,” he offers a telling lesson in rhythmic ingenuity; here Armstrong stokes the fire merely by repeating— with variations in length, placement, and intensity—a single note. What would have been monotonous in the hands of any other band member comes to life under the sway of Armstrong’s sure mastery of syncopation. On “Shanghai Shuffle” and many of his other features with the Henderson band—“Copenhagen” from October 1924, “Mandy Make Up Your Mind” from early December, “I’ll See You in My Dreams” recorded a month later—Armstrong was pointing the way to a more modern conception of improvisation. In the end, his impact was decisive—for the Henderson band, for the New York scene, for the jazz world.

Armstrong’s stiffest challenge during these months leading up to the Hot Five recordings came in a different setting. As a sideman in the Clarence Williams Blue Five, Armstrong faced off with Sidney Bechet—“the only man who,” in the words of critic Gary Giddins, “for a short while, seemed [Armstrong’s] equal as an improviser during those transitional years.”
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Bechet, born May 14, 1897, in New Orleans, may have been only four years older than Armstrong, but he already had accumulated a world of experience since first leaving New Orleans in his late teens. In 1919, he had traveled to Europe with Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, where he dazzled audiences and won the praise of noted Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet. In a prescient piece published in
Revue Romande
in 1919, Ansermet declared Bechet to be “an artist of genius” and suggested that his clarinet playing was “perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow.”
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Other memorable performances by this early ambassador for hot music included a garden party at Buckingham Palace for the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) and an Armistice Ball at the Royal Albert Hall. Bechet returned to the United States with an enhanced reputation, but also—and perhaps more importantly—with a soprano saxophone, which he had spotted in a shop window during a stroll through London’s West End.

Up until this point, Bechet’s work had been restricted to clarinet, an instrument he had learned under the influence of three New Orleans pioneers of the instrument: George Baquet, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson, and Lorenzo Tio. The tradition Bechet inherited from these musicians was anything but primitive; indeed, the clarinet was, in certain respects, the most advanced of the jazz instruments during these early years. Clarinetists in the New Orleans tradition worked assiduously to develop great finger flexibility and, as a result, were often assigned the most intricate parts in performance. This fluid approach to the clarinet grew out of a tradition of melodic embellishment, rather than the freer linear development we associate with later jazz horn players, as demonstrated by the well-known obbligato section in the piece “High Society,” which served as a technical showpiece for many New Orleans clarinetists. Melodic complexity, however, was far from the only distinguishing characteristic of the New Orleans clarinet sound. Figured patterns built from arpeggiated chords were often employed as the building blocks for New Orleans clarinet solos; because of this, these players needed to have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of chord structures. Years later, Coleman Hawkins would develop this penchant into a probing, harmonically adept saxophone style, but even with the first generation of jazz reed players, the chordal implications of their playing were prominent.

Yet the clarinet tradition that Bechet inherited was not without its limitations. The figured patterns that served as the foundation for many early clarinet solos soon came to represent a stylistic dead end. Caught up in the static vocabulary, these first-generation players tended to leave the rhythmic potential of their instrument largely untapped. Syncopations played a modest role in their efforts and, when employed, rarely moved beyond restatements of the rhythmic patterns developed years before in the ragtime idiom. And even at its dirtiest, the New Orleans clarinet rarely approached the rawness of the more unbridled cornet improvisations. In this environment, it was mostly left to the brass players—Bolden, Keppard, Oliver, Armstrong—to expand the rhythmic vocabulary and explore the variations of tone possible within the context of the New Orleans style.

Bechet played the most prominent role in developing the clarinet as a mature solo voice in jazz. Other performers, no doubt, also contributed—hear, for instance, Leon Roppolo’s underappreciated recordings with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings that gave notice of the instrument’s potential as early as 1922—yet Bechet’s role was especially influential in pointing the way toward a more melodic, linear conception of the horn, and drawing on a more expansive palette of sounds. Much like King Oliver, Bechet developed a voicelike quality to his playing, and exhibited a rare sensitivity to the potential of timbre and phrasing. These skills allowed him to stand out as a premier soloist, yet—unlike Armstrong—Bechet felt equally at home submerging his melody lines in the larger ensemble.

This difference in temperament between the two great New Orleans players is evident in their December 1924 pairing on “Early Every Morn,” where they ostensibly support vocalist Alberta Hunter. Bechet’s soprano work, with its mixture of high held notes and diving phrases into the lower register, blends well with the group and provides ample space for Armstrong’s countermelodies. Armstrong, in contrast, assumes a more assertive posture and belts out a flamboyant coda to the performance, one that tends to eclipse Hunter and the rest of the band. Such exhibitions of technique were not Bechet’s forte. Yet he too could indulge in grandstanding when the situation so warranted. On another collaboration from the period, “Texas Moaner Blues,” Armstrong again takes center stage with a brief burst of double time in his feature break, but Bechet is not to be outdone in this encounter. He lets loose a swarming cannonade of angular phrases, less fluid than the cornetist’s, but clearly signaling a determination to match any contender note for note, even the great Louis Armstrong. And this time Bechet steals the show with a bluesy coda.

Bechet flirted with big band music, and even served a brief stint with the Ellington orchestra; but, for the most part, he retained his predilection for the New Orleans ensemble style. In the early 1930s, when Armstrong adapted his music to the public’s newfound preference for big bands, Bechet kept true to the earlier approach, most notably in his recordings with trumpeter Tommy Ladnier. Their work on “I Found a New Baby” and “Maple Leaf Rag” from 1932 demonstrated, to those willing to listen, that the old style had not lost its charm. Audiences, however, were largely unimpressed— the New Orleans revival was still almost a decade away. After an unsuccessful stint at the Savoy Ballroom, Bechet and Ladnier temporarily left the music business, setting up a tailor shop in Harlem, where the trumpeter shined shoes while Bechet focused mostly on pressing and repairs—when he wasn’t busy in the back room cooking Creole food or hosting a jam session.

Bechet was eventually enticed back into performing by an offer from bandleader Noble Sissle. For four years, until 1938, Bechet worked as a sideman for Sissle, before leaving to front his own group and pursue freelance opportunities. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, public interest in the early pioneers of jazz was on the rise, with Bechet being one of the beneficiaries of these changing attitudes. Bechet began recording in traditional jazz settings, for Blue Note and other labels, as well as gigging regularly at Nick’s and other New York venues. Unlike some other first-generation players, Bechet’s skills had not declined by the time his music had come back into favor with jazz fans. His celebrated 1939 recording of “Summertime” is a case in point. Playing soprano saxophone—an instrument that in the hands of many others has an all too limited expressive range and a disconcerting tendency to veer out of tune—Bechet employs his full arsenal: growls, moans, plaintive calls, luminous high tones, whispered asides, even a sly quote from an opera aria.

Bechet returned to Europe in May 1949, for the first time in almost twenty years, to participate in a Paris jazz festival. The event was a success, and Bechet came back to France in the fall for more performances, followed by a trip to England. In a move that many later American jazz musicians would emulate, Bechet decided to settle permanently overseas; it was not a departure from his roots, he explained, since it brought him “closer to Africa.” In the Old World, he received the adulation, financial security, and social acceptance that no black jazz musician could find in the music’s native country. Performing and recording dates were abundant, as were a whole range of other artistic opportunities; these years found Bechet entertaining capacity audiences at nightclubs and concert halls, and also involved in ballet and cinema projects. Shortly before his death in 1959 he even turned
litterateur
, completing his autobiography
Treat It Gentle
, a plainspoken work that many of his fans cherish almost as much as his legacy of recordings.

THE HOT FIVES AND HOT SEVENS

Several months before leaving for New York, Armstrong married his colleague in the Oliver band, pianist Lil Hardin. This was the second marriage for both the twenty-three-year-old Armstrong (in his teens he had tied the knot with Daisy Parker, from whom he soon was separated and eventually divorced) and for twenty-six-year-old Hardin. College educated, sophisticated, ambitious: Hardin possessed many of the qualities that Armstrong lacked. Most accounts agree that her aspirations for his career, not Armstrong’s, were responsible for his break with Oliver and his decision to join Fletcher Henderson.