Transformed jazz, America’s most original musical art form, from an exercise in collective improvisation to a platform for intense individual expression
Louis Armstrong
(1901–1971)
A gumbo. That’s what natives of NOLA—New Orleans—like to call their city and its culture. It certainly describes the music of that town during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a thick, hot, delicious mélange of sounds. Racially, the mélange was something else again. Not only were blacks and whites segregated by law in the early days, but so were blacks (African-Americans) and Creoles (people of Euro-African ancestry)—not by law, but by tradition. Musically, Creole musicians typically had formal training—in contrast to the people they disparaged as “black Negroes,” who couldn’t read “those little black dots.”
But in 1894, the city enacted Municipal Code No. 111, which classed Creoles as “Negroes” and forced them out of segregated white neighborhoods. This had the effect of forcibly mixing African blacks with Euro African Creoles. The result for music was an intense exchange between the tutored Creoles and the untutored “black Negroes” that produced a Euro American hybrid, in which African blacks learned to read music and thereby expanded their musical universe beyond folk traditions, and Creoles were liberated from strict adherence to printed scores. Improvisation came to mark the music of the tenderloin area along Canal Street called Storyville, the “sporting house” district most historians of American music identify as the birthplace of jazz, the nation’s most influential indigenous popular music.
Sin was the stock in trade of Storyville—gambling, liquor, drugs, and prostitution. The area was designated a red-light district through legislation drawn up in 1897 by Alderman Sidney Story, who sought to confine “vice” to a single neighborhood. The “mansions,” as the district’s bordellos were called, needed music, and that music was called jazz, a blend of Creole and African traditions. As the great folklorist Alan Lomax put it, Storyville produced the “master formula of jazz—mulatto (Creole) knowingness ripened by black sorrow.”
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New Orleans has produced and nurtured a host of musicians. Two of the most famous were Joe “King” Oliver and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Both came of age in NOLA, but they also came from different worlds. But for the music, they would doubtless have had sharply different destinies.
Joseph Nathan Oliver was born in 1881 in rural Aben, Louisiana, and moved to New Orleans when he was very young. He received formal training on the trombone before switching to cornet, and he made a living playing in New Orleans brass bands and dance bands. He was a professional, like most New Orleans band musicians, but, also like most of them, he supplemented his slender income by moonlighting in Storyville. The Storyville gigs were not only essential to paying the bills, they were sources of inspiration, infusing the “legitimate” band music with a certain spice. From 1908 to 1917, Oliver played cornet, and in 1910 he teamed up with trombonist Kid Ory as co-leader of a band that earned a reputation as the best and the hottest in the city. It crossed racial and social lines. Oliver and Ory played black dives one night and white debutante balls the next.
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into what had been called the “European War” and was now the “Great War” or the “World War.” New Orleans became a major U.S. Navy base, and the Secretary of the Navy, a North Carolina progressive named Josephus Daniels, was opposed to the “corruption” of youthful sailors by prostitutes and alcohol. As these were two of the principal commodities served up in Storyville, Daniels, with the backing of Secretary of War Newton Baker, effectively forced the closure of Storyville’s “mansions” and drinking establishments. This sent Oliver—and many other New Orleans musicians—on an exodus to the North. Most, Oliver included, headed for Chicago beginning in 1918.
Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 in a ramshackle house on Jane Alley, between Perdido and Poydras Streets, hard by the Storyville neighborhood. His mother, Mary Albert Armstrong, was sixteen, and his father, William, abandoned mother and son almost immediately, plunging them into deep poverty. Mary’s mother took in Louis, raising him to the age of five, at which time he returned to his mother. He began attending public school, where he was introduced to music, but he dropped out in fifth grade. Among the odd jobs he did was running errands for a local Jewish family, the Karnofskys, who ran a junk business and also used their junk wagon to deliver coal. One of Louis’s tasks was to deliver coal to the Storyville “mansions.” There he discovered the music of the brothels and first heard Joe Oliver.
Over the months and years, Louis’s relationship with the Karnofskys ripened. They treated him like a son, and Armstrong wore a Star of David pendant for the rest of his life. It was Morris Karnofsky who advanced Louis $2 on his wages so that he could buy a cornet from a local pawn shop when he was eleven. It is uncertain whether cornetist Bunk Johnson or Joe Oliver taught Armstrong to play the instrument by ear, but he took to it naturally and began performing for tips in a Storyville honky-tonk. He also sang—for spare change—in a street-corner quartet with neighborhood boys.
On New Year’s Eve 1912, the street-corner gig got him into trouble. That night, Armstrong got hold of his stepfather’s .38 revolver, which he fired into the air to celebrate the New Year. He was immediately arrested and sent to the Colored Waif’s Home. The military-style discipline there was harsh, but the school also had a band, and Armstrong received his first “formal” musical training. The band gave public concerts, and Armstrong performed along with trombonist Kid Ory, a fellow inmate.
Released in 1914, Armstrong played in traditional New Orleans parade bands and, in 1918, began performing on Mississippi River excursion boats in the band of Fate Marable, who taught him to sight-read music. But his first big break came in 1918 when Joe Oliver left New Orleans for Chicago, and Kid Ory invited Armstrong to take Oliver’s place on trumpet in his band.
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By 1918, New Orleans’s days as the incubator of jazz were numbered. The closing of Storyville contributed to the demise, but the causes were even bigger than that. Tens of thousands and soon hundreds of thousands of African Americans were leaving the Jim Crow South for the relative freedom and opportunity of the North. In 1922, Louis Armstrong joined that exodus. Like numerous other New Orleans musicians, he went to Chicago, where Joe Oliver had already renamed himself King Oliver and was a highly successful bandleader.
King Oliver was not a great musician, certainly not a breakthrough musician—except, perhaps, in his genius for invariably attracting great talent to his band. But if you listen to the recordings he made in Chicago during the 1920s with his most important group, the Dixie Syncopaters, you will find the music exuberant and skillful in execution, yet also four-square and a far cry from the highly improvisational jazz that was about to emerge from other musicians. Listen to Oliver’s cornet solo on “Dippermouth Blues,” his most famous composition, a piece that generations of jazz trumpeters have learned by heart. Clipped, precise, even brilliant, it nevertheless fades in the wake of the far more expressive cornet work of Oliver’s most famous alumnus, Louis Armstrong.
Nevertheless, Oliver and his band gave Armstrong a platform and a living. Even more, in King Oliver himself, the young man found the strong, strict, but caring father he had so sorely missed in childhood. Did the older musician influence Armstrong’s musicianship? Probably not profoundly. Oliver looked backward, whereas Armstrong was poised to take jazz into the future. But Oliver nurtured the talent he recognized and instilled in Louis Armstrong the discipline he needed to vault beyond mere genius and become a professional genius capable of disrupting the course of American music.
While playing in King Oliver’s orchestra, Armstrong eclipsed his bandmates. The period 1923 to 1924 produced “Potato Head Blues,” “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” and “Hotter Than That.” In those songs, Armstrong pushed the envelope of popular musical expression, laying down just what jazz, in the hands of a master, could deliver. Lyricism alternated with tommy-gun staccato jabs as Armstrong played in the very highest register of his instrument—a stratospheric region into which early cornetists dared not venture. Above all, it was Armstrong’s approach to rhythm—loose enough to come in slightly behind the beat in a manner that invented what came to be called swing. The pulse of the music as it might be notated in a score was never lost, but it was altered, alternately elbowed aside and caressed by Armstrong, a musician with an inexhaustible reserve of invention.
The jazz that migrated north from New Orleans evolved in its new environment in ways that matured the music. The exuberant, spontaneous, but typically down-and-dirty standards of the Crescent City parade bands no longer cut it in the speakeasies of the urban North. Nor did the unpolished approach appeal to the major record producers. Bands and individual performers either became professional or they found themselves cast adrift and left behind. Even more important, performers like Armstrong dramatically raised the bar on improvisation. The catch-as-catch-can collective improvisation of the New Orleans tradition gave way to improvisation born of individual genius. It was more varied, more daring, and just plain harder to do.
It started with Louis Armstrong standing out in the King Oliver band. Throughout the mid-1920s, jazz came to focus increasingly on individual players. The greatest thrill in hearing the music began to come with the solos. What would Louis—or Satchmo or Satch, as his fans liked to call him (short for “satchel-mouth”)—what would Satch do next?
The North offered a major market for jazz, and it was within this market that Armstrong became even more than the first great jazz soloist. He became the creator of a new American music, a music whose very individuality made it representative of a people’s struggles and triumphs. Oliver gave him his start, and Oliver’s band also introduced Armstrong to Lil Hardin, the band’s pianist. She became Armstrong’s second wife, and she was a source of abundant confidence. When Freddie Keppard, a rival trumpet player, came to hear Armstrong, Lil recalled, he “said to Louis, ‘Boy, let me have your trumpet.’ So, Louis looked at me and I bowed my head, so Louis gave him the trumpet. So, Freddie, he blew—oh, he blew and he blew and he blew and then the people gave him a nice hand. Then he handed the trumpet back to Louis. And I said, ‘Now, get him, get him!’ Oooh, never in my life have I heard such trumpet playing! If you want to hear Louis play, just hear him play when he’s angry. Boy, he blew and people started standing up on top of tables and chairs screaming, and Freddie eased out real slowly.” It was Lil who talked her husband into leaving his mentor and father figure to join the far more innovative Fletcher Henderson band in New York. Thanks in no small part to this move, the center of gravity for jazz moved from Chicago to the Big Apple, just as it had earlier moved from the Big Easy to the Windy City.
A year with Henderson in 1924–1925 immersed Armstrong in more modern sounds that were better suited to improvisation. He rocketed to fame, not just with audiences but with his fellow musicians. His evolution as an artist accelerated, and because it moved fast, the jazz itself advanced by leaps. To hear the recordings Armstrong made with the Henderson band is to hear an artist veering decisively away from the martial rhythms of New Orleans-style melody into pure jazz invention. What had been a playful dance that shoved against regular meter now became an artist playing with time itself, coming in fractionally before or after the beat. Swing was and is ultimately undefinable, yet Armstrong defined it for the next three generations of jazz musicians.
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Before long, even the innovative Fletcher Henderson band became too confining for Armstrong, who moved back to Chicago late in 1925 and, from that year through 1928, recorded more than sixty sides with two groups he fronted, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven. These moved jazz along yet another trajectory.
The original Hot Five consisted of Armstrong on cornet, Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Johnny St. Cyr on banjo, and Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano. In 1927, Pete Briggs on tuba and Baby Dodds on drums joined to make the group the Hot Seven. To this day, musicologists lavish well-deserved attention on their recordings in an attempt to pin down just what they mean in the history of jazz. Might as well try to sum up “just what” Beethoven means to classical music. Suffice it to say that the likes of “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” “Hotter Than That,” and “West End Blues” revealed to audiences and fellow musicians alike the full range of possibilities for the jazz soloist. With the Hot Five and Hot Seven, Louis Armstrong transformed jazz from an ensemble-oriented, folk-derived music into a popular art form defined by soloists who were extreme in their virtuosity.
Musically speaking, the Hot Five and Hot Seven body of work is the sum and substance of the disruption that brought jazz to its first great maturity, both establishing and changing that musical form forever. The long career that followed brought transformations of a different kind, as Armstrong pushed jazz farther into the popular realm, mainstreaming the music, developing as much as a vocalist as he had as an instrumentalist, and figuring as powerfully as a stage presence, a personality, as he did as a musician.
That Armstrong never pushed racial issues to the forefront of his public persona created some controversy, especially late in his life, during the civil rights era. The truth is that his racial and cultural roots were in the music—always. The lyrics of “Black and Blue,” a 1929 Fats Waller song Armstrong made his own, plaintively ask, “What did I do to be so black and blue?” The cultural and aesthetic disruption that Armstrong began both embodied and transcended the apartness, the otherness of race to become integral with the fabric of America and its music. The poor black boy from a New Orleans neighborhood so bad that it was called “The Battlefield” was appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 “United States Ambassador of Goodwill” and sent with his biggest band, the All Stars, on a 51-nation world tour. It’s possible that no president ever made a better decision.