ARMSTRONG’S SUCCESS in 1947 not only made headlines across the United States but also reached the jazz press overseas. A newspaper article from December of that year announced, “The superb notes of jazz Louis Armstrong and his all-star crew set into the ears of a packed Carnegie Hall audience a few Saturdays ago were heard around the world, and particularly in Paris, France. As a direct result, Hugues Panassié, the world-famous French jazz critic, is reported staying up all night in an attempt to get the great musician for a planned ‘Jazz Festival’ which he hopes to stage in February.”1 Panassié, perhaps Armstrong’s biggest European fan, was also a passionate moldy fig. Repulsed by bebop, Panassié wanted his proposed jazz festival to feature only the musicians he liked, those who played what he called “the real jazz.” In addition to Armstrong, he reached out to Earl “Fatha” Hines. Little did he know he was about to get two for the price of one.
Joe Glaser had already pondered recruiting Hines to play piano for the All Stars.2 Known as “the father of modern jazz piano,” Hines influenced almost every pianist that heard him, though no one could perfectly duplicate his intricate style. His 1920s recordings with Armstrong have attained legendary status, but the two men seemed not to have remained especially close in the ensuing years. Hines led a big band for years, but broke it up in 1946 to start a nightclub in Chicago, El Grotto. Glaser visited Hines at El Grotto and told him, “I’m getting an all-star band together—all bandleaders who have had bands and given them up—to play with Louis Armstrong. It’s a good way to bring you together and we might come up with something. You never know.”3 Hines agreed to come along, closing up his struggling club and saying later, “I’m always glad to be anywhere I can make a dollar, as the saying goes!” Glaser had already drawn up a contract before making his offer to Hines. He was originally hired for only six weeks. He stayed with Armstrong four years.4
With Earl Hines aboard, the All Stars became one of Armstrong’s greatest bands, and as some critics would hail it, one of the greatest jazz bands in the history of music. Armstrong’s new All Stars with Fatha Hines debuted at the Roxy Theatre in New York for a four-week engagement. But because pianist Dick Cary had done such a wonderful job with the band, Armstrong didn’t want to let him go yet, knowing that as egotistical as he assumed Hines was, he might not last as a sideman for very long. Thus, the Roxy engagement featured the unusual setup of two pianos. “Earl was going to Europe with them, and I was going to stay behind—with pay—and then rejoin them after a couple weeks and we were going to have two pianos, [and] I could never figure how they were going to do that, unless they were just going to invite Earl up to play solos or something,” Cary remembered. “Because, he didn’t like to play in someone else’s band, he never did.”5
All the same, the Roxy engagement would prove to be Cary’s last, because of an encounter with the infamous Pierre Tallerie, by all accounts a villainous figure in Armstrong’s later years. Tallerie, better known as “Frenchy,” was originally Armstrong’s bus driver but eventually became his road manager. To Barney Bigard, he was a “real asshole.”6 “He was a racist, really,” says Armstrong’s close friend Jack Bradley. “He’d use the word ‘nigger.’ You know, I don’t know how Glaser got some of these people. I suspect they were all his cronies from Chicago … They were all gangster related and tough and insensitive to people’s needs and didn’t know anything about music.”7 “Frenchy was what you might call a company man,” according to Dan Morgenstern. “He was Joe Glaser’s spy, you know, but everybody knew that. I guess the reason why Joe had him there was that he wanted a disciplinarian, because he knew that Louie from the get-go did not want to be bothered with any nonmusical issues involved in the management of the group.”8 As Armstrong said in 1950, “Joe Glaser formed this band and appointed me leader … I don’t know what any of the men get. I can’t concentrate and play my heart out and pay the musicians off. Can’t put my mind on it. I haven’t seen a contract in 10 years. Papa Glaser handles all that stuff. I don’t need contracts.”9 When it came to “all that stuff,” that’s where Tallerie would come in. “If anybody wanted a raise, they’d have to go to Joe and they’d go to Joe through Frenchy,” Dan Morgenstern said. “If any issues arose on the road, if somebody didn’t like their room, or if somebody wanted, you know, whatever, all the millions of little things that come up when a band is on the road and especially when they travel as much as the All Stars, then it was Frenchy [he went to]. He was the road manager, and it was up to him to take care of these things. And he didn’t do that in the nicest way. He was a bit of a blowhard.”10
According to Cary, Frenchy was “one of the slimiest sonofabitches I ever knew. Oh, he was a horrible man. He started more trouble in that band between people. And that was his job, to do it. I mean I got a glimpse of how they do things like that.” In an early effort to get Sid Catlett to leave the band, Tallerie purposely started an argument backstage at Billy Berg’s between Catlett and Armstrong. “And at one point,” Cary recalled, “Sid had Louis around the neck and he was choking him, then he stopped and he was weeping. It was very embarrassing and [Cary’s girlfriend] Virginia and I didn’t want anybody to know that we were there, so we huddled in the back until they left. That Frenchy was a horrible man.”11
At the time of the Roxy concerts, Cary was going through a divorce, drinking too much, and suffering from leg cramps that forced him to leave the stage in the middle of performances more than once. Cary ended up going to a doctor, who prescribed some sedatives for the cramps. Still, because the band had been such a hit, Cary felt he deserved a raise, so he went to see Joe Glaser about it. “So I’m sitting in the office there, and Frenchy comes in and he tells Joe Glaser that I’m a drug addict. And that was absolutely false, and I got mad as hell. I told him what I thought of him and I left the office and that was the end of that.”12 The exit of Dick Cary is one of the saddest stories in the history of the All Stars. For all the glitz and glamour of Earl Hines’s name, he never did fit the band as well as Cary did. If Hines hadn’t been hired for a limited stint, Cary might have remained with Armstrong for years, a better team player.
With Cary out and the Roxy engagement over, it was off to Europe for Panassié’s Nice Jazz Festival, where the All Stars arrived to a riotous reception from fans and musicians on February 21. Armstrong played from February 22 through February 28 at the Opéra de Nice, where British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton caught Armstrong’s performance and vividly recalled how, in a band with such star power, Armstrong showed he was the leader. “When I first saw him at the Nice Jazz Festival, in 1948, he was in command of a sizeable chunk of jazz history—Earl Hines, Sid Catlett, Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard,” Lyttelton wrote. “Each of these was a jazz giant, and two of them had been for some years bandleaders in their own right. I stood right behind the bandstand one night while they played. And more than once I found myself quaking at the ferocity with which he directed the band. If Sid Catlett’s drums started to intrude too heavily upon a solo, Louis would turn to him and hiss at him like a snake. And more than once Earl Hines’s exuberance was curbed by a sharp ‘Cut it boy!’ ”13 Fully in charge, Armstrong was awarded a “President’s Cup” for his efforts at the festival. Max Jones wrote: “Make no mistake about it, Louis Armstrong is still as great a jazz sensation as he has ever been. In this friendly and almost worshipping atmosphere of jazz fervour, he is in his element, and he is playing stuff which has raised even such old-timers as Sinclair Traill and myself to almost boyish heights of enthusiasm.”14 But not all press notices were positive. The festival was perfect timing for Panassié, who had recently published a biography of Armstrong in 1947. In a negative review of the book, writer Hugh Rees took some shots at Armstrong’s recent Nice performances as well as his status in jazz history—“It seems high time for a reassessment of Louis Armstrong’s importance”—while writing off the musicians in the old Hot Five as “musical illiterates, unaware it seems of their own incompetence.” Rees began planting seeds of negativity that still sprout today:
It was fortunate for Armstrong that, around 1929, he was taken up by a commercially-minded manager. Louis is a natural showman, an adequate if unimaginative trumpeter and an original if sometimes incomprehensible vocalist … But a truly great artist can never be satisfied with his achievements. Were Armstrong, as M. Panassié would tell us, “one of the greatest musicians that humanity has known,” he would have developed. Instead, his approach has remained the same. His technique in a world of Gillespies, Hawkins, and Tatums seems childish. Every phrase that he uses he’s used a hundred times before so that now they all sound faded … After hearing that sad little broadcast from Nice one must face the truth. Louis Armstrong is a bore, whose manner of telling the old, old story has not improved in the least after twenty-odd years of repetition!15
Rees notwithstanding, the majority of Europe’s jazz fans were in awe of Armstrong and remained so when Armstrong arrived in Paris on February 29 to play the Salle Pleyel for the first time since 1934. The air was tense, as there had been an anonymous threat of violence against Armstrong before the concert; the trumpeter was guarded by fifteen police and secret service men on his way to the show. No one made good on the threat, and Armstrong gave a show well received by a crowd of thousands. Armstrong dedicated “Someday” to France and even sang “That’s My Desire” in what DownBeat called “a completely surrealist pidgin-French version.” Years later, much of the concert was released on LP, but it never has been issued on CD. The only sloppy moments on the record are caused chiefly by Hines’s unfamiliarity with the material; he begins “Black and Blue” in the wrong key and has to be admonished by Armstrong for setting the tempo too fast on “Muskrat Ramble.” After another sold-out Paris concert, Armstrong flew back to the United States on March 4. Joe Glaser was particularly pleased with the money Armstrong earned. “March 2,” he said, “the gross was 1,422,748 francs. March 3, a new record, 1,466,404 francs. Bobby-soxers everywhere asking for autographs.” Armstrong was proud of the Sèvres vase presented to him by France’s president, Vincent Auriol, though he referred to it with characteristic simplicity as “a plate.”16 Years later, he remembered the vase, saying, “Say, they only give out about 50 of them vases in the las’ 500 years to people who really done somethin’, like Madame Curie and Toscanini, but I’m the first jazz musician that got one, they tell me.”17
When he returned to the United States, Armstrong was about to step back into the throes of controversy. The boppers had started lambasting him, but not for musical reasons. “I criticized Louis for other things, such as his ‘plantation image,’ ” Dizzy Gillespie later wrote. “We didn’t appreciate that about Louis Armstrong, and if anybody asked me about a certain public image of him, handkerchief over his head, grinning in the face of white racism, I never hesitated to say I didn’t like it.”18 Armstrong fought back. “I’d never play this bebop because I don’t like it,” he said to George T. Simon. “Don’t get me wrong; I think some of them cats who play it play real good, like Dizzy, especially. But bebop is the easy way out. Instead of holding notes the way they should be held, they just play a lot of little notes … It’s all just flash. It doesn’t come from the heart the way real music should.”19 The more Armstrong vented to Simon, the more upset he got. “Those were real tears in the big, round Armstrong eyes,” Simon wrote, “tears of despair, of frustration, tears from a man who had always tried to do what he felt was right, in his relations with people and in relation to his music; tears from a man whom everybody loved, who wanted to harm no one, but who wanted to be free to blow his horn the way he wanted to blow it.”20 A month later the controversy flared, thanks to an article in DownBeat quoting Armstrong at a hotel in Nice talking about the music he heard in New Orleans: “The way they phrased so pretty and always on the melody, and none of that out-of-the-world music, that pipe-dream music, that whole modern malice … So you get all them weird chords which don’t mean nothing, and first people get curious about it just because it’s new, but soon they get tired of it because it’s really no good and you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to. So they’re all poor again and nobody is working, and that’s what that modern malice done for you.”21
The All Stars saw a spike in popularity in the spring of 1948 when a readers’ poll in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, named Armstrong’s group the most popular small combo in the music world. “There has been a switch in positions among the smaller orks with Louis Armstrong displacing Louis Jordan after a week of solid balloting,” the article announced. “Louis in moving to the top is seeing his successful concerts in Detroit and St. Louis bear fruit. To see Armstrong keeping so close to a solid trouper like Louis Jordan is hardly surprising when one peeks into the personnel that makes Satchmo’s aggregation click. Certainly Sid Catlett, Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden and Barney Buigard [sic] are aces on their respective instruments. They are a good part of what makes Armstrong click.”22 No bop groups placed in the poll. Below Armstrong and Jordan were rhythm-and-blues-derived jazz combos, including groups led by Illinois Jacquet, Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Earl Bostic, and Roy Milton. Most jazz history books give scant attention to these bluesy, swinging, and honking musicians, focusing instead on bop and its offspring.
As successful as the band was, Armstrong now and then would have to step up and assert his leadership, especially with Hines. W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was a song Armstrong had recorded and played for decades, but when Hines joined the band, “Boogie Woogie on St. Louis Blues” became his own feature, as it was one of his biggest hits of the swing era. It would remain a feature for All Stars pianists until 1955—except for one night, June 4, 1948. A few days before, Hines had owned it as usual, even introducing it at the microphone. But on June 4, at Ciro’s in Philadelphia, Armstrong called “St. Louis Blues” not as a feature for Hines but as an instrumental showcase for the band. For four minutes, Armstrong dazzled, delving into a complex solo climaxed by an angry blue note of extraordinary power. Not done yet, Armstrong saved his best for the three rideout choruses, building to a sensational ending that saw him hitting high concert E-flats as if he were a young man again. Shortly thereafter, “St. Louis Blues” went back to being a Hines specialty. Hines may have angered Armstrong during the Ciro’s engagement, compelling the trumpeter to fierce competitiveness. Few, including Hines, could match Armstrong’s musicality when he was angry. Hines would get his feature back, but Armstrong had made his point.
Armstrong spent 1948 without a record contract; he didn’t make a single studio side and was none the poorer for it. A Holiday magazine article quoted Glaser as saying the group’s annual gross billings averaged $500,000 and that they had a weekly payroll of $3,200 without commissions.23 Armstrong made it clear that he was decidedly finished with big bands. “We had all that,” Armstrong said. “Take this outfit … ump … Fatha Hines, Big Sid and that Jackson [Teagarden] all had trouble with big groups, lost dough with some of ’em, had a lotta headaches [that weren’t] needed. This is better.”24