AS THE “Sleepy Time Down South” controversy raged at the beginning of 1952, the All Stars were about to undergo a transformation. Armstrong appeared in the film Glory Alley not with the band but with only trombonist Jack Teagarden, who had left the All Stars four months earlier. After a string of one-nighters in August 1951, Teagarden had played his final date as a member of the All Stars on September 6, 1951. Constant touring had got to him. He left Armstrong on good terms, thankful for the years of employment and the boost to his career, though a clearly sad and puzzled Armstrong would say that Teagarden “won’t make any money that way, away from us. I don’t think Jack really wanted to leave. It isn’t like him to do that. Sometimes people don’t do the things they really want to do.”1 All the same, Teagarden couldn’t have been happier going back to his wife, Addie, and his son. He had joined the band in 1947 in debt, picking up the pieces in the wake of his big band’s failure. Now he was more acclaimed as a musician than ever. He would soon start his own group, Jack Teagarden and His All Stars, which he led until his death. Months after Teagarden left, Armstrong was still disconsolate: “What really bothers me, Pops, is losing Jack. That Teagarden, man, he’s like my brother.”2 Even in 1958, when Teagarden had been out of the band for seven years, Armstrong was asked to name his favorite musician and responded, “You mean the cat I like to play with the best. Easy. It’s Jack Teagarden, Pops.”3 The two would go on to make a few memorable film and television appearances together (including a legendary “Rockin’ Chair” captured live at the Newport Jazz Festival in Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day), but Teagarden’s departure from the band would signal the end of one of the great partnerships in jazz.
Meantime, he was replaced by Russ Phillips, a trombonist from the Midwest who had worked with trumpeter Wingy Manone as well as in the nonjazz bands of Del Courtney and Tiny Hill. In the late 1940s, he settled in Denver, where he first met Armstrong. The All Stars were there in 1949 when Teagarden succumbed to pneumonia and had to return to California. Phillips was playing with a similar combo of his own, so he filled in for Teagarden and must have impressed the maestro. According to his son, Russ Jr., Phillips heard that when Teagarden left, it was Armstrong himself who remembered his playing, saying, “Get the fat white cat from Denver!”4 About working with the All Stars, Phillips was ecstatic in 1952: “I think it’s a great kick to play with a jazz group such as this, fine gentlemen, and to be able to play with fine musicians, I think it would be a kick to anybody.”5 Phillips added “Coquette” to the band’s repertoire, but also performed Teagarden’s feature of “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” and took on Teagarden’s vocal duties on “Rockin’ Chair.”
On July 6, 1951, after an engagement at the Blue Note in Chicago, Arvell Shaw also left the band to study music in Switzerland (he would marry Swiss journalist and photographer Madeleine Bérard). He spent a full year immersed in arranging, voice, theory, harmony, and even piano lessons. Leaving the All Stars had been a difficult decision, as Shaw related to Armstrong in a letter he wrote from Switzerland the following year. “Pops, that was the hardest thing I ever did was to make up my mind to leave home and the band to study,” Shaw wrote. “But in the long run, I don’t think I will regret it.” He also hinted that a chief reason for his decision to go abroad was that blacks in America at the time were denied proper respect as legitimate musicians. “Now-a-days, you have to know so much, especially being an Arabian [i.e., black] to make a living,” he wrote. “I knew so little and with such a long way to go, I hope, with this background, there is nothing they can say, especially after having played with you.” Shaw concluded touchingly, “You gave me my start and I will always appreciate it.”6
Shaw would eventually return to the All Stars, but for now, he was replaced by Dale “Deacon” Jones, a veteran of Teagarden’s big band. Born in Nebraska in 1902, Jones already had been in the music business for thirty years when he joined the All Stars. “I haven’t been to Europe and I haven’t been to South America yet but I’ve been everywhere else,” he said in 1952. Jones added a unique feature to the band with his vocal on the Bert Williams–associated song “Nobody.” Jones wasn’t much of a soloist, but Armstrong loved his showmanship, and privately told friends that his addition elevated the quality of the band.7 With regards to the All Stars, Jones said in 1952, “I’m enjoying myself right now more than I ever have in the last thirty years, playing with this group.”8
Shaw’s and Teagarden’s departures might have been amicable, but the same couldn’t be said of Earl Hines’s. Whereas Teagarden was willing to take a backseat to Armstrong, Hines considered himself just as much of a star and started yearning to become a leader again. “I didn’t think I was greater than Louis, and I didn’t think I had as much experience as he had, so far as going around the world was concerned, but I thought what I had contributed to the music business entitled me to more consideration than they offered,” Hines said of the new contract he was offered in 1951. “I had had a contract with 75 percent publicity and a good salary, but now they wanted to list me merely as a sideman. I thought they should have kept me with 75 percent publicity, but they were not going to, so that was my reason for leaving.”9 It was during the long vacation the All Stars had lined up while Armstrong filmed Glory Alley that Hines decided to make his move; he quit the band in Richmond, Virginia. He later wrote, “I think [Armstrong] never really understood why I left.” Armstrong was furious and didn’t hide his frustration: “I don’t give a damn. Hines and his ego, ego, ego! If he wanted to go, the hell with him. He’s good, sure, but we don’t need him … Earl Hines and his big ideas. Well, we can get along without Mr. Earl Hines.”10 Hines also learned that it might have been unwise to cross Joe Glaser. “I had pretty tough dealing after that, maybe because Joe Glaser thought I shouldn’t have left,” he said years later. “They gave me a rough way to go. It never was pinpointed. I never knew why it was so hard to get engagements, even with other booking agencies. It was hard to break into some of the elite clubs, places where the agencies had, you might say, franchises on the clubs. Yes, it was pretty rough for me for a while.”11
Now that the All Stars had lost half its members in the span of four months or so, many critics averred that it no longer lived up to its name. But while the band had been star-studded, it never cohered as did later incarnations. Armstrong would spend most of the next couple of years rebuilding, but when he finally got the pieces to fit together just right, the All Stars entered their golden era.
For a two-week gig at the Oasis in Los Angeles beginning on December 18, 1951,12 Armstrong turned to Chicago stalwart Joe Sullivan, of whom Armstrong simply said, “Pops plays fine piano.”13 While Phillips and Jones were no match for Teagarden and Shaw as musicians, Sullivan was another matter altogether: he was a highly talented pianist, who added his “Little Rock Getaway” to the All Stars’ repertoire as well as an exciting, stride-filled solo version of “I Found a New Baby.” The downside to Sullivan, though, was that he was a heavy drinker, and that he played in an old style that didn’t exactly fit the All Stars’ swing. Recordings survive of only three performances of the Phillips-Jones-Sullivan All Stars, and they are some of the weakest entries in the Armstrong discography. Jones kept solid time as a bassist, but many a solo disintegrated before its conclusion. Phillips was Teagarden Lite; he played many of the same features and had a somewhat similar style, but any other comparisons of their achievements in the band would be misguided. For his part, Sullivan never attempted to change his monotonous oompah backing, setting the group’s rhythm section twenty years backward. Sloppy moments also abound; on “Steak Face” from a concert at Kitsilano High School in Vancouver, Sullivan forgot to modulate his piano solo from F to D-flat, so when the horns enter, a nasty clash occurs. The very next evening, Sullivan and Jones combined to play some wrong changes during the bridge to “Blueberry Hill.” And even on something as simple as “Back o’ Town Blues,” Sullivan got lost for at least half of it, changing chords at all the wrong times.
Though the All Stars were floundering now and then, most of the time they still put on a great show. Armstrong was going through a period of particularly strong trumpet playing, and at times it sounds as if he’s compensating for the rest of the band with his fiercely strong lead. The Vancouver dates are particularly interesting because the All Stars were performing in front of a riotous crowd of high-school kids eager to scream and shriek their approval at every turn—they even go crazy for Jones’s Bert Williams routine on “Nobody.” Armstrong may still have sent many of his crowds into bedlam, but he could not have liked the sloppy playing, especially from Sullivan, whose features and solos were all spot-on but whose accompaniments were a disaster, even worse than Hines’s, who, too, had not been a good listener.
Sullivan was replaced on February 25, 1952, by Marty Napoleon, who came from a strong jazz background: his brother Teddy was also a fine jazz pianist, and his uncle was trumpeter Phil Napoleon of the famed Original Memphis Five. By the time he joined Armstrong, Napoleon, who started playing professionally in 1940, at the age of nineteen, had played with the bands of Bob Astor, Joe Venuti, Charlie Barnet, and Gene Krupa.14 He had been playing with the Big Four with Buddy Rich, a group that was booked by Joe Glaser, when he joined Armstrong, though originally he turned Glaser’s offer down because he had promised his wife he wouldn’t spend any more time on the road. Napoleon remembers, “So [Glaser] says, ‘Come up and see me, we’ll talk.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ So I went up to see him and we talked and he talked me into it. He was the kind of guy who always made you an offer you couldn’t refuse. That’s what happened, so I went for a year.”15 Napoleon soon began featuring a turbo-charged version of “St. Louis Blues” that never failed to stop the show. After such heavy hitters as Earl Hines and Joe Sullivan, Napoleon might have seemed like a lesser choice, but in my opinion he was the most exciting pianist the All Stars ever had.
It didn’t take long before Napoleon realized he was working for Glaser, not Armstrong, but he never saw any reason to tarnish Glaser, as some have. “I have black friends that say, ‘You know, Joe Glaser made all that money, he became a millionaire with Louie, sending him on those one-nighters,’ ” he says. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute! Joe Glaser made Louie a millionaire. What’s the matter with you guys? Louie didn’t make Joe Glaser a millionaire. If Joe Glaser hadn’t said “Louie, I’m going to book you,” he would still be in New Orleans playing in some honky tonk joint.’ ”16
Napoleon also noticed firsthand how Armstrong’s audiences were changing. “We played a ballroom in Lubbock, Texas,” he remembered. “We were there Sunday and Monday. Sunday night was an all-black audience; Monday night, all-white … Sunday night, maybe 250 people, 300 people; Monday night, white people, 1,200 people.” Napoleon asked road manager Pierre “Frenchy” Tallerie why the blacks didn’t show up. “He says, ‘Don’t you know they don’t like him?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? Who doesn’t like him?’ He says, ‘The black people don’t like Louie ’cause he’s an Uncle Tom. He rolls his eyes, he sweats, he comes with the handkerchief, he laughs, he shows his teeth, he carries on. He’s like an Uncle Tom.’ And the blacks despised him because they were trying to elevate themselves, you know? They’d say, ‘He’s degrading us.’ ” Napoleon was outraged at such thinking. “I said, ‘But how about the way musicians revere him? And say the guy’s a genius? The way he plays? So he’s not educated. So what? People still love him!’ ”17
The new version of the All Stars was heard to great advantage at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans in May of 1952, a thrilling evening of music whose recording sadly remains unreleased. “Indiana,” the standard opener (after “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South”), allowed Armstrong the opportunity to warm up his chops every night on something familiar. Critics would later chastise Armstrong for playing a set solo on the tune, but the truth is he improvised many different variations on “Indiana” into the mid-fifties, and some of these were captured on tape. Charting the progress of “Indiana” is fascinating, as one can hear Armstrong continually toying with ideas, sticking with certain motifs for a number of months before discarding them for something new. He approached his solos like a great composer, studying them each night in his hotel room, listening fastidiously and making changes as he saw fit. When he finally emerged with something of a set solo in 1956—five years after the tune first appeared in an All Stars show—it was a dynamic, adventurous outing, full of bravura high notes, skipping, fleet-fingered phrases, and even a humorous quote of “I Cover the Waterfront.” But even when he perfected it, critics still griped, much to his chagrin. “I also remember when Leonard Feather criticised him in print,” Ernie Anderson recalled. “The complaint was that Louis had once more opened a concert with ‘Back Home Again in Indiana.’ Louis never responded to the critic directly but he turned to me and said, thoughtfully, ‘When I improvise something, I don’t forget it! If it’s good, of course I remember it. Every note! That’s why I play it again. Nearly everything I ever play I improvised at some time or other. Why that third chorus of “Indiana” is a masterpiece, man!’ He had been listening to that concert on his tapes. He spoke as though someone else had played that third chorus that Leonard Feather obviously hadn’t listened to.”18 Armstrong was rightfully proud of that solo, but in 1952 it was still a work-in-progress.
Armstrong, clearly eager to please his hometown fans, blows with incredible force on many New Orleans classics, including “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” “Muskrat Ramble,” and “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Yet the highlight of the evening had nothing to do with music. During the intermission, Armstrong was honored by some local politicians and even given the keys to the city by Myra Menville, secretary of the New Orleans Jazz Club. Asked to say a few words, Armstrong stopped the show by deciding to tell a bawdy joke: “This waitress, in this restaurant, you know,” he began. “It’s about this fella, every time you look around, he’s ordering a hamburger. So the waitress said the next time he come off the job and come in this restaurant, she’s going to scratch hamburger off the list. And the minute the fellow sit down, she say, ‘Good afternoon, sir. I just scratched what you like.’ ” The audience immediately began convulsing with laughter (Menville can be heard saying, “That’s wonderful!”), but Armstrong hadn’t even gotten to the punch line: “So the young man said, ‘That’s all right, miss—just wash your hands and bring me a hamburger!’ ” Armstrong’s joke was greeted with over thirty seconds of laughter.19
Armstrong returned to New York in late August for a month-long engagement at the Paramount, sharing the bill with Gordon Jenkins. “Oh, I loved that man,” Napoleon says of Jenkins. “He was great. Well, we did the Paramount Theater, he was on the stage with us. And he wrote an arrangement on ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ where we closed the show with that. And I swear, one day we came off the stage and you had the elevator that used to take us downstairs to the dressing rooms and Gordon had tears in his eyes, man. And I said, ‘Gordy, what’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Man, that’s the most exciting ending I’ve ever heard of on a show, playing with a band on stage.’ It was fantastic, just great. And he was just a great guy.”20 Drummer Nick Fatool remembered the extent of Jenkins’s hero worship, saying, “Back at the Paramount, he’d stand in the wings holding Louis’s handkerchiefs. And hell, Satch would sweat and spit into those things, you know. But Gordy said just holding those handkerchiefs revived him, like an electric shock. It was his way to get back.”21
Arvell Shaw returned to the band late in the summer of 1952, after clarinetist Barney Bigard, the other original member of the All Stars, left in early August. “I started getting sick of the traveling and of always being on the move,” Bigard later wrote, “so I gave my notice in to that ‘fat-bellied’ Frenchy and went home to take a long rest. I really did rest most of the time. It was good to be off the road for a while.”22 He was replaced by Bob McCracken, a native of Dallas who was boyhood friends with Jack Teagarden. Through the years, he played with the likes of Joe Venuti, Wingy Manone, Frankie Trumbauer, Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, and Benny Goodman, and he recorded as early as 1927. “I didn’t think he was a great player,” Napoleon says of McCracken. “When he did his clarinet solo featured spot in the show, he would practice, all the time we were in the dressing room, he would practice a four-bar introduction to play for his solo. And the minute he got on stage, when he was introduced and he started to play, he would always crack. He’d always make a mistake on it … Why don’t the guy play something else for crying out loud or just ad-lib something? He wasn’t a very good ad-lib player.”23
McCracken entered the band around the same time another change was made. On September 10, during the Paramount engagement, James Osbourne “Trummy” Young replaced Russ Phillips. Armstrong had run into Young during a tour of Hawaii earlier that year, jamming with Young’s band, which featured a fresh-out-of-high-school drummer, Danny Barcelona. Armstrong was always a fan of Young’s playing. In a 1948 letter to one of his friends, he wrote, “I’ve received a letter from the Philippines Island. And they said that Trummy Young is over there Singing and blowing up a Storm. He’s one of my favorite musicians.”24 Armstrong had asked Young to join the All Stars in Hawaii, but Young couldn’t at the time. Nevertheless, Young more or less became part of Armstrong’s entourage during the trip, appearing with him every time Armstrong did an interview, as tapes at the Louis Armstrong House Museum bear out. “The first time I heard Louie play, oh, I just didn’t believe it,” Young said during the trip. “I didn’t think things like that happen. It was so beautiful. And, gee, I had just started playing trombone so I bought every record I could find of his and I just tried to copy them note-for-note on the trombone. Couldn’t make them all, but I made a few that I could copy and they helped me out a lot.”25 Young eventually turned the leadership of his band over to Barcelona and was an All Star by the fall.
Young had an impressive pedigree, having played in the big bands of Earl Hines and Jimmie Lunceford and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. But previous experience paled in comparison with his employment by Armstrong. “Louis wasn’t only a great musician,” he said. “Louis was a great showman on top of it. So there isn’t nothing wrong with using showmanship out there along with your music, a combination, and this is what Louis had. This is one of the things that made him so great. He could play one of the greatest choruses you ever heard in your life, and after he got through, he could give some little mannerisms that was greater than the chorus, you know. So he’d shoot you down one way or the other.”26
Because of the company he kept, Young didn’t consider himself a Dixieland player, but his excitable style jibed with the ensembles. After the exquisite virtuosity of Teagarden, Young offered something different: loud, roaring, all swing. But because he was less well known to many critics, they dismissed his robust style for cluttering the ensembles, as they heard it. But the roar of Young’s trombone often generated tremendous excitement, and as Dan Morgenstern points out, “When Pops was a bit tired, Trummy’s relentless energy often saved the day, and he was a team player first and foremost.”27 Young also sang a lot with Armstrong, inheriting Teagarden’s old part on “Rockin’ Chair” and bringing in his old hits from the Lunceford days, “T’ain’t What You Do” and “Margie.” On the latter, Young would occasionally indulge in some showmanship, playing the slide with one of his feet. As a great trombonist, a charming singer, and an unpredictable showman, Young was a triple threat in the All Stars. Morgenstern adds, “Trummy became the backbone of the All Stars, Louis’s closest friend in the band, and a 12-year iron traveling man. He took critical licks for supposedly having simplified his style for Louis, but that was a mishearing; always a blustery player, Trummy saw his role in the All Stars as chief instrumental supporter of the leader, and if he got a bit raucous at times, it was all for the cause.”28
On September 24, new personnel in tow, the All Stars embarked on yet another tour of Europe. Now an old hand at this, Armstrong said of the trip: “It’s just like going back to New Orleans.” Of the European jazz fans: “They go to jazz concerts there like we go to football games … The Europeans are familiar with every riff you play and you can’t jive ’em. Jazz and longhairs are treated the same—and if they like your riff, they’ll ‘bravo’ you to death.”29 The music on this tour would also be broadcast by Radio Free Europe in such Communist countries as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Here was Armstrong breaking through the Iron Curtain with his brand of jazz.
The trip started off inauspiciously with a concert in Eskilstuna, Sweden, that featured a subpar sound system. According to Gösta Hägglöf, “The usually good-humoured Louis lost his temper, but finally resigned himself and played the concert. ‘I can’t let my audience down,’ he said.”30 A few days later, on September 29, recording equipment caught daring versions of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “High Society.” McCracken more than passed the test on the New Orleans clarinet showpiece, while “Sunny Side” was stretched out to seven minutes and forty seconds to accomplish its stirring achievement.31
Armstrong signed many autographs during the Scandinavian leg of the tour, greeted as he was by throngs. DownBeat reported:
Seldom has anything been seen like the riotous reception accorded to Louis Armstrong on his first visit since 1949. Incredible prices were offered in a black market for tickets to Satchmo’s concert at the Royal Hall in Stockholm (capacity almost 5,000). Scores of fans lined up all night outside the hall to await the opening of the box office. A dozen people were reported to have fainted in the crowds that tried to break a police cordon in Oslo, Norway. In Gothenburg police had to chase the more fervent fans off the roof of the Cirkus Hall. In four shows at the huge KB Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark, Armstrong played to more than 18,000 frenzied customers.32
When the tour landed in Germany, Armstrong met up with his old friend Franz Schuritz. Twenty years earlier, Schuritz had invented a lip cream called Ansatz Crème, of which Armstrong said, “If you don’t use salve on your lip, it will split like a pig’s foot. This Ansatz Crème is the greatest salve in the world. I’d be dead without. Before World War II I told Joe Glaser, my manager, to buy $250 worth of it. He said ‘Are you crazy,’ and I said, ‘Man, I can read between the lines. There’s trouble coming. Now buy it, dammit.’ When I say dammit, I get service. He bought the stuff and now he’s more sold on it than I am. He wants to buy it for America and call it Louis Armstrong Salve. They’ll be using it for generations.”33
But the salve was not always balm for Armstrong’s chops. Many broadcasts survive from this tour, capturing him playing erratically. In the Stockholm and Belgium concerts, he is in peak form; in Switzerland and Italy he struggles mightily. Armstrong was rapidly gaining weight, and this, together with the relentless pace of the tour, may have deleteriously affected his chops. Regardless, audiences were never unsatisfied; Armstrong always gave his all, singing more if he needed to compensate for sore chops. The tour ended in Paris, where Art Buchwald spent time with Armstrong and asked him how the trip had gone. “It was just great,” Armstrong said. “I wasn’t cutting for the money. The cats were there, that’s all I cared about.” Buchwald also asked him how his autobiography was coming along. “I’m up to 1922,” he said. “I can’t get time to write. Between my wife and that horn I got all the work I can cut out.” Finally, the humorist asked the trumpet player why he wasn’t going to stay in Europe any longer. Armstrong’s answer was simple: “I go where Mr. Glaser sends me. He’s king in my country.”34
The next tour Mr. Glaser would book for Armstrong would be far more explosive than anything he had encountered on his visitations to Europe.