IN JUNE 1924 THE EDITORS OF The Etude, a magazine for musicians, surveyed the jazz of their day and made the following historical assessment: “We do know that the Jazz of ten years ago is not to be compared with that of today. Jazz has grown up, gone through high school and is ready for college.”1 The editors were right to see this moment as pivotal in the evolution of jazz, but not—or at least not primarily—for the reasons they supposed. Given a glimpse into the future, they would no doubt have been shocked to learn that the key “professor” to lead jazz through its college years would not be prominent white bandleaders Paul Whiteman or Vincent Lopez, nor composers George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, but a twenty-four-year-old African American cornet player from New Orleans named Louis Armstrong (1901–71). Shortly after this statement was published, Prof. Louis opened school, so to speak, and began to “teach,” producing from 1925 to 1928 a series of over seventy 78 rpm recordings for OKeh Records.2 Featuring Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five or his Hot Seven, New Orleans–style groups of varying personnel and instrumentation (sometimes including six members), the records are known collectively as the Hot Fives. Although Armstrong’s previous recordings showed remarkable originality, the Hot Fives went much further, redefining jazz and placing it on a new course, one more revolutionary and far-reaching than any subsequent upheavals in the music’s history. In particular, the Hot Fives helped change the nature of instrumental jazz in the 1920s, shifting the focus from lively ensembles to lengthy statements by virtuoso soloists. This book attempts to explain, in the most significant senses, how all this came about.
The Hot Five recordings ensued naturally from events set in motion by Armstrong’s big break—the call in 1922 to leave New Orleans and come to Chicago to play in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band at the Lincoln Gardens.3 In the summer and fall of 1923, Oliver’s band recorded for OKeh Records. During these sessions the recording team got a chance to hear Armstrong’s playing, and Armstrong became acquainted with E. A. Fearn, the OKeh manager in Chicago, and Ralph Peer, the director of production. When Armstrong moved to New York to play with Fletcher Henderson in 1924, his new wife and de facto manager, Lil Hardin, pressed Peer to record him there. Peer, who later claimed credit for launching the blues craze with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920), saw in Armstrong a potential new star for OKeh’s “race record” portfolio. During his time in New York, Armstrong played on several record dates produced by Peer, including the historically important Blue Five records made with Sidney Bechet under the leadership of Clarence Williams. By late 1925 Peer was ready to take the next step. At Hardin’s instigation, apparently, he offered Armstrong an exclusive contract to make records under his own name, credited to Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, as soon as he returned to Chicago. As sidemen Armstrong chose three fellow New Orleanians—trombonist Kid Ory, clarinetist Johnny Dodds, and banjoist Johnny St. Cyr—plus one outsider: his wife Lil on piano. (Although Hardin was from Memphis, her musical background gave her a strong New Orleans pedigree: at age seventeen she had made her professional debut with the pioneering New Orleans Jazz Band, led by Lawrence Duhé.)
With this group Armstrong made twenty-four recordings between November 1925 and November 1926. During the second week of May 1927, he replaced Ory with John Thomas, expanded the band to include tuba player Pete Briggs and drummer Baby Dodds, and recorded eleven sides under the name Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven. From September to December 1927, he reassembled the original Hot Five to make nine additional recordings, adding guitarist Lonnie Johnson to three tracks. Then, in a sweeping personnel change, Armstrong hired four northern musicians—including the brilliant pianist Earl Hines—and one New Orleanian, drummer Zutty Singleton, to make the last eighteen Hot Five recordings, from June to December 1928 (some of which were attributed to Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra or Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five). To distinguish this last group from the New Orleans Hot Five and the Hot Seven, I will call it the Chicago Hot Five.4
Although the earlier bands were assembled strictly for recording, the members had played together a great deal in the past. Armstrong had worked with Ory and Johnny Dodds in Ory’s Brownskinned Babies in New Orleans, with Baby Dodds on the riverboats, and with both Dodds brothers and Hardin in Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. The musicians’ combined experience in the New Orleans idiom imparted a unity, maturity, and depth to their studio performances that was normally enjoyed only by regular working bands. The Chicago Hot Five, by contrast, was a smaller version of Carroll Dickerson’s Savoyagers, the band that Armstrong played with every night at the Savoy Ballroom, and before that, the Sunset Café. Thus, the 1928 records reflect both that band’s comfortable working habits and, probably, its nightly repertory as well.
By the time Armstrong began the Hot Five series in late 1925, several different approaches to jazz had emerged, including the rollicking New Orleans polyphony of King Oliver, the bouncy homophonic dance music of Jean Goldkette, and the zany musical slapstick of Ted Lewis, none of which emphasized sophisticated, extended solos. On the question of the music’s future, most observers looked to a new experimental hybrid of jazz and classical music, introduced by Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin through their joint production of Rhapsody in Blue (1924). Conventional wisdom in white circles held that this so-called symphonic jazz would surely produce the music’s highest cultural achievements. Black writers took a more ambivalent view of symphonic jazz, vacillating between high praise for the ideals of Western art music and resentment toward Whiteman for his neglect of African American features (and musicians) that made jazz special in the first place. But no one in 1925, it is safe to say, was predicting the rise and influence of someone like Armstrong. First of all, he was a performer instead of a composer, and thus seemed unlikely to determine the conditions for musical change. Black performers, in particular, were thought to be ingenious mimics or clever showmen, but not creators in any deep sense. It was unthinkable that such a person could establish a body of musical principles upon which the next generation of jazz musicians—both white and black—might base their work. And yet virtually all of the important characteristics of 1930s swing, as far as solo playing was concerned, at least, can be traced back to lucidly rendered archetypes in Armstrong’s Hot Fives. By the late 1930s Whiteman was considered passé, and Armstrong was just beginning to be recognized for his seminal contributions to the music of swing and, more broadly, the language of jazz.
This much, I believe, is generally agreed upon by jazz historians. What remains to be demonstrated is how Armstrong brought these momentous developments to pass and how observers in the 1920s may have interpreted them. Some stylistic revolutions in the history of jazz— bebop, free jazz, and fusion, for instance—were immediately recognized as such. But Armstrong’s was a quiet revolution whose full implications went undetected for a long time, even within the black community. This book will argue that 1920s listeners first understood his Hot Five music not as a major realignment of jazz but in more familiar terms as (1) traditional New Orleans dance music marketed toward black southern migrants (as race records), and (2) a manifestation of novelty entertainment such as one might hear on a vaudeville stage. In the former sense, the Hot Fives extended the same tradition upheld by King Oliver a few years previously and had little to offer the next generation. It was in the latter sense, as music saturated in the values of novelty, that Armstrong’s playing most strongly broke with convention. Yet what we, in hindsight, view as his most striking innovations may have come across to 1920s listeners, paradoxically, as par for the course in a world in which the outlandishly new was expected as a starting point for success. Thus, in addition to underrating Armstrong on account of his race, his contemporaries may have underestimated the significance of his playing in purely musical terms as well. The perspective of novelty also tells us something about Armstrong’s motivations—why he chose to play in an unusual manner for his time, and what he hoped to gain by it. We will see that in the pursuit of novelty, Armstrong did not create new music out of whole cloth but by reinterpreting materials readily at hand, familiar materials that sounded brazenly novel when catalyzed by Armstrong’s uncanny transformative gifts.
Armstrong is widely regarded as an innovator, but rarely does he receive the credit due to him as a consolidator. Over the course of the Hot Five series, and especially near the end, one can sense Armstrong’s desire to bring together diverse threads of the jazz and pop music of his day. In particular, it seems clear that he wanted to reconcile the contrasting idioms and agendas of hot and sweet jazz (a project that also occupied Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and other black jazz musicians of the period). In doing so, Armstrong prefigured the peculiar stylistic mix that made the most successful swing bands palatable to a large public in the 1930s. Taking from Whiteman and his ilk only what he needed—that is, sweet but not overtly symphonic elements—while preserving as a foundation his own hot traditions, Armstrong changed the rules of the game. Listeners concerned with the quality of jazz (both moral and musical) no longer faced a simplistic choice between the disreputable hot style and the apparently more refined and dignified sweet style. Armstrong made it safe to enjoy both and, as a growing number of contemporary critics recognized, did so at a level of great artistry. His achievement thus opened the way to the marriage of art and commerce in the swing era, in which the music, at its best, pleased both the jitterbugs and the critics. As Jeffrey Magee has argued with respect to Fletcher Henderson, in this sense Armstrong unexpectedly fulfilled some of the aspirations of the Harlem Renaissance to elevate black cultural achievements to a level of parity with those of white society.5 Had Armstrong not accomplished this stylistic consolidation, his influence might have fallen well short despite the brilliance of his innovations.
Traditionally, studies of early jazz have viewed recordings as timeless works of art, treating them from the critical viewpoint of the writer rather than the workaday perspective of the musicians who made them. These studies emphasize the universal genius of the performers and the influence they seemed to have on other players. In recent years, scholars have developed more contextual approaches. The new studies want to show how the original participants viewed their own work and less the impact it had on succeeding generations. This book will try to bridge the traditional and more recent approaches by assessing the meaning of the Hot Fives both in the 1920s and today. I take for granted that Armstrong changed the face of jazz, becoming the revolutionary genius lionized by early critics. At the same time, I would argue, he accomplished this feat not only by following his undeniably voracious muse, but also by responding to stimuli from his native environment, elements that traditional critics have often ignored as commercial intrusions antithetical to his extraordinary gifts. Sometimes, social forces seemed to drive Armstrong’s musical decisions; other times, as in the matter of structural coherence, he went against the cultural grain, moving in a clearly different direction from his colleagues. To illustrate both Armstrong’s mammoth talent and his environmental dependence, I will blend old-school note crunching with new-school cultural analysis. By combining methodologies, I hope to avoid blind spots in navigating a complex and diverse body of work.
The emphasis on cultural analysis, I expect, will cause no alarm. Some readers, however, may not be happy with my close readings of Armstrong’s solos, nor with my occasional use of terminology and concepts associated with Western classical music and the Euro-American tradition of musical analysis. With a twinge of embarrassment, I recognize that Armstrong himself would have rejected the very task I have undertaken—partly out of modesty and partly from a homespun ideology that refused to sully music with logic: “I don’t think you should analyze music. Like the old-timer told me,… ‘Don’t worry about that black cow giving white milk. Just drink the milk.’ ”6 To potential detractors I can only say that I have tried to ground my analyses in the views of jazz musicians, both Armstrong himself and those who knew him well. If I discuss virtuosity or coherence or harmony, it is usually because musicians brought up these concepts first. If I use language drawn from European analytical traditions, it is because I know of no alternative systems that address specific musical passages with the same precision. In chapter 2 I make a tentative effort to connect Armstrong’s motivic strategies with principles of African American oral rhetoric, while recognizing that such an effort must be regarded as experimental at best. Nevertheless, I operate under the assumption that cultural context has little meaning without a text, and that probing both text and context with equal rigor makes a basic kind of sense (even if such a balance is not always necessary or even possible in writing history). Whether or not I have achieved this objective is another matter.
To accomplish my purpose of charting the peaks, I will not try to conduct an exhaustive survey of Armstrong’s many recordings in the Hot Five series.7 Rather, this book focuses on seven exceptional (and in that sense not necessarily representative) records, treated in chronological order by date of recording: “Cornet Chop Suey” (February 1926), “Big Butter and Egg Man” (November 1926), “Potato Head Blues” (May 1927), “S.O.L. Blues” (and its twin “Gully Low Blues”) (May 1927), “Savoy Blues” (December 1927), and “West End Blues” (June 1928). Other records in the series receive less attention, serving primarily as a context against which to evaluate these seven. In a similar vein, I do not say much about ensemble interaction or Armstrong’s singing in the Hot Fives, since these matters bear more lightly on my topic. As I see it, his singing had little direct effect on the transformation of jazz in the 1920s from an ensemble-based to a solo-based music. And the collective activity of the Hot Fives was largely a throwback to tradition and had little influence on what jazz was becoming in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
My primary motivation for choosing these seven records has not been to further canonize them. While these records are historically important, I do not see them as static, concrete works that sent unique ripples of influence through the jazz community much as Beethoven’s symphonies, say, affected later Romantic composers. Judging from oral histories, it seems likely that Armstrong’s disciples learned his music just as much or more from repeatedly witnessing live performances as from listening to his records. “West End Blues,” to take one example, was probably not a fixed entity but an amorphous, fluid construct that came together in other musicians’ minds from multiple performances of that piece at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago as well as from Armstrong’s famous 1928 recording for OKeh. In this sense, these seven Hot Five recordings might be regarded as private snapshots of a dynamic creative process that played out perhaps even more dramatically in public. They give evidence of Armstrong’s enormous contributions to jazz but, by themselves, do not constitute those contributions.
I selected these records for their capacity to represent specific stylistic or technical principles. The first chapter portrays “Cornet Chop Suey” as a vehicle for Armstrong’s startling virtuosity, particularly his speed and agility, which he himself summed up in the term “fast fingers.” This skill initially arose from Armstrong’s need to distinguish himself in competition with other young cornet players in New Orleans, but took on a different—or additional—meaning after Armstrong moved to Chicago. To make a good living as a jazz soloist in the North, he had to satisfy the demand for novelty. His employer and mentor, King Oliver, gave him a thorough introduction to novelty, through both Oliver’s solos and duet breaks that Oliver and Armstrong played together. As a soloist, Oliver became famous for using muted wah-wah effects to imitate preachers, crying babies, animals, and so forth. In doing so, he maintained a tradition among New Orleans cornetists dating back twenty years, at least, to Buddy Bolden, the legendary founder of jazz. Armstrong, too, wanted to continue this tradition, but for some reason found muted effects difficult to master. So he fell back on the technical fireworks he had been working on in New Orleans. Like Oliver, Armstrong embraced vaudevillian mimesis as his expressive channel, but instead of using wah-wah effects to imitate people and animals, he used runs and arpeggios to imitate the style of New Orleans clarinetists. The longest and most vivid example of this style appears in “Cornet Chop Suey,” the introduction of which features cascading arpeggios. Although he subsequently dropped overt “clarinetisms” from his playing, Armstrong continued to develop the acrobatic impulse such references had implanted.
The second chapter addresses one of the most significant of Armstrong’s achievements, namely his ability to craft extended, coherent solos based on abstract melodies. Before Armstrong, cornet soloists tended to play paraphrases of a song’s melody or very short breaks (unaccompanied solos) on newly invented material. Armstrong was among the first to play lengthy solos on the abstract material characteristic of breaks. More important, he managed to connect the various phrases of his solos, creating a sense of ongoing coherence. In doing so he rejected the prevailing standard of novelty that encouraged a rambling, disjointed rhetoric in order to provide a more or less constant sense of the unexpected. In its place he substituted a structural conception that later musicians would identify with the phrase “telling a story.” It was this conception, based on narrative, that would govern most jazz solos of the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond. One of the most impressive early examples of a strongly coherent full-length solo was “Big Butter and Egg Man.” Armstrong holds this solo together through a complex network of motivic relationships at multiple levels of phrase structure. The unity relies chiefly, however, on his elaboration of a single melodic kernel that first appears in the fourth phrase. In this regard, despite a high degree of abstraction, “Big Butter and Egg Man” still partakes of the old tradition of melodic paraphrase. To get a sense of Armstrong’s approach to solos based on a harmonic progression, we must look to such later recordings as “Potato Head Blues.”
Armstrong’s ability to play lengthy, coherent solos on abstract material helped shift the focus of the jazz solo from the melody to the harmony, from melodic paraphrases to what Scott DeVeaux calls “harmonic improvisation.”8 This process, treated in the third chapter, required Armstrong to bring arpeggios and runs—which had previously been confined to the fringes of his solos in introductions and breaks—into the body of his solos. One gets the impression that he did not find this an easy task. The broken chords in one of his earliest fully arpeggiated solos, on “Oriental Strut” (1926), come across as a bit forced; as he outlines the chords, Armstrong shows his mastery of the harmonic progression but seems as yet unsure how to turn plain arpeggios into memorable melody. A year later, however, on “Potato Head Blues,” he seems to have made a breakthrough. One of his most rigorously arpeggiated solos on record, “Potato Head Blues” also achieves a striking rhetorical fluency and unselfconsciousness. He no longer seems concerned simply to run the changes but instead focuses on making melody out of harmony, unleashing phrase after phrase of lyrical configurations of broken chords. Moreover, the phrases relate to one another motivically, binding the entire solo together in a coherent statement. In this way, “Potato Head Blues” offers a new approach to jazz based on structurally integrated variations of a chord progression rather than embellishments of a fixed melody.
The fourth chapter treats Armstrong’s quest for dominance in the upper register of the trumpet. Although classically trained trumpet players could match Armstrong’s range, their tones became thin as they went higher in pitch. Armstrong’s tone, by contrast, became more brilliant in the upper register. During the 1930s, trumpet pedagogues discovered the reason for this discrepancy: in the early twentieth century it was believed that high notes resulted from stretching the lips into a smile, a technique that produced a thin tone. Later, it was discovered that tongue motion actually created the rise in pitch, and that by puckering rather than stretching the lips a player could preserve a full tone in all registers. Armstrong, an autodidact on the trumpet, stumbled onto this powerful way of playing just as classical theorists were beginning to identify it. The first extended example of this new style can be heard in Armstrong’s solo on “S.O.L. Blues” and “Gully Low Blues,” two versions of essentially the same tune, recorded a day apart. In both solos, at a relatively slow tempo, Armstrong begins the first five phrases with powerfully sustained high Cs. These notes signified a special kind of confidence, displaying a masculine swagger and latent sexuality that colored perceptions of jazz trumpet in the early days, according to Krin Gabbard.9 The solos also forecast high note techniques that Armstrong and others would more fully develop in the 1930s, such as the half-valve glissando and the shake.
The fifth chapter shows how Armstrong used the blues, the most lowly and disreputable idiom of black popular music in the 1920s, to bring sweet elements into his solo style. Armstrong inherited a blues tradition rooted in the lowdown music of New Orleans, emphasizing loud dynamics, searing blue notes, rough tone color, and similarly “gutbucket” musical traits. Like King Oliver before him, Armstrong mastered this style of playing, as his nearly one hundred recorded accompaniments for blues singers amply attest. Yet these recordings also indicate a restlessness or dissatisfaction with the idiom he had inherited. Seemingly bored with the uneventful harmonic activity of most blues songs, Armstrong began exploring more colorful harmonies as early as 1924. This interest in harmonic color—a characteristic of sweet music—became more pronounced as the decade went on. In 1927 Armstrong became a big fan of Guy Lombardo, a leading exponent of sweet music who began performing in Chicago that fall. It may be no coincidence that at the end of the year, Armstrong recorded a blues piece in a style more obviously indebted to sweet music than anything he had previously recorded. On “Savoy Blues” he uses triadic extensions and rubato rhythms to create feelings of melancholy or nostalgia, a mood far removed from the rough and raucous ethos that had come to define the blues idiom. By bringing together within the framework of the blues elements of sweet and hot, urban and rural, North and South, Armstrong took part in a movement identified by Guthrie P. Ramsey as “Afro-Modernism,” which crested at midcentury and pervaded all African American popular genres.10
Sweet elements alone did not fulfill Armstrong’s aspirations to a more high-class style of playing. The economic need for stylistic versatility required Armstrong to become acquainted with principles of the European classical tradition as well. This phase of his development appears to have intensified during his brief rivalry with trumpeter Reuben Reeves. For months in early 1928, Reeves was lauded in the black press—at Armstrong’s expense—for the classical refinement and polish of his jazz playing. The praise came abruptly to an end that spring as Armstrong became a popular star at the Savoy Ballroom. Armstrong’s recordings from this period suggest that he bested Reeves on his own turf, by showing a command not only of hot style but also of sweet and even classical references. This is especially clear in “West End Blues,” the subject of chapter 6. This piece is regarded as a landmark recording, probably for the astonishing virtuosity of Armstrong’s unaccompanied solo introduction. Equally important in my view is the range of stylistic resources he brings to bear throughout the piece. Hot, sweet, gutbucket, classical, clarinet style, and vaudevillian novelty all intermingle in a topical mélange that dismayed New Orleans purists but that must partly account for the recording’s broad appeal among young musicians of the next generation. In “West End Blues,” Armstrong presented himself as a cosmopolitan sophisticate, not by abandoning his New Orleans heritage but by tempering and integrating it with “high-class” northern elements, just as he had physically integrated with northern musicians in this last edition of the Hot Five.
Indeed, if there is a structural theme that unites the diverse trends in these seven records, it is integration. Proceeding from an early reliance on formulas, Armstrong found a way to dissolve the stock figures and blend their essential qualities into a mature solo language. Thus we see him breaking down clarinet-style arpeggios and deriving from them a more natural and fluid approach to figuration. His initial dependence on ragtime clichés yields to fresh and unpredictable rhythmic patterns. His penchant for playing high C leads to a groundbreaking expressive vocabulary in the upper register. And his fascination with sweet and classical music opens new vistas, expanding his technique and adding color to his tonal palette without sacrificing the vigor of his original conception. Drawing together elements from the various traditions of his time, Armstrong created something new and whole and prophetic in its implications. In this way, like all great historical figures he summed up an era.
In 1944, an interviewer longing for a return to the old ways asked: “Do you think jazz will ever regain the freshness and the spontaneity and the naturalness of the music as it was played down in New Orleans?” Armstrong’s answer must have been disappointing: “It will, but there’s always goin’ to be some kind of an addition nowadays to polish it up, see, they couldn’t afford to play jazz as rough as they did way back in the days of Buddy Bolden and King Oliver.… [Listeners] wouldn’t appreciate it, it’s gotta be smoothed out some kinda way.”11 In this gentle rebuke, Armstrong rejected the interviewer’s cherished ideal of jazz as a pure and primitive folk music untouched by the marketplace. Although this notion has been out of favor for a long time now, its romantic implications remain alive in jazz commentary and continue to shape our interpretation of the Hot Fives. How might Armstrong’s achievements appear if considered from another perspective, as his attempt to placate those finicky listeners, whether by smoothing out or, contrarily, galvanizing his idiom? That is the question this book tries to answer.