The History of Jazz (14 page)

By all accounts, Hines developed his mastery of the piano at an early age. Even during his high school years, Hines led his own trio, and by the time he left for Chicago had gigged widely in and around Pittsburgh as a piano soloist, sideman, and accompanist to vocalists. While still in Pittsburgh he heard stride pianists Luckey Roberts and James P. Johnson, and his tenure in Chicago overlapped with Jelly Roll Morton’s as well as Teddy Weatherford’s—the latter is a fascinating figure, best known for influencing Hines with his intricate two-handed keyboard style, but who deserves equal credit for his pioneering jazz advocacy in South Asia, where he performed from 1937 until his death from cholera in Calcutta in 1945. In Chicago, Hines worked primarily as a solo pianist before joining Dickerson, in time to participate in a lengthy road trip that took him to California and back. His return to Chicago coincided roughly with Armstrong’s, and soon these two dominant forces in the city’s jazz life were collaborating regularly, in Dickerson’s band and in many other settings. For a while, the two even joined forces in operating their own dance hall—a venture that lasted only a few weeks before they decided that working as sidemen offered a higher (and more predictable) income stream.

Following the closure of their club, Hines entered into a second musical partnership almost as fruitful as his work with Armstrong. Soon after joining New Orleans clarinetist Jimmie Noone at Chicago’s Apex Club, Hines participated in a series of recordings that rank among the finest combo sides of the era. Known as the Apex Club recordings, they reflect a combination of melodic fluency and hot rhythms that was rare at the time. Noone had studied with Bechet and apprenticed with Keppard before leaving New Orleans in 1917, and later served a lengthy stint with Doc Cooke. During this period, Noone developed a clarinet style distinguished by its smooth phrasing and assured execution—one that would inspire Benny Goodman and many other players associated with Chicago jazz. Hines was the perfect foil for Noone. Their crisp clarinet-piano dialogues would stand unsurpassed until Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson initiated a further revolution in small-combo jazz some years later. Indeed, there was only one jazz collaboration of any sort at the time to rival the Apex Club music—and that was the one Hines embarked on in late June 1928, when he joined Armstrong in the studio for follow-up recordings of the latter’s Hot Five.

Armstrong leads off “West End Blues” with an unaccompanied introduction that has justly been praised over the years. It lasts a brief twelve seconds, but what an amazing twelve seconds. Armstrong’s singular mastery of the horn is packed solidly into these few bars of improvisation. “I felt as if I had stared into the sun’s eye,” was Max Kaminsky’s later description of his first hearing of this recording—a reaction that must have been shared by many other jazz musicians of the time. “All I could think of doing was run away and hide until the blindness left me.”
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Yet Hines’s piano solo, also only a few measures in duration, does not suffer by comparison. Midway through his chorus, his right hand accentuates a stuttering phrase in octaves—one of the trumpetlike lines so characteristic of his approach to the keyboard—that both propels the music forward and encapsulates the wide chasm between the jazz sensibility of Hines and the ragtime-based approach of virtually all of his piano contemporaries. On any short list of the defining recordings in the history of jazz, this performance holds a secure position.

“Weather Bird,” the duet Hines recorded with Armstrong a few months later, reflects this same assured command of the new musical vocabulary being developed in Chicago at the close of the Jazz Age. Compare the fluid phrasing of Armstrong and Hines on this performance with the duet version of “King Porter Stomp” recorded, four years earlier, by Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. On the latter number, Morton keeps close to the “oom-pah, oom-pah” rhythm of ragtime, while Oliver sounds reluctant to move too far afield from the written melody. In contrast, on “Weather Bird,” both Armstrong and Hines playfully employ subtle hesitations and anticipations in phrasing and engage in ambitious flights beyond the written score—if, in fact, there was a written score at the session—all with a comfortable command several steps beyond the scope of the early New Orleans pioneers. This was jazz, pure and simple, freed from both the shadow of ragtime and the dictates of dance music.

Yet Armstrong, more than Hines—indeed, more than any jazz player of his day—was just as comfortable working within the narrower confines of popular music. Especially in his singing, which he increasingly featured during the closing years of the decade, Armstrong captured the imagination of both jazz devotees and the general public. Musicians could marvel at his ability to swing the melody with his voice, to recraft a song with the same inventiveness that he brought to his trumpet work, but the irrepressible gusto of Armstrong’s delivery and his instantly recognizable style, epitomized in the raspiness that increasingly marked his singing after the early 1930s, appealed to the mass market as well. He could take a dirge and make it into an ode to joy, transform the despair of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” into, in the words of Ralph Ellison, “a beam of lyrical sound.” As early as his March 1929 recording of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” Armstrong was already demonstrating his sure instinct for deconstructing the vocal line, departing radically from the melody, and singing far behind the beat in a performance that ranks among the finest early ballad recordings in the jazz idiom. A few weeks later, Armstrong dazzled the audience of the Broadway musical revue
Hot Chocolates
with his performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Although Armstrong merely sang from the orchestra pit between acts, the
New York Times
reviewer heralded this performance by “an unnamed member of the band” as the highlight of the show. The producers, realizing Armstrong’s appeal, soon changed the script to bring him on stage to sing.

This shift from the anonymity of the orchestra pit to the acclaim of a Broadway stage is in many ways symbolic of Armstrong’s whole career during the period. One month after the
Times
review, Armstrong entered the studio to capitalize on the popularity of his work in
Hot Chocolates
. The approach adopted here—a trumpet melody statement, followed by an Armstrong vocal and then a trumpet solo—would become an oft-repeated recipe for success for Armstrong over the next several years. Although his vocal work takes on greater prominence in these sides, they also include some of the finest trumpet playing of Armstrong’s career. One listens with admiration to Armstrong’s relaxed control of the rapid tempo on “Shine,” the strafing double-time passages of “Sweethearts on Parade,” or the fluent mute work on “Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea.” Armstrong’s repertoire also changed during this period, with well-crafted popular songs such as “Stardust” and “Body and Soul” developing into outstanding vehicles—a far cry from the instrumental charts and novelty numbers that had been his staple in earlier years. In particular, Armstrong’s vocalizing takes on an idiosyncratic splendor at this stage in his rise to fame. His “Stardust” veers so far from Hoagy Carmichael’s original that it might as well be a new song. Yet Armstrong’s alterations, simplifying and distilling the intervallic gymnastics of Carmichael’s melody, underscore the music’s emotional essence and serve as a deepening rather than a distraction.

Armstrong’s work as a vocalist would exert a tremendous influence on later jazz and popular singers. With good reason, Leslie Gourse gave the title
Louis’ Children
to her history of jazz singing. Even among his contemporaries—singers only a few years younger than Armstrong, such as Bing Crosby, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, and Mildred Bailey—his impact can be clearly heard. Among the next generation, it is pervasive. Armstrong’s music stood out as the most dominant early influence on Billie Holiday, who carefully studied and assimilated aspects of both his singing style and trumpet work. Ella Fitzgerald was equally drawn to this same source of inspiration—her childhood friend Annette Miller recalled her, at an early age, emulating the nuances of Armstrong’s 1929 version of “Ain’t Misbehavin ’”—which helped shape her sense of phrasing, rhythm, delivery, even her choice of songs. Later singers from many different orbits, from Frank Sinatra to Betty Carter, Billy Eckstine to Anita O’Day, Louis Prima to Harry Connick Jr. (names that hint at the diversity of influence; to probe the depth would take a volume) were equally satellites, albeit at varying distances, each feeling the gravitational pull and drawing on the warmth and fire of Armstrong’s overarching star.

By the close of the 1920s, a number of other trumpeters were crafting virtuoso styles in the Armstrong mold. Jabbo Smith and Henry “Red” Allen, in particular, deserve recognition for their command and artistry, and their recordings serve as useful reminders that other horn players could find inspiration in Armstrong’s work while also establishing their own personal sound and conception of jazz improvisation. Although he may have lacked Armstrong’s magisterial phrasing and sense of solo construction, Smith demanded the utmost respect for the speed and range of his playing. And, in many ways, his driving, energetic attack foreshadows the later evolution of jazz trumpet, as represented by Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, more clearly than even Armstrong’s efforts of the period. While still in his teens, Smith turned down a chance to join Ellington’s band, although he made his presence felt in recording “Black and Tan Fantasy” with that group in 1927. In 1929, Smith made a number of sides for the Brunswick label, which include some of the most fervent trumpet playing of the period, but they sold poorly at the time. Henry “Red” Allen also emerged on the scene in 1929 with impressive recordings as leader and sideman on the Victor label. His playing at this stage was akin to Armstrong’s in tone and structure—hear, for example, his exultant solos on Luis Russell’s “Louisiana Swing” (1930) and Don Redman’s “Shakin’ the African” (1931)—but, as it evolved in later years, it took on a freer, more undulating sense of time. At its best, Allen’s approach to melodic construction captured a sense of spontaneity and free invention that stood out even in an art form built on these values. Such artists were formidable rivals, by any measure.

Armstrong thrived on the competition offered by other luminaries of the horn. He refined a crowd-pleasing bravura style during the 1930s, with many solos serving as elaborate vehicles to demonstrate his mastery, especially his skill at hitting high notes. Armstrong exhibited endless ingenuity in building up to the latter: sometimes they cap a spirited performance (“I Surrender Dear” from 1931; “Thanks a Million” from 1935); elsewhere he might develop repeated descending phrases from Olympian altitudes (“I’m a Ding Dong Daddy” from 1930); or indulge in lazy, sliding tones that may take anywhere from one beat to two bars before they arrive—with a
pop
—at the designated high tone (“Shine” from 1931); or let loose with repeated rhythmic stabs into the stratosphere (“Swing That Music” from 1936).

The commercial orientation of his work became especially pronounced after the trumpeter began his long-term association with manager Joe Glaser in 1935. This relationship brought Armstrong a degree of financial security he had never yet enjoyed. Yet critical opinion about the music of this period is mixed and often contradictory.
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His performances and even studio dates often relied heavily on material he had mastered in earlier decades—a pattern that would continue for the rest of his career, with Armstrong eventually leaving behind more than forty recordings of “St. Louis Blues” and over fifty of “Basin Street Blues.” Although these new versions occasionally repeated older renditions virtually note for note, Armstrong was capable of mounting impressive reconfigurations of his classic songs, as in his 1938 version of “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” which would earn praise from trumpeters as diverse as Bobby Hackett and Maynard Ferguson. Through it all, Armstrong’s showboat trumpet style—criticized by some for its formulaic qualities, lauded by others for its sheer bravura—remained a calling card of his work; yet he also well knew the power of understatement, as on his 1940 reunion session with Sidney Bechet, an inspired pairing that anticipated Armstrong’s celebrated return to a “trad jazz” working band seven years later.

His vocal work is perhaps less daring—albeit more stylized—on his post-1934 projects, compared with the liberating and quasi-avant-garde efforts of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Yet no matter the setting or audience, Armstrong seemed almost incapable of singing a tune straight. Even the conventional Armstrong vocals had a way of sounding unconventional, and audiences delighted with the liberties he took—for example, at his performance for King George V of England, when he introduced a song with an unusual royal dedication: “This one’s for you, Rex.” (Adding to the piquancy, the song was “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.”) In the final analysis, Armstrong’s stiffest competition during this period was primarily with his own landmark performances from the past. And if his musical vocabulary now seemed somewhat clichéd, Armstrong was hardly to blame: after all, the jazz world had stolen it from him, not the other way around.

These years also saw Armstrong broaden his audience and build on his gifts as an entertainer. In 1932, during his debut tour of Europe, he both fascinated and dismayed local musicians—one delegation even demanded to examine his horn and mouthpiece, suspecting he had doctored them to facilitate his pyrotechnics. The following year Armstrong returned, visiting England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Holland, and, in 1934, he took an extended vacation in Paris, followed by more concerts and recordings. Soon after returning to the United States, Armstrong initiated his relationship with Glaser, whose savvy sense of career management further advanced the trumpeter’s commercial prospects. For example, Armstrong’s decision to work in a more traditional, small-combo setting in the late 1940s is often cited as a nostalgic return to the roots, but it was just as much a smart business move, driven in no small part by Glaser’s appreciation of the public’s renewed interest in earlier jazz styles (discussed later in this book). Above all, it was also the right artistic decision, reuniting Armstrong with Hines, Teagarden, and other sympathetic fellow travelers. Armstrong’s prominent role in the 1947 Hollywood film
New Orleans
had paved the way for this shift and contributed to the public’s growing perception of him as a historical figure, as did his celebrated February 8, 1947, Carnegie Hall concert, which featured the trumpeter in traditional small combo and more contemporary big band settings. Critics and fans expressed their preference for the former, and though Glaser and Armstrong griped about throwing “eighteen cats out of work,” the trumpeter was soon working full time in a downsized ensemble.