Louis Armstrong
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Louis Armstrong. The first genius of jazz, as he has been called, Armstrong began to make a name for himself with King Oliver's band in 1924, and soon became one of the spearheads of the music. With his spectacular, well-crafted solos, possessing both the emotional power of country blues and the elegance of baroque dance, he taught the music world what swing was and showed what jazz was to become. With the prestigious recordings he made with his Hot Five and Hot Seven in the mid-1920s, it was inevitable that jazz would become a solo art form. Armstrong expanded the trumpet's range and technical possibilities. His timbre and vibrato are still miraculous, and he was one of jazz's great singers.
Evans and Sudhalter, biographers of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, wrote of Armstrong's influence: "It was only with the appearance of Louis Armstrong that the idea of the virtuoso jazz solo on trumpet or cornet found its true expression. With Armstrong, the instrument was freed entirely from the restrictions of its original role in marching bands and circuses. When Bix heard Louis later in Chicago, [cornetist Esten] Spurrier said he realized that King Olivier's young protégé had departed considerably from all cornetists ... in his ability to construct an individual, coherent 32-bar chorus in which all the phrases were compatible with each other - while remaining based on the piece and harmonic structure being played. It amazed us all and made us jealous."
Others admired Armstrong's unmistakable sound, with its enormous vibrato, a sound he could still produce - and which continued to have an effect - in the 1960s. Armstrong sometimes sang when he played, with wind-instrument-like solos, full of vigorous humor and always musical. He was just as capable of singing ballads as variety. His warmth and sincerity on Sweet Lorraine (1957) were as impressive as his sense of comedy on You Rascal You (1931 and other dates). He became one of the great personalities of American show business, and was as famous as a singer as he was as a trumpeter, seducing his fans with his music, of course, but also with his humor, mimicry and touching on-stage demeanor. These facial expressions made some people - black and white alike - uncomfortable. Some criticized Armstrong's place in the entertainment world, as if jazz in the U.S. had always been separate from it. In a sometimes condescending book, his biographer, James Lincoln Collier, asserts that Armstrong's adoring public appreciated him only for his songs and jokes, and describes Satchmo as a man lacking in self-confidence who had become the helpless victim of a vulgar show-business world. This lack of self-confidence, he suggests, is due to the fact that he spent his life searching for the father he never had. We're sure, however, that Armstrong, with his many and varied talents and great integrity, would have found such views incomprehensible.
He never separated his musical activities from the stage, and for him, playing the trumpet and singing were one and the same. Collier criticized Amstrong for his compulsive way of working, and his excessive need for applause. But when Amstrong talked about his career, he simply held up his trumpet and declared: "This is my livelihood, and this is my life ! "
In the course of his life, he made a number of choices to protect his musical activities, including taking on Joe Glaser as his manager, who controlled his career from the 1930s onwards and looked after him professionally until his death, a few years before Armstrong's. According to Collier, Armstrong was attracted to Glaser because he was a tough, loud-mouthed man - almost a gangster - who played the role of surrogate father. According to Collier, Armstrong was attracted to Glaser because he was a tough, loud-mouthed man - practically a gangster - who would have played the role of surrogate father. Armstrong recalled, however, that when he was a child in New Orleans, he was advised to take on a white man to take care of his business, allowing him to concentrate on his instrument. While this advice may sadden us today, when black Americans are better able to take charge of their own destiny, it was quite sound advice in the 1920s, and Armstrong's willingness to follow it undoubtedly helped his career.
It's equally sterile to condescend to Armstrong's audience. His fans responded to his personality and stage presence because they were essential elements of his music. Nobody went to an Armstrong concert just to hear his jokes, but the audience laughed heartily nonetheless, because they were told with the same warmth and exuberance as when Satchmo plucked his trumpet and sang. We may regret the ham-handed solos he sometimes played in the 1930s, and criticize the repertoire of his later years. We'd prefer his main hit to have been 1927's Potato Head Blues rather than 1963's Holly Dolly, but those who hear him sing Hello Dolly, Mack the Knife or even Blueberry Hill will hear completely personal versions of popular songs that are no worse than many he offered in the 1930s. He sometimes performed for royalty, but never forgot the people he grew up with. Collier criticizes him for preferring to associate with blacks, "and not just blacks, but blacks from the working classes". Such a preference seems inevitable. Those who would have liked the trumpeter's demeanor and repertoire to be constantly imbued with a somewhat stilted dignity expected a seriousness that would have been inconceivable had he not played so sublimely.
Armstrong undoubtedly heard music from an early age. He lived for a time not far from the famous "Funky Butt" Hall, where the first jazzmen performed, and followed many marching bands in parades. As a child, he recounts in his autobiography, published in 1954, "I began to listen carefully to the different instruments, noticing what they played and how they played it. That's how I learned to distinguish the differences between Buddy Bolden, King Olivier and Bunk Johnson."
At the age of thirteen or fourteen, Armstrong played the tenor part with a vocal quartet made up of young boys performing on the street. He didn't begin to play an instrument until after January 1, 1913, when the police arrested him for firing a revolver the previous evening and sent him to an orphanage for blacks, a relatively mild institution run by Captain Joseph Jones.
There, Armstrong was allowed into the orchestra and eventually given a cornet. He undoubtedly learned to play the usual brass band repertoire, and perhaps had the opportunity to hear the colorful cornet solos popular at the time. He also enjoyed, he said, listening to recordings of opera arias. When he left the orphanage in 1914, he worked at various odd jobs while continuing to play the cornet. His technique undoubtedly made considerable progress. Sidney Bechet later recalled hearing him perform the clarinet solo from High Society on his cornet, already considered difficult for a clarinetist. At other times, he would launch into what he called figurations ("embellishments") or elaborate improvisations on certain chords. I was exactly like a clarinettist," he told a BBC television program, "like the guys who are now going through the whole range of their wind instruments playing bebop and stuff. I'd do all that, alternative fingerings and all, and he [Olivier]'d say to me, 'Play a little melody on your cornet, my boy.'"
Armstrong never forgot this advice. He managed to retain a clarinet-like ease and freedom, while ensuring, as Olivier wanted and advocated, that every note counted. And at some point, he achieved a full, singing sound, more moving and spectacular than Olivier's.
The first major milestone in Armstrong's career came in 1917, when King Olivier left Kid Ory's band, then the most highly regarded in New Orleans, and made way for his protégé. Armstrong seems to have been an immediate success: "The first night I played with Kid Ory's band, the guys were stunned: they could hardly play their instruments, listening to me blowing like crazy. But I wasn't scared at all. I did everything exactly as I had heard Joe Olivier do it." He would continue to do some things in the same way as Olivier: he was partly indebted to him for the way he executed counterpoint with blues singers in the 1920s, although Olivier, like most musicians of his generation, tended to stick to a narrow register, executing only strictly melodic ideas rather than Armstrong's more technical strokes, with their clarinet-like scales and arpeggios. Armstrong also imitated Olivier directly, drawing on his solo on Jazzin' Babies Blues (1923) for phrases he used on Railroad Blues (1925). And in 1928, he recorded Olivier's West End Blues, a few weeks after his mentor.
In November 1918, Armstrong began working on the wheelboats. Around the same time, he married for the first time, but it was to be a short-lived union. By May 1919, he had left New Orleans to join the Fate Marable band, hired by the Streckfus company and sailing out of St. Louis. For the next two years, he worked with this black dance band, learning to read music and perform a varied repertoire. In September 1921, he returned to New Orleans, leaving again in the summer of 1922, when - the second major milestone in his career - Olivier invited him to join his ensemble in Chicago. The originality of the second cornetist in this group must have been obvious from the outset. On recordings, Armstrong's vibrant sound contrasts sharply with Olivier's more subdued one.
The fact remains that Armstrong was the leading jazzman of the 1920s. He rightly became a symbol of jazz, its black roots, its warmth, its depth and its scope. His music touched millions of people around the world. It's not beyond criticism, but at its best, it's certainly beyond praise.
