The Secret Gets Out
Jazz goes nationwide as its first superstar is born.
A Syncopated Sendoff
The colorful celebratory strut of a jazz funeral is one of the most evocative images of New Orleans. The high-stepping, festive parade following the internment of the deceased is recognized worldwide as a quintessential display of Crescent City jazz sensibilities. The parades have two distinct sounds: mournful hymns lead the solemn march to the cemetery, then (in celebration of the departed’s entry into heaven) the return route is a joyous street party in motion.
Dixie Goes North
There’s nothing like a bad review to generate business. And that’s exactly how jazz made its name in Chicago. The first jazz expedition, led by the all-white Brown’s Band from Dixieland, had carried the music north in May 1915 with decidedly mixed reactions. Less than a year later, a hastily assembled band of New Orleans refugees began an engagement at a run-down cabaret on Thirty-first Street, one that just happened to be the target of a local decency league’s protest march.
The anti-vice demonstration received major newspaper coverage, and the reporter felt compelled to comment on the music in the process. The newspaper story stressed how hedonistic and uninhibited the scene was and how the music, described as a “blatant scream,” never stopped. And, quite naturally, the next night people were fighting to get in to see what all the excitement was about.
Original Dixieland Jazz Band
Cornetist Nick LaRocca, who would use the core of that group to create the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, knew he was on to something. The music his band was playing wasn’t totally new to Chicago as a whole, since it had already been circulating in the African-American community. But it was a joyous revelation to the white audience, and they soon made the music the hottest ticket in town. The success, however, was accompanied by a firestorm of media condemnation, similar — but even more intense and universal — to what would greet the early days of rock and rap decades later. And, just as with rock and rap, the music was larger than the small minds that opposed it, and its progress couldn’t be stopped by those who didn’t understand its intent or appeal.
Just Call Him King Louis
When Louis Armstrong began his career in the honky-tonks of Storyville, where patrons sported colorful names and criminal pasts, he was relatively unknown. As his fame grew, he needed a nickname; his friends, fans, and fellow musicians ultimately settled on Satchmo, short for Satchel Mouth. Not the most flattering nickname, but it was better than Hammock Face and Rhythm Jaws. Eventually he became known simply as Pops, a nickname befitting the father figure of jazz.
Louis Armstrong: Jazz Incarnate
Jazz fans love to debate the significance of their heroes in the development of the music. Each legend has his or her advocates to eagerly extol their achievements and enduring influence. But, unless they’re discussing Louis Armstrong, they’re only talking about the also-rans, because there is no room for debate when it comes to the single most important musician in jazz history.
Louis Armstrong, quite simply, was jazz incarnate. He expressed, in both his music and his manner, the aspirations and attitude of the music while regularly revolutionizing its sound. In the preface to Jazz: A History of America’s Music, filmmaker Ken Burns describes Armstrong (whom, before researching the documentary, he had naively regarded as only “a guy with a smile and a handkerchief”) with unconditional superlatives. “He is to twentieth-century music . . . what Einstein is to physics, Freud is to psychiatry, and the Wright Brothers are to travel,” Burns writes in appreciative wonder.
Burns, of course, is on target with such comparisons but he omits a contemporary of Armstrong’s with whom Satchmo had much in common. Armstrong can also be called the Babe Ruth of jazz, a designation that recognizes not only his pre-eminent position with his supposed peers but also his role as a personable popularizer of his chosen field of excellence.
Errant Bullet Lands Armstrong on Target
Armstrong grew up without even the pretense of parental supervision in a neighborhood so violent it was called “the Battlefield.” He was a hard-working and fun-loving youngster whose first professional music experience was singing on corners for tips and spare change. Despite his shady surroundings, Armstrong managed to avoid major run-ins with the law until he was arrested, at age 11, for firing a pistol into the air to celebrate New Year’s. He was sentenced to a stint in the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in 1913. The brief stay — during which he became leader of the school’s marching band — changed Armstrong’s life and, subsequently, allowed him to change American music.
The Talented Tyrant
Joe “King” Oliver lorded over the early Crescent City jazz scene, partly through his talent as a bandleader and cornetist and partly through the power of his personality. The short, stocky Oliver cut a big figure with his trademark brown derby, cocked to obscure his blind eye. Though Oliver was frequently more feared than respected, and despite the older musician’s reputation for taking financial advantage of his sidemen, Louis Armstrong was fiercely devoted to his pistol-packing patron.
The Legend Begins
Louis Armstrong had marched out of the Colored Waifs Home with a freshly focused determination to be a professional musician. But it took more than youthful ambition and talent to make a name on the New Orleans music scene, one saturated with experienced virtuoso musicians.
Armstrong, happy just to be playing his horn for a living, persevered through a period of entertaining the “sporting crowd,” the dangerous subculture he had grown up around. He gradually worked his way up to bigger and better venues as word of his awesome abilities made the rounds of the music scene. And when his idol, King Oliver, left New Orleans in 1919 to go to Chicago, the teenage Satchmo took his place in Kid Ory’s prestigious band, at the suggestion of Oliver himself. It was one of young Armstrong’s proudest moments.
“Figurations”
Figure 2-1: Louis Armstrong’s “figurations” were later transcribed in this book, the sales of which brought in enough money for him to buy a Hupmobile for his trip from Chicago to New York.
Armstrong had landed his first few professional gigs on the strength of his blues playing, but he had since moved beyond the simplicity of that form into uncharted musical areas. He had become adept at a personalized form of improvisation involving elaborate extensions and ornamentations of the melody that he called “figurations.” It was exciting stuff, and it quickly caught the attention of the more adventurous fans and fellow musicians who heard it.
But Kid Ory, Armstrong’s employer, wasn’t a fan of musicians who strayed too far from the melody, and he was unimpressed with the extrapolations. There were more than a few testy times on the bandstand, but Armstrong was too conspicuously talented to easily dismiss. Satchmo, his eyes already trained on future innovations, cheerfully endured the bandleader’s displeasure, knowing that he had at last become the equal of his heroes and that he’d be making his own music in due time.
The Dream Deferred
The original New Orleans jazz scene had been reined in by racist politics in the 1890s. Following the 1912 election of African-American favorite Woodrow Wilson as President, the stage was set for the overturn of the discriminatory Jim Crow laws that forced racial separation in all social functions. Celebrations had barely concluded before Wilson took action. However, he implemented the restrictive segregation rulings on the federal level, effectively locking them in for another 40 years.
Jazz Royalty
Figure 2-2: The always elegant Duke Ellington (1934).
While the youthful Armstrong was scuffling on the mean streets of New Orleans, another of jazz’s future royalty was growing up in Washington, D.C., in radically different surroundings.
Duke Ellington, who would be on center stage of the jazz world for a half century, was relatively late in falling totally under the sway of the music. Although he took piano lessons as a child, it wasn’t until he was 15 that he became enamored with jazz, after hearing a particularly impressive ragtime pianist.
Pampered Pianist
Ellington was a pampered child from a relatively prosperous family, and his early years included exposure to a wide array of arts. His mother was fervently religious, taking the young Ellington to two churches — one Baptist and one Methodist — each Sunday. Ellington, who ultimately combined art and religion in a series of historic Sacred Concert productions, grew up far (both geographically and socially) from Armstrong’s “Battlefield” in New Orleans, but he was equally impassioned about the music.
Even as a child, Ellington, as fiercely private as Armstrong was unabashedly extroverted, radiated a quiet dignity and elegance. Some of it was undoubtedly a product of his privileged upbringing, but some was also Ellington’s method of distancing himself from other people, a behavior trait that proved valuable when dealing with the passionate public adulation of his later years. This reserved regal demeanor was a stark contrast with the exuberant nature of Armstrong, a self-confessed clown who felt it was his duty to entertain everyone he met. Although they were polar opposites in personality, the duo would serve as the twin pillars of jazz for decades to come.
We’ll deal more extensively with Duke in several future lessons, but next up is a discussion of how the jazz audience rapidly expanded as the music was exported to Europe and preserved on recordings in America.
