The History of Jazz (13 page)

Similarly, Hardin served as the reason for Armstrong’s return to Chicago in the latter part of 1925. The stint with Henderson in New York and an ensuing tour with the band had meant an enforced separation for the pair. Several motives now drove Hardin to seek his return: like any newlywed, she was appropriately anxious to have her husband closer at hand; in addition, she may have suspected Armstrong’s dalliances (which ultimately capsized their marriage); she may have also seen opportunities for advancing Armstrong’s career in Chicago; and clearly she could benefit from his presence in her own band, now set for an engagement at Chicago’s Dreamland Cafe. With some misgivings, Armstrong left the Henderson ensemble, yet took consolation in the leader’s promise to rehire him if he decided to return to New York.

If duties as a husband and opportunities as a sideman brought Armstrong back to Chicago, it was work as a recording star that eventually proved decisive during this period. On November 12, 1925, Armstrong entered a makeshift studio—the OKeh label’s portable recording equipment was in Chicago only a few months out of the year—to undertake his first session as a leader. This date initiated a period of fertile music making, one that would establish Armstrong as the dominant jazz instrumentalist of his generation, perhaps of all time. Surely no other body of work in the jazz idiom has been so loved and admired as the results of these celebrated sessions, the immortal Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. In historical importance and sheer visionary grandeur, only a handful of other recordings—the Ellington band work of the early 1940s, the Charlie Parker Savoy and Dial sessions, the Miles Davis recordings of the late 1950s come to mind—can compare with them. Certainly none can surpass them. It was a rare, felicitous instance of an artist facing a defining moment in a career, and in the process of self-discovery also crystallizing a turning point for an entire art form.

What were the elements that constituted this breakthrough in jazz performance? Armstrong’s role in transforming the focus of jazz from the ensemble to the soloist has already been mentioned. But how Armstrong effected this change is the real crux of the story. It wasn’t that earlier jazz players were incapable of playing solos. But, compared with Armstrong, they lacked the technical resources and, even more, the creative depth to make the solo the compelling centerpiece of jazz music. For all their virtues, none of the other great players of the day—whether Bechet or Beiderbecke, Hawkins or Hines—could match Armstrong’s vast range of rhythmic devices, his variegated ways of phrasing, or just the sheer inner momentum and outer logic of his melody lines.

The method book Armstrong inspired during this period, called
50 Hot Choruses for the Cornet
, is far from his greatest artistic achievement, but in its own way it reveals the essence of his contribution to jazz in a way that no single solo can. To compile this volume, the Melrose publishing house recorded numerous Armstrong improvisations, had them transcribed and printed commercially, then sold the sheet music to other aspiring jazz players. The original recordings that led to this tutorial have been lost, but one need go no farther than the transcriptions to see, in page after page, measure after measure, the innovative quality of the trumpeter’s work. Many of these advanced melodic ideas simply did not exist in jazz before Armstrong. The individual phrases and ways of incorporating syncopation into a jazz line were no doubt highly original at the time; but over and above these isolated gems of improvisational acumen, an ineffable wholeness to Armstrong’s improvisational style must have been a revelation to other players of that era. The unassailable logic of the phrases matched their rhythmic intensity and sense of purpose. As Richard Hadlock describes it, Armstrong “regardless of tempo, always
completed
each phrase and carried each sustained tone out to its fullest value, creating the illusion of unhurried ease, even in the most turbulent arrangement.”
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It is one of the ironies of jazz history that this fundamental element of Armstrong’s contribution is mostly obscured for many modern listeners by the very success of the trumpeter’s trailblazing. To uninformed ears, these Armstrong phrases often sound commonplace today, familiar devices used by many players; it is easy to forget that the jazz world originally learned them from Armstrong. To gauge his true impact, one must go back and compare his solo work with what came before. Listen, for example, to King Oliver’s stilted attempt to swing the two-bar break on his September 1924 recording of “Construction Gang.” Halfway through his break, Oliver loses his way, unable to marry his ambitious double-time phrasing to the ground rhythm. After a brief burst of energy, the horn line fades away abruptly, the beat lost until the piano reenters a moment later. Compare this with any number of Armstrong hot breaks, with their rhythmic vitality and assured execution.

The Hot Five, unlike most previous jazz recording units, was not a regular working band, but was put together solely for these sessions on the OKeh label. At first glance, the band’s pretensions were modest. In terms of instrumentation and repertoire, the Hot Five was very much in the mold of earlier New Orleans ensembles. The group’s lineup, which overlapped to a great degree with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, featured Armstrong with wife Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Kid Ory on trombone, and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo. But from the opening measures of the first take, “My Heart,” something different is in the air. The three horns may be playing New Orleans counterpoint, but here Armstrong’s lead line dominates the proceedings from the start in a way King Oliver would never have allowed. Armstrong once claimed that Oliver had asked him to stand far away from the recording horn during the Creole Jazz Band sessions so that his cornet would not overwhelm the ensemble. On these Hot Five sides, the opposite seems true; Armstrong is clearly positioned front and center and, if anything, the other players sound as though they are standing several paces behind him. But this dominance of Armstrong is more than a matter of relative volume. His melody lines ripple with a newfound freedom and confidence that set them apart from the other instrumental sounds. Who dares to complain that, when his bandmates solo on the ensuing take of “Gut Bucket Blues,” Armstrong talks over their contributions? He is the clear star here, and the other solos are featured—or drowned out—at his discretion.

Follow-up recording dates for Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five find the bandleader even more in command. The clearest indication of this comes in the February 26 session of the following year, where Armstrong the vocalist takes charge, not only revealing his highly personal manner of interpreting a song, but also inventing—at least according to legend—scat singing in the process. Armstrong later described how, in the middle of recording “Heebie Jeebies,” he had dropped the lyric sheet to the tune and was forced to improvise hornlike lines, built on wordless syllables, with his voice. We have good reason to be skeptical of this colorful story. Earlier examples of scat singing (as this technique came to be called) can be found: Al Jolson relied on it repeatedly on his 1911 recording of “That Haunting Melody,” to cite one prominent example, and Jelly Roll Morton traced it back another decade, claiming that New Orleans musicians learned scat singing from Mississippi-born Joe Sims, who was performing wordless vocals around the turn of the century. Yet after the Hot Five recording, this practice became closely associated with Armstrong, and it remains, to this day, a trademark of jazz vocalists.

As if this were not enough for a day’s work, Armstrong also contributed a number of his finest horn solos to date at this same session. Armstrong always took delight in the use of stop-time choruses, a tried-and-true jazz device in which the band would accompany a lead player with a simple rhythmic pattern—in its most common form, striking a staccato note on the first beat of each bar or every other bar—while remaining silent the rest of the time. Unless the soloist possessed enormous rhythmic ingenuity, these stop-time choruses could sound tense or even clumsy; but with a master of percussive phrasing, such as Armstrong, the stop-time technique could serve as the compelling centerpiece to a performance. On two of the numbers recorded at this February 26, 1926, session, “Oriental Strut” and “Cornet Chop Suey,” Armstrong bursts forth with his finest stop-time playing to date, and on the latter he adds a swirling coda that was much imitated by his contemporaries. (The use of Asian-inflected song titles to emphasize the exoticism of early jazz was not uncommon during the period, and makes the later accusations that Armstrong and others of his generation leveled at bebop—deriding it as “Chinese music” or “jujitsu music”—all the more ironic.) By comparison with Armstrong’s work from the following year, these solos reveal slight imperfections and moments of tentativeness, but at the time they represented the finest body of jazz improvisation yet recorded. Follow-up sessions from June and November 1926 find Armstrong displaying increasing fluency in the upper register of the horn, and exerting more control over his tone and phrasing.

After the November session, a period of almost six months passed before Armstrong’s band returned to the studio, this time in an enlarged format. With the addition of Baby Dodds on drums and Pete Briggs on tuba, the new group— christened the Hot Seven—boasted a more prominent, more driving rhythm section, one better able to provide a hard-swinging foundation to Armstrong’s horn lines and vocals. Armstrong’s new conception of jazz, with its emphasis on the soloist, demanded just such a change. His choice of instrumentation reinforced this shift, and reflected his need for a more streamlined accompaniment, one that anticipated the future evolution of the rhythm section—in which piano, bass (filling a functional role similar to the tuba in early jazz by supporting the group with low register on-the-beat bass lines), and drums, with the optional addition of guitar, worked together in providing a looser and more fluid underpinning to improvisation.

During the course of several sessions in May 1927, this expanded Armstrong ensemble showed how much the leader’s conception—as well as the scope of his musical ambitions—had continued to mature in the intervening months. On “Wild Man Blues” the old New Orleans counterpoint is all but gone, relegated to a few brief bars at the close. Instead, the piece is given over to two long solos, one by Armstrong and another by Johnny Dodds. Dodds’s work from the Hot Seven sessions reveals the great strides he had made since his days with Oliver, with his bluesy solos on “Willie the Weeper” and “Alligator Crawl” standing out as especially poised. But no other horn player could outshine Armstrong at this point in the music’s history. On “Alligator Crawl,” Armstrong follows Dodds with a masterful solo, both in terms of his rhythmic command (hear the skipping syncopations with which he kicks off his solo) and technical acumen, as he moves with ease from register to register. But the crowning glory of these May sessions came in Armstrong’s brilliant stop-time work on “Potato Head Blues.” This virtuoso improvisation set a new standard, even for Armstrong. The phrasing, the tonal control, the assured sense of time—one is aware of only the slightest hint of hesitation, midway through the chorus, before Armstrong pushes ahead triumphantly—all contributed to making “Potato Head Blues” the most memorable of the Hot Seven recordings. Follow-up efforts with the Hot Five, from later in the year, find Armstrong in equally fine form, contributing bravura performances of “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and “Hotter Than That.”

The Armstrong revolution was clearly announced in these recordings; yet—strange to say—few members of the general public took notice. He continued to work as a sideman even after this extraordinary output with the Hot Five and Hot Seven. Anticipating the Beatles and Glenn Gould, Armstrong apparently felt no need to bring the music of the recording studio out in front of paying audiences, and these two bands, by any measure his most famous, never went on the road or played a nightclub engagement. Armstrong’s chief paying gig during these Chicago days was as a member of violinist Carroll Dickerson’s ensemble. Yet the Dickerson connection was not without its benefits, if only for its fortuitous pairing of Armstrong with pianist Earl Hines, another rising star laboring in semiobscurity as a sideman in the band. The intersection of these two careers would produce some of the most exciting jazz of the decade.

The twenty-four-year-old Hines had come to Chicago at the close of his teens. A native of Duquesne, Pennsylvania, where he was born on December 28, 1903, Earl Kenneth Hines grew up in a middle-class black family where, as he later described it, “I was just surrounded by music.”
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Years later, critics would characterize his distinctive approach to the piano as the “trumpet style,” linking it to the melody lines of Armstrong, yet the roots of this technique can perhaps be traced back to his childhood, when he began his musical studies learning trumpet from his father, who worked days as a foreman on the coal docks, and piano from his mother. But Hines’s stylistic breakthrough went far beyond the use of trumpetlike lines on the piano. As part of his development, he also studied and assimilated elements of the classical repertoire as well as a wide range of popular styles, including the blues, ragtime, and early stride piano. Hines’s ability to integrate these sources of inspiration seamlessly into his own vision of keyboard performance remains a crucial part of his legacy. For, more than any other musician, Hines stands out as responsible for pushing jazz piano beyond the limiting horizontal structures of ragtime and into a more versatile and linear approach, one that continues to hold sway to this day.

Hines may have lacked the harmonic sophistication of an Art Tatum or the dulcettoned piano touch of a Teddy Wilson, but his rhythmic ingenuity—the complex interweavings of his phrases, his gamesmanship with the beat, the percussive quality of his attack—was unsurpassed. At critical moments in the course of a solo, Hines’s hands would nervously fly across the keyboard, letting loose with a jagged, off-balance phrase, a flurry of notes as agitated as a swarm of honeybees forced from their hive. In the midst of this chaos, the pulse of the music would disappear. Time stood suspended. Yet almost as unexpectedly as it had erupted, this musical anarchy would suddenly subside, and the measured swing of the composition would reemerge, again solidly locked into the ground beat. Put a metronome to this apparent burst of jazz arrhythmia, and you will find that Hines has kept strict time all along.