The History of Jazz (15 page)

In his later career, Armstrong’s stage presence, repartee, and globe-roving activities as an unofficial ambassador for jazz almost overshadowed his role as a musician. Yet his playing and singing, when they took center stage, radiated an endearing, carefree ambiance that contrasted greatly with the heroic exhibitions of technique from earlier decades. Armstrong could seemingly fit in effortlessly in almost any musical setting, jazz or popular, as witnessed by memorable collaborations with Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Bing Crosby, Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Leonard Bernstein, and others. In an era in which jazz was increasingly hard edged, some lamented the soft contours of Armstrong’s music and public persona. But he was not hesitant to confront mainstream America, as when he canceled a 1957 government-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union to protest President Eisenhower’s initially tepid response to the exclusion of black students from a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Through it all, Armstrong retained his prominence as a public figure—even more, enlarged it to quasi-mythic status. As a senior citizen, he knocked the Beatles off the charts with his hugely successful recording of “Hello Dolly.” The power of his artistry was further confirmed when, almost two decades after his death, his recording of “What a Wonderful World” became a posthumous hit on the strength of its brief appearance in a Hollywood movie. His name was not mentioned in the film, nor was his image featured, yet audiences instantly recognized and responded to his inimitable style. The choice of both singer and song were fitting. For this figure— described by the newspapers at his death in 1971 as the most widely known American of his day—left behind an enduring and endearing artistic legacy, marked by a world-embracing warmth and a universality that transcended musical genres and national boundaries. For Louis Armstrong, it was truly a wonderful world.

BIX BEIDERBECKE AND THE JAZZ AGE

The compact geography of early jazz, as it is commonly told, is deceptively simple. Drawing its ebb and flow on a map, we seem to find ourselves staring at a sharply articulated triangle formed by three urban centers: the starting point is New Orleans, next comes Chicago, finally New York. So much of our history flows along this closed loop that we are tempted to ignore the rest of the map. Yet the Jazz Age was not confined to three cities, or even thirty or three hundred. Probing deeper into the mythology of early jazz, we see the Mississippi River immortalized as the music’s lifeline, inspiring the blues roots of the music, and eventually transporting jazz by riverboat to its second home, Chicago. The story is charming. However, the map will not oblige us this time: the Mississippi skirts Chicago by a wide margin. When Louis Armstrong traveled to Chicago to join the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band, he arrived by train. And years before Armstrong’s fateful trip, countless other New Orleans jazz musicians had already journeyed, by train and other means, not only to Chicago, but throughout the United States and, in some instances, overseas. A number of early jazz players have left behind memoirs of these years, and their tales of nomadic adventures almost overshadow stories of the music. These various sources do, however, agree on one point: almost from the start, jazz went on the road.

These itinerant jazzmen were not alone in their missionary work for the new music. The phonograph record, even more than the musicians themselves, would play a critical role in disseminating the creative fruits of New Orleans jazz to all who cared to listen. As early as 1909, some $12 million in phonograph records and cylinders (at wholesale prices) were manufactured in the United States; only twelve years later, sales were running at four times this level, reaching $47.8 million.
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This tremendous growth set the stage for a substantial increase in the recording of jazz music over the next several years. Our knowledge of jazz before the early 1920s is mostly based on hearsay. But from this point on, recordings document the intricate and variegated evolution of the music.

The complex synergism between technologies of dissemination and the growth of African American music can only be hinted at here. But even when it is sketched in broad brushstrokes, one cannot ignore the telling pattern: the growth of ragtime takes place in conjunction with the spread of parlor pianos, mechanical pianos, and mass-produced sheet music; then the blossoming of early jazz and blues occurs in tandem with the nascent market for recordings; still ahead in our story lies the birth of the Swing Era—a history that took place, in large measure, over the airwaves. Record sales had collapsed with the Great Depression, falling almost 40 percent in 1930 alone, with many listeners now turning to broadcasts, not the phonograph, for their music. Previously, the musical celebrities may have made broadcasts, but, by the late 1930s, in a telling flip-flop, the broadcasts now made the celebrities, now created the audience for live music, now set the agenda for the musical tastes of a nation. The medium is the music: a truism as much today as at the dawn of jazz. Who can doubt that downloading and music files are the platform for jazz careers in the new millennium, just as 78s and radio broadcasts were in an earlier day? In truth, the entire history of jazz finds the music periodically adapating and responding to new technologies of distribution and dissemination as they emerge.

It would be hard to conceive of Bix Beiderbecke becoming a jazz musician without the intervention of technology, in this case a Columbia Graphophone that entered the Beiderbecke household circa 1918. Davenport, Iowa—where Leon Bix Beiderbecke was born on March 10, 1903—may have been, as often pointed out, a riverboat stop, albeit some thousand miles distant from New Orleans. But the span in miles was small compared to the even greater gap in culture, demographics, and attitude between the two cities. If New Orleans was a city immersed in music, Davenport was a community steeped in—what else?—cornfields. By Davenport standards, the Beiderbeckes were a musical family—Bix’s grandfather had led the Deutsche-Amerikanische choral society before the turn of the century—but brass dance bands, funeral parades, and blues singing played no part in their musical heritage. By almost any measure, the city and household were an unlikely setting for the education of a jazz legend.

Bix’s older brother Charles, who returned from service in World War I, owned this phonograph player and a few records, including the popular jazz sides made some months earlier by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The playing of Nick LaRocca, the standout cornetist with the ODJB, made an especially strong impression on Bix. Excited by the music, Bix announced to his befuddled parents his aspiration to learn to play jazz on the cornet. Their attempts to discourage this interest failed: Bix purchased a used horn with his allowance money and began teaching himself how to play it. At this point he had already studied the piano; as early as 1910, the
Davenport Chronicle
ran an article about the seven-year-old Beiderbecke who, it claimed, “can play any selection he hears, on the piano, entirely by ear.”
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Soon he was applying this same native talent, with even greater fervor, to his new instrument.

Beiderbecke’s noted ear for music would take him far, but—like his idol LaRocca (and many other jazz players)—Bix used it as a crutch, as a way of avoiding the rigors of formal study. His early piano lessons were deemed, despite the youngster’s talent, a failure: Beiderbecke never learned to read music fluently, since it was much easier for him to play the lesson by ear. The same mixture of precociousness and studied nonchalance marked his approach to the cornet. Not only did his reading skills fail to improve on the new instrument but, in his attempt to teach himself, Bix adopted an unusual, dry embouchure and fell into a habit of using unconventional fingerings—which he stuck with even after the “proper” method was pointed out to him. No doubt a characteristic streak of obstinacy underlay this chronic disregard of the tried-and-true. Years later, Beiderbecke was equally stubborn in continuing to play the cornet long after most of his contemporaries had switched to the trumpet. In so many aspects of his life, Beiderbecke was determined to do things his way or not at all.

Wary of their child’s growing interest in jazz music (perhaps rightly, given Beiderbecke’s later fatal adoption of all the worst habits of the jazz lifestyle), Bix’s parents decided that firm action was required. The youngster was enrolled in a boarding school where, they hoped, he would pick up a solid education and greater self-discipline. In retrospect, the decision was fated for failure from the start—for their chosen school, Lake Forest Academy, was situated only a short train ride away from Chicago, then rapidly becoming the jazz capital of the world. The worst that Bix could have done in Davenport paled in comparison to the potential for trouble in this new setting. Within a short time of his arrival at the academy, Bix was regularly violating the strict curfew regulations—their disregard would eventually lead to his dismissal—and haunting the various nightspots of Chicago and its environs. At first, Bix went on these midnight expeditions simply to listen and, occasionally, to sit in with various bands; but, as word of his prowess on the cornet spread, he began performing with his own group, composed of a mix of Lake Forest Academy coconspirators and ringers from Chicago. After his expulsion from Lake Forest Academy, Bix must have recognized that his passport to a career would never be reached through an Ivy League degree—although Bix would hatch occasional plans to return to his studies for years—but by means of his cornet and ear for music.

Beiderbecke’s first major band, the Wolverines, brought together a group of like-minded instrumentalists. These all but unknown young jazz devotees took their inspiration primarily from the performances of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. During that band’s engagement at Friar’s Inn, members of Bix’s circle were frequently in attendance: listening, learning, sometimes sitting in with the group. A chance to put this education into practice came in October 1923, when clarinetist Jimmy Hartwell succeeded in obtaining regular employment for the Wolverines at the Stockton Club, located seventeen miles north of Cincinnati. Performances here and at other venues in the area gave the musicians ample opportunity to refine their craft and develop an enthusiastic local following; but greater fame would have been inconceivable this far distant from the major music capitals of America had not the Wolverines secured an opportunity to spend a day recording at the Gennett recording studio in Richmond, Indiana, some 125 miles away from Cincinnati. This was a turning point, not only in documenting the band’s progress to date, but also in reinforcing the confidence of this group of novices to the music industry. “No amount of words could adequately describe the excitement and utter amazement of that first recording, played back to us for correction of positions around the recording horns,” recalled George Johnson, tenorist with the group. “I doubt if any of us realized until that moment how different in style and how dissimilar in effect our results were from the music of the Friar’s band that had thrilled us all so, barely months before.”
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Beiderbecke’s debut recordings with the Wolverines only hint at the potential of the young cornetist. His solos, for all their poise, are melodically simple by comparison with the work he would create over the next several years. Evidence of Beiderbecke’s sensitivity to altered tones is apparent—hear his use of flatted fifths and ninths in his work on “Riverboat Shuffle”—but one also notes the relaxed delivery, so characteristic of Bix’s phrasing. Above all, the expressive, at times haunting, tone of Beiderbecke’s cornet demands our attention. Bix may not have mastered the dirty, rough-edged sound of a King Oliver, a style vastly influential at this stage in the history of jazz; nor do his solos burst forth with the unbridled energy that Armstrong would soon bring to the music. But they sing in a way that was unique in the context of mid-1920s jazz. Not so much played, they sound as though lofted gently from the bell of the horn, left to float in a stream of warm air.

Eddie Condon, a collaborator of Beiderbecke’s, also sensed an invitation in Bix’s sound: “like a girl saying yes,” was his oft-quoted appraisal of his initial encounter with it. “For the first time I realized that music isn’t all the same, that some people play so differently from others that it becomes an entirely new set of sounds.” Hoagy Carmichael, grabbing for an even odder allusion, saw Bix’s music affecting him “in a different way. Can’t tell you how—like licorice, you have to eat some. … Bix’s breaks were not as wild as Armstrong’s, but they were hot, and he selected each note with musical care. He showed me that jazz could be musical and beautiful as well as hot.” To Mezz Mezzrow, Beiderbecke’s tone was “pickled in alcohol. … I have never heard a tone like he got before or since. He played mostly open horn, every note full, big, rich and round, standing out like a pearl, loud but never irritating or jangling, with a powerful drive that few white musicians had in those days.” Louis Armstrong, recalling a Beiderbecke performance in Chicago in the mid-1920s, said simply: “I’m tellin’ you, those pretty notes went right through me.”
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A pearl or a girl? Liquor or licorice? These poetic comparisons may strike some listeners today as being at odds with the body of work that Beiderbecke left behind. Studio technology of the 1920s did not serve the cornetist well. “Records never quite reproduced his sound,” Pee Wee Russell has attested, with many others concurring in the judgment.
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Acoustic recordings, with their use of a single horn to capture music and translate it mechanically into grooves on a wax disk, present modern-day fans, weaned on the crystal clarity of digital technology, with a flattened, one-dimensional sound. Like shadows in Plato’s cave, these artifacts from audio’s earliest days are merely indicative, not truly representative, of the absent originals. And electric recordings, launched in the mid-1920s, sound only marginally better—this innovation was slow in demonstrating its advantages, so much so that, at the time, many listeners lamented its introduction as a step backward. For a solo performance, such as a classical piano piece, or for a vocal number in which the singer was situated front center, the early recording devices proved adequate, if just barely, in conveying the essence of live music. But for ensemble music, such as New Orleans and Chicago-style jazz, the clarity of the individual instruments was greatly compromised. Although the rhythm, melody, and harmony are there for the careful listener to hear, or even to notate, the subtleties of tone are all but lost. For an artist like Beiderbecke, for whom quality and texture of sound were almost as important as the actual notes played, the resulting records are little more than a simulacrum of the actual performance. But, like sailors peering into murky waters, we find that, though we may not be able to measure Beiderbecke’s genius in precise fathoms, even this indistinct ebb and flow gives little doubt that it is ever so deep and broad.