Louis Armstrong

[Jubal Slate]

Segregation!

[North Star]

The jazz discussions are all in the Diner, including this thread on Louis Armstrong.

I definitely agree with the importance of Armstrong, but think that it is  a good idea to separate the jazz from classical threads.

+1

[Mirror Image]

Well, the OP made some points above, and then there's this:

[asin]0306804913[/asin]

The title of that book refers to how jazz originated here much like classical music originated in Europe hence jazz is the US's classical music.

[Mirror Image]

The jazz discussions are all in the Diner, including this thread on Louis Armstrong.

I definitely agree with the importance of Armstrong, but think that it is  a good idea to separate the jazz from classical threads.

+1

+2

[TheGSMoeller]

  - TPD
The Thread Police Department has arrived. Calm down.

[Karl Henning]

He was a very nice boy. He used to cut my grass.

[North Star]

- TPD
The Thread Police Department has arrived. Calm down.

Or you'll squash as all like ants?  0:)

[Chaszz]

The thread has not yet been moved to The Diner, in spite of all the rumblings above. In any case, I'll be adding posts to it and will trust that it will have continuity there or here. By the way, the gatepost to The Diner says anything may be discussed there, except music. That's why I put this here. 

I hope as time goes on to demonstrate to a few people that Louis' best solos cannot be compared with anything in our culture more apropos than with classical music. And, again, one has to go to the 1920s for those solos.

[Karl Henning]

http://www.youtube.com/v/JRtNk_7lylQ

[Purusha]

I like his hot five and hot seven recordings, but i can't say i was ever taken by the rest of his oeuvre, though admittedly i didn't listen to them all. He was certainly a pioneer (as far as i can see he was the first to ever put a "real" Jazz solo on a record) but i don't know if that is enough to make him the greatest American musician, or even the greatest Jazz musician.

[Chaszz]

As a beginning for musical examples, I today wrote a post on New Orleans jazz before Louis Armstrong, with links to illustrative recordings. This was designed to provide a background against which his contributions could then be presented. Unfortunately, my system had a glitch and the post disappeared while I was testing it. I don't have time to rewrite it now but will do so soon, this time in Word for safe-keeping until posting. 

[Chaszz]

1. Jazz before Louis Armstrong.


Influential cornetist Buddy Bolden led a popular jazz dance band in New Orleans from 1900 to 1907.

To understand what Louis accomplished, it's necessary to have some knowledge of jazz music as he found it. Jazz developed around 1890 - 1900 in New Orleans, with its rich tapestry of cultural and musical influences. Culturally there were Afro-American, Spanish, French, Cajun, and Creole influences, existing alongside the dominant white American culture. Musically there were a number of contributing strains, with ragtime, marching band music and the blues being the most important.

The blues had earlier evolved out of black field singing during slavery, and before jazz itself appeared the blues probably had formalized its characteristic 8-measure and 12-measure chord progressions, based on the tonic, subdominant and dominant chords. The 12-measure version of the blues continues to this day to be a vital source of improvisation in jazz and rock. An additional important aspect of the blues was its reliance on African musical scales, with the result being the frequent flattening or partial, microtonal, flattening of the third, fifth and seventh notes of the Western diatonic scale. As the blues was absorbed into the new jazz music, these "blue" notes became an integral part of all jazz, a rich contributor to improvisation, even when the actual format was not blues. 

The most important single factor was the meeting and mixing of Western and African musical vocabularies and scales, including the introduction of African rhythms. The presence in black New Orleans neighborhoods, in homes and pawnshops, of a large number of leftover Civil War marching band instruments helped this mixture happen. Before the fullest bite of Jim Crow commenced with Plessy vs. Fergusen in 1896, there were substantial black middle class neighborhoods in many cities, including New Orleans, and it's noteworthy that many early jazz players were middle class and had conventional music lessons as children.

By the turn of the century, after developing in marching bands, jazz was being widely played in dance halls, saloons and in funeral corteges. A more-or-less standardized instrumentation had developed, consisting of a front line of horns backed by a rhythm section. The horns were usually the cornet, which played the lead melody, the clarinet, playing an improvised treble obbligato, and the trombone, adding a bass line that was partly harmonic and partly rhythmic. The part played by the clarinet had developed out of the piccolo obbligato of march music. The rhythm section might consist of any assortment of instruments including piano, guitar or banjo, plucked double bass, tuba and drums, and usually had one to four players, depending to some extent on whether it was a marching or indoor band.

The rhythmic impulse was intense and included some of the complex polyrhythms of African drumming. New Orleans had a red-light district where prostitution was legal, and the sexually suggestive nature of much of the music led to its original name, jass, a slang term for the sexual act. The red-light district's grand brothels or "sporting houses" usually featured a "professor", a Creole or black pianist playing ragtime and jazz in the ornate parlor. Dance halls had the full band as described above.


Jazz marching band, c. 1910

A rhythmic aspect of the music that came to be known as "swing" consisted in holding the note of a eighth-note downbeat for a slightly longer time than the upbeat which followed, a feature also based on the polyrhythms of African music. The quality of swing was to drive the music forward propulsively and at the same time provide a feeling of very pleasurable relaxation. (An interesting Armstrong sidelight here is that swing could typically be present in some sections of a song and not in others, or might be entirely lacking in some jazz songs, which relied instead on the more stilted syncopations of ragtime or white dance music. It was not until Armstrong reached early maturity as a cornetist in 1924 that under his widening influence in person and on records, swing began to permeate every part of every jazz song.) 

At this early time there were generally no solo passages; the collective polyphony by the front line horns repeated chorus after chorus with slight variations. The song would get more melodically and rhythmically intense, or "hot", as it reached conclusion. Occasionally during transition points, or "breaks" between sections, a short solo passage would be played by one horn. Variations in the polyphonic playing, precomposed or improvised, were almost entirely based on the melody and not the harmony. However, the need for the trombonist and especially the clarinetist to learn the notes in the chords accompanying the melody, in order to fulfill their roles, helped to lay the basis for the harmonic variation which would later become standard after Armstrong's great achievements in this realm.

A few recordings will exemplify this early jazz. They were not made in New Orleans, but in northern or western cities to which many New Orleans musicians had migrated in search of more lucrative jobs, as the new music's popularity spread northward and from coast to coast and even to Europe. Although these records come from the early 1920s they most probably reflect the sound and nature of the music as it was generally played from the turn of the century onward in New Orleans. The standard length approximately 3-minute early jazz recording is sonically primitive, acoustic, pre-electric, and does not use anywhere near the best available technology of the time, since these "race records", as they were known, aimed at black buyers, were a minor albeit profitable sector of record companies' sales. The technology will improve as we move forward, so if you can adjust to and deal with these you will have an easier time later on.

The first recording is Ory's Creole Trombone by a band led by the able New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory, recorded in Los Angeles in 1921 or 2. The solo passages consist only of trombone breaks. The structure of the song owes its origin to ragtime and parade music in its distinct melodic sections in the format ABAC with a key change into the C section. The cornet player Mutt Carey leads the group in racheting up the "hot" intensity toward the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWUkShQQwk4


The next recording is Snake Rag by King Oliver's Creole Jazz band, recorded in Chicago in 1923. Cornetist Joe "King" Oliver had come to Chicago from New Orleans. His band was a sensation at the Lincoln Gardens nightclub and played night after night to audiences packed with both blacks and whites. 21-year old Louis Armstrong, a former cornet student of Oliver,  is actually present here on 2nd cornet. Oliver had sent to New Orleans for him and brought him north to Chicago for an unusual role as a 2nd cornetist in part because his own embouchure was beginning to weaken and he needed help and relief. (Oliver's lifelong habit of drinking water sweetened with sugar gradually rotted his teeth and ended his playing some years later.) The two cornetists play duets during the breaks. The number is again in ABAC format with a key change into the C section, and consists entirely of collective improvisation with some breaks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nklm3JoAh3o


King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. 2nd cornetist Louis Armstrong is third from right.

The next recording is Dippermouth Blues by Oliver's band, also recorded in Chicago in 1923. It is way stop on the road to the soloist's era. Oliver, challenged embouchure and all, was one of the best cornetists and this fast 12-bar blues is his masterpiece. There are no succeeding distinct sections here, but one 12-bar blues form which repeats. Although Oliver's solo, stretching for several choruses, is still embedded in the surrounding polyphonic texture, it is notable as a series of melodic and rhythmic variations which develop and lead to a climax. The clarinetist Johnny Dodds also has a solo, earlier in the piece, backed by a stop-time rhythm which implies its formal source in the inter-section break. Young Armstrong, though present, is again not much heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEF9QeHxrYw

Finally, it would be incomplete to close this post without a sample of the sung blues, the separate earlier music which merged into and contributed an important chord progression form and harmonic vocabulary to jazz. Four O'Clock Blues by Flo Johnson was recorded in 1921 or 2. It opens with an introductory verse and then shifts to the classic 12-bar blues form. The accompanying band is a good example of an early group which decidedly does not swing (though the singer does, passably well) but plays in a more antique style of syncopation, especially the cornet player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INvD8T4n0Fw

My next post will begin to follow Louis Armstrong's career as he leaves Oliver's band in 1924 and strikes out on his own.

[king ubu]

There were no recording facilities in New Orleans, as far as I know ... which is why they all travelled to Chicago or other places to make platters.

Love the story about his rehearsal with Fletcher Henderson - the band played pretty and at low volume, and there he comes, blaring out loudly. Asked what he was doing, he said his sheet music said "pp": "pound plenty"! 

[Karl Henning]

BOMBAST!

[Chaszz]

2. Louis on his own


Louis Armstrong around 1925

Louis Armstrong left the King Oliver band in Chicago in 1924 for New York City and wider opportunities. In this post we'll hear some of his work during his early maturity as a soloist... not yet there, but getting closer. Before doing so it's useful to have some background on his early life. He was born in New Orleans in 1901 into a childhood of relative neglect and poverty. His mother was a prostitute in the red-light district and his father, although in the neighborhood, took an on-again, mostly off-again interest in the boy. His older sister and grandmother helped raise him. He quit school after only a few years. A family of Jewish junk-dealers, the Karnofskys, gave him jobs collecting junk and delivering coal, took him in and fed him and often provided him with a place to sleep. Armstrong frequently remembered them fondly in later years. He spent much time on the streets and looking in the doorways of the saloons at night, hearing the jazz and observing the goings-on. He and some other boys formed a singing group that performed on the streets for spare change. 

On New Year's Eve 1912, Louis borrowed his stepfather's handgun and discharged it into the air. He was arrested and sent to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys. Here he received a battered cornet and regular instruction, eventually becoming bandleader. When he was released in 1914, he had a new career.

He began playing in bands and by age sixteen was attracting attention for his blues playing and singing. He received lessons from Joe Oliver and also possibly from Bunk Johnson, two of the best cornetists in the city.  When Oliver left for Chicago, Armstrong replaced him as lead cornet with trombonist Kid Ory's popular band. He also worked on riverboats going up and down the Mississippi, playing in more formal bands and learning to read music. He had a brief, stormy marriage with a prostitute. In 1923, Oliver sent for him and brought him to Chicago as 2nd cornet in his band. His outsized talent and musical ideas began attracting attention there. 

Armstrong dated and married Oliver's pianist Lillian Hardin. It was a marriage that failed within a few years, but was important in that Hardin pushed him to be more decisive in his career and playing. She saw to it that he practiced scales and reading. Aware of his great talent, she told him he would never achieve anything in Joe Oliver's shadow.


Lil Hardin

Under Lil's urging Louis quit Oliver and accepted an invitation to join the Fletcher Henderson band in New York City, one of the first large jazz bands playing arranged music with featured solos. Louis' solos with the Henderson band created a sensation at the Roseland Ballroom in New York. The band as a whole started to swing more reliably and fully under his influence.


Fletcher Henderson. In the 1930s, he became lead arranger for Benny Goodman's swing big band.

Here is Sugar Foot Stomp, a 1925 Henderson recording where Armstrong reprises Oliver's solo on Dippermouth Blues, with a fuller, more vibrant tone and a blistering attack and sense of swing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0ybjKEuX8

Shanghai Shuffle, recorded in 1924, is more dated as an arrangement but contains a fine Armstrong solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-1OAGBBQz0

Copenhagen, 1924, has a 12-bar blues solo by Louis. Too short, but he can also be heard leading and swinging the trumpet section.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZwpzK57z0Y


Clarence Williams

While in New York in 1924-5, Armstrong also recorded with Clarence Williams, a pianist and bandleader from New Orleans. In these recording sessions he encountered Sidney Bechet, a New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophonist who played very fluently and was his only serious rival as a jazz soloist at this time. Williams' band was a typical New Orleans ensemble, but Bechet played soprano sax rather than clarinet. Also, rather than playing the typical clarinet role of obbligato around the cornet lead, he sometimes played a parallel melody and in general often competed with rather than complimented the cornet lead. This led to an overall rivalry between the two players that is very apparent on the best examples of this Williams series, the two recordings of Cake Walkin' Babies from Home.

The tune was recorded twice by the Williams band for different record labels under different band names. In the first version, where the group was named the Red Onion Jazz Babies, Bechet has the more prominent role. During this era of acoustic recording, the cornet had to stand well back from the recording horn to avoid overpowering the others, and Louis can at times hardly be heard here, unlike the second version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98JqwyqDdOI&spfreload=1

The second cut was recorded about two weeks later under the name Clarence Williams' Blue Five, in a studio slightly better sonically. Armstrong, smarting from the first encounter, makes sure to dominate this one. The solos are still embedded in the polyphonic matrix. Bechet does some wonderful things with the soprano sax but his breaks on both records are an odd mixture of swinging and rhythmically stilted phrases - as mentioned earlier, this was a frequent characteristic of jazz played by those who had grown up without Armstrong's influence. Louis here is still a year or two away from his greatest soloing, but in terms of rhythm and attack he more than holds his own in this chapter of the contest. His lead melody during the counterpoint ensembles is forceful in its propulsion and sophisticated swing using an economy of notes, and in its technical mastery of the instrument. In particular, his final passage, in what was known as a "ride-out" ending, shows a mastery of the New Orleans ensemble lead cornet role that is unmatched on records. The simple, repeated rhythmically pulsing two-note phrase ends it majestically but makes one wish there was more. We'll hear something similar later in the Hot Five records. Though he ultimately helped destroy the New Orleans collective improvisation style as the typical mode of jazz with his greatness as a soloist, he was also its best exponent, as demonstrated here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3io6YlyGzk

Here is another Williams recording where Armstrong and Bechet manage to cooperate more than compete, and Louis plays some wonderfully relaxed, swinging passages. Bechet has a somewhat weird novelty solo on bass clarinet. After the first chorus, Louis is way off in the back of the studio, and though you have to listen carefully to hear what he is playing, it is worth it. (Beginning with the next post, recording quality will improve somewhat, and the cornet will be easy to hear at all times.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc6NjajSOw8

Finally for this post, some recordings of the blues. Female blues singers were very popular in the 1920s and sold a lot of records. They were sometimes accompanied only by pianists but more often by two or three players, and occasionally by bands. Once Louis Armstrong reached New York in 1924 and was featured once or twice as a blues accompanist, his cornet became de rigeur on the records of most of the leading blues singers. Here he is with Bessie Smith.


Bessie Smith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9SQdSLW27Q 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rd9IaA_uJI

These examples of Armstrong's playing are fine but are short of his full achievements as a soloist, which will begin to be heard in the next post devoted to his Hot Five. If you've managed to deal with the primitive sonics and somewhat enjoy what you've heard so far, from now on your pleasure should increase appreciably.

[Purusha]

I think an honorable mention before you delve into the birth of the Jazz solo goes to Jelly Roll Morton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcgIrAyNGGM

His recordings sort of run parallel to those of Armstrong because of when the technology was introduced but his music still belongs to "Jazz before Armstrong", so to speak.

Also, Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer deserve a mention as well, not only because the music is great, but also because of the influence they had in creating an alternative, more "cool" type of Jazz aesthetic that differed from the explosive style of Armstrong and was championed pretty strongly by Lester Young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ue9igC7flI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP0cf1bpTM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW7YYt0F-K4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye0thizYq-g

Bix was also a pianist and this little composition shows a great deal influence from Debussy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_Ai8dgBko

[Purusha]

Ho, and Duke Ellington!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Y0cJ-aEbY

[Chaszz]

I think an honorable mention before you delve into the birth of the Jazz solo goes to Jelly Roll Morton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcgIrAyNGGM

His recordings sort of run parallel to those of Armstrong because of when the technology was introduced but his music still belongs to "Jazz before Armstrong", so to speak.

Also, Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer deserve a mention as well, not only because the music is great, but also because of the influence they had in creating an alternative, more "cool" type of Jazz aesthetic that differed from the explosive style of Armstrong and was championed pretty strongly by Lester Young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ue9igC7flI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP0cf1bpTM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW7YYt0F-K4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye0thizYq-g

Bix was also a pianist and this little composition shows a great deal influence from Debussy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_Ai8dgBko

You are right, these people deserve mentions and more. But my purpose was not to write a history of early jazz but to focus on Armstrong's soloing, so anything not directly connected with him and that I left out. I had to put it in the context of where it came from, so wrote a truncated history of New Orleans jazz. I tried to pare things to the bone but even so my story ballooned to far more than I'd planned. In a very tiny way, it was like what Wagner experienced when he tried to write a single work about Siegfried's death and had to keep retreating earlier in time step by step. I am finally getting to the Hot Fives where I would have actually liked to start.

Pianist and composer Jelly Roll is interesting in that his work is the fullest development of New Orleans jazz in its collective playing style. He wrote out a lot of the passages, leaving others to be improvised by his musicians, and the result is a richly variegated tapestry of timbre and rhythm. The best examples of these IMO are Doctor Jazz and Original Jelly Roll Blues, with his Red Hot Peppers, 1926.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vio-TjMi5_s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt203us6TME

The last 2 choruses of Doctor Jazz are extraordinary in the variety of effects among the breaks and ensemble passages, all integrated into the hot "ride-out" at the end. Jelly Roll, who was from an older generation, could not move beyond the New Orleans style as could many younger musicians. He often used the old three-theme ragtime structure as jazz simplified around a single theme with solos. He was developing New Orleans jazz into a fuller, more complex music just as younger jazz composers, arrangers and soloists, and the public, were leaving it behind. His compositions sounded dated in the 1930s, and he ended up broke and despondent. He made a series of reminiscing recordings for folklorist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress, complaining on one of them about how he had once made $100 a night and now was lucky to make $10. He died just as the 1940s traditional jazz revival was getting started in San Francisco, which would have lionized him in person as it did when playing his compositions.
 

[Purusha]

Ho, i understood what you are trying to do, that's why i felt the need to fill up some of the gabs myself!

BTW, why is this thread in this sub-forum again?

[Chaszz]

Ho, i understood what you are trying to do, that's why i felt the need to fill up some of the gabs myself!

BTW, why is this thread in this sub-forum again?

It has been here all along; it was never moved.