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| The OG Hot Five. |
I decided to see out the 1920s with a look at the early career of one of the biggest American musicians of the first half of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong. The content will bleed ever-so-slightly into the 1930s, but, unlike earlier posts on blues and country, the notes on jazz will end right around the same time the Jazz Age did.
Before digging in, I’ve got a frustration to acknowledge: the audio on Spotify’s early holdings for Armstrong is…well, just crap, muddy and barely audible to boot. That made it hard to hear the music I was hearing, which made it hard to appreciate the same. Basically, I don’t have the same sense/connection to the music that I typically do, which means the sampler will be a short, mildly pissy list of songs (or something else entirely). If Youtube doesn't have better audio, I apologize in advance. Also, the Internet didn’t have much on Armstrong’s early period, so this post relies heavily on Wikipedia. As much as I hate to mono-source, sometimes it's what you have.
Now…Louis Armstrong. I’m confident that a strong majority of people of a certain age can pick out his voice and I think those same people have clear sense of the music he played. Going the other way, the rest of it, especially his early years, would surprise most of those same people.
Born in New Orleans, in 1901, Louis Daniel Armstrong grew up hard, as indicated by the name of a neighborhood he came in and out of, The Battlefield. Both his mother and father came in and out of his life, and to the extent that he spent some years being raised by the Karnoffskys, a family of Lithuanian Jewish street peddlers. That short period of his life clearly meant something to Armstrong, who honored it by wearing a Star of David to the end of his life. He also gained fluency in Yiddish and his first experience with a musical instrument of any kind, e.g., the tin horn he played to attract people to the Karnoffskys wagon.
He was living with his mother again when he dropped out of school at age 11. The same year (or thereabouts) saw him get arrested for stealing his stepfathers’s gun and firing a blank into the air. The legal system shipped him to the “Colored Waif’s House” (aka, 1920s juvie) and into the care of a man named Captain Joseph Jones, a fan of all things military, including discipline. The upside of Jones’ love of the military was the presence of a marching band in the “waif’s house,” and that’s where Armstrong first found brass instruments. It also put him in front of the famous New Orleans trombonist, Kid Ory.
The rest of Armstrong’s life didn’t begin there - there was still sometime in the dance halls of New Orleans’ Storyville district, a short stint of pimping that ended with Armstrong getting stabbed and his mother, Mary Albert, nearly choking a sex worker to death (so you can’t say she was never there for him) - but it did start when he started playing with the bands on Mississippi steamboats. He started in a band led by Fate Marable, who, in nothing else, taught Armstrong to sight-read music (Armstrong called this “going to the University”). The same job introduced him to Joseph Nathan “King” Oliver, a man who became a pivotal figure in Armstrong’s early career. When Oliver quit Kid Ory’s band to join the Great Migration, Armstrong provided a ready replacement on his first instrument, the cornet. And Ory lost him almost as fast and in the same way, when Armstrong moved North in 1922 to follow Oliver, a man he considered his mentor. Ory would join both of them before too long.
On arriving in Chicago, Armstrong reunited with Oliver, but met someone who would have an evern greater impact on his life, the pianist from Oliver’s ensemble, Lil Hardin. Oliver gave him a job and, with his Creole Jazz Band behind him and the Royal Gardens as a venue, they waded into Chicago's burgeoning jazz scene. Hardin, a fascinating person in her own right, as well as a regular early collaborator, had a more and less subtle influence. Having grown up in a more stable environment and with a college education (Fisk University), Hardin possessed a wider view of the world and its possibilities. Armstrong could read music by then and she encouraged him to broaden his knowledge by playing classical music in church concerts; she also worked to convince Armstrong that Oliver both dropped a ceiling on his potential (“he was wasting his talent on a secondary role”) and stiffed him financially. As her Wikipedia entry notes, she saw a country bumpkin in Armstrong and “worked to take the country out of him.” Within a year, she’d talked him into resigning his position with Oliver to go play with New York’s Florence Henderson Orchestra, then one of the biggest outfits in the country.
That skips ahead of a couple key moments, so, to back-track a bit. The work of taking the country out of Armstrong led to a romance - one that stung their bandmates, as several of them had tried to win Hardin’s hand (she was a stunner), only to see the “country bumpkin” be the one to hold it. The two of them married in February 1924, and…enjoyed a working honeymoon while touring with Oliver. Armstrong recording for the first time was another noteworthy development. The experience was far from elegant: they recorded with Gennett Records, which required a train trip to a town called Richmond in bum-fuck Klan-country, Indiana; the job didn’t pay much, the studio was small, and the acoustics and equipment of comparable quality. Still, it made the introduction to the studio experience. Oh, and Armstrong’s mother makes one more appearance. When she traveled to Chicago for a visit, she left virtually nothing behind besides worry and hunger. Hardin arranged an apartment for her, and Mary Albert repaid the favor by helping the two youngsters separate from previous marriages so that Lil Hardin could become Lil Harden Armstrong. Back to New York…briefly…
Joining Henderson’s orchestra put Armstrong in a place that drew a lot of attention. Apart from playing The connections he made opened doors to record with contemporary heavies like Sidney Bechet and the leading blues singers of the day, like Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Henderson worked to blend Armstrong into the act - with his singing (scatting) and tall tales from New Orleans worked into the mix. With his profile rising and his wife hundreds of miles away, Armstrong returned to Chicago to start the next chapter in his career.
Said chapter brings this post to Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Sessions,” a series of recordings he made starting in 1925 and running to 1928 with a self-selected ensemble of players. As noted in Syncopated Times:
“These were informal settings that all concerned remember as a good time. Louis picked all the musicians that he wanted to play on the sessions and the record company generally left them alone to do what they wanted.”
That covers the mechanics, but another source, WTJU.net, expands on what that meant:
“This was not a working group, Armstrong had other larger ensembles, such as pit orchestras, with whom he played nightly. This was a hand-picked group that he created exclusively for recording his music as it rapidly evolved. With these recordings, small-group jazz moves from a music dominated by polyphony and collective improvisation to one that features virtuoso soloists and daring flights of creativity. With these recordings, jazz becomes a soloist’s music leaving the collectivist aesthetic behind.”
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five was the first band to play with Armstrong’s name up top, but the ensembles themselves followed the structure of a regular New Orleans jazz band, e.g., “consisting of trumpet, clarinet, and trombone backed by a rhythm section”; trumpet lays down main melody, clarinet and trombone play around it.” His first group consisted of Armstrong (trumpet), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), and Kid Ory (trombone) for the front trio, and Johnny St. Cyr (banjo) and Lil (now) Armstrong (piano) as the rhythm section. An Okeh Records employee named Richard Jones helped organize the session and, as noted above, he largely let them play. That first session saw a fair amount of collaboration between both Armstrongs, Louis and Lil, with Louis contributing “Yes! I’m in the Barrel” and “Gut Bucket Blues,” and Lil pitching in “My Heart,” but the big session, the one that made them, was the third.
All the same players came in for that February 1926 session, but the momentum had picked up. Those sessions saw the Hot Five lay down “Oriental Strut,” “Georgia Grind,” “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Muskrat Rumble,” “You’re Next,” and, most famously, “Heebie Jeebies.” The records raised Armstrong’s profile high enough - particularly in the Chicago market - that Okeh took the chance of marketing “Heebie Jeebies” to white audiences - who very much responded. The 78 rpm record with “Heebie Jeebies” on one side made them stars of the national stage and, impressive for the times, with both black and white audiences. Okeh Records did the smart thing and signed Armstrong and anyone he brought in to a five-year recording contract.
The “anyone he brought in” comes in because Armstrong wound up recording with a completely different line-up when his Hot Seven came together in 1927. Some of it was practical - e.g., Kid Ory was touring with King Oliver when the session happened - some of it was personal - e.g., Lil and Louis had started the long process of drifting apart by then (it took till 1938 to become official) - but Armstrong called in an entirely new group for both the 1927 recordings and a second set in 1928. Most of the members came from the Carol Dickerson Orchestra, including Fred Robinson (trombone), Jimmy Strong (clarinet), Mancy Carr (banjo), and future, frequent collaborator, Jimmy Hines on piano; in order to grow the Hot Five into the Hot Seven, Armstrong added Zutty Singleton (and, later, Al “Baby” Dodds) on drums and Pete Briggs on tuba. Those 1927-28 sessions saw a couple guest spots, including Lonnie Johnson coming in as a session guitarist and vocalist on numbers like “I’m Not Rough,” “Savoy Blues,” and “Hotter Than That.” The more famous numbers from snippet of a period included “Willie the Weeper,” “Wild Man Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” “Twelfth Street Rag,” and “West End Blues.”
This period launched Armstrong’s career - at least until it ran into the iceberg of the Great Depression, a catastrophe that sank damn near everyone’s careers. He returned to New York in 1929 and found work playing at Connie’s Inn, a rival to the famous Cotton Club (and also a Dutch Schultz front); he also played the pit and landed a cameo in a Broadway production called Hot Chocolate, a play for which Fats Waller wrote the musical score. The same city also saw him reconnecting with people I haven’t even mentioned yet - e.g., Hoagy Carmichael, which afforded Armstrong the opportunity to make the most famous version of Carmichael’s “Stardust.” And then came the iceberg…
This overview skips over a bounty of details, even from the online materials; God only knows what you’d find in a book, but it, along with everything else I’ve read over the prior 21 entries in this series, provides a fair look into how careers in the music industry worked at the dawn of recording, and up to the Depression, for artists both black and white. Louis Armstrong had a fairly standard journey at the beginning, but, unlike…I’d say nearly everyone else I researched, he’s the one who achieved “household name” status. Out of the rest, I’m guessing only Robert Johnson, Lead Belly and Al Jolson come close - and the first two as names/legends, the latter for all the wrong reasons (and that’s more complicated than you think).
Thus endeth the 1920s. I have a 1930s cycle lined-up that, barring distractions [NOTE: Bet on distractions.], will take me to a 40th entry. At which point, this series will take a turn into more condensed timelines and, ideally, a wider variety of artists. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
About the Sampler
As noted above, it’s mostly unlistenable. You have to crank it to hear anything and what you can hear sounds like it’s playing from inside a box. With that in mind, and given that I’ve linked to most of the songs on the sampler above, I thought I’d use this space to pass on some quotes from that WTJU.net page, which has some pretty nifty musical/historical notes on the songs from Armstrong’s “Hot Sessions.” For instance:
On “Heebie Jeebies” - “Armstrong shows himself to have a highly personal manner of interpreting a song. He certainly wasn’t the first person to scat or even to record scatting, it’s just that his vocal style was so influential it seems that way.”
“Potato Head Blues” - “In an extended series of stop-time breaks, Armstrong moves fluidly around the underlying time, perfecting what must have been a startling virtuoso approach to soloing.”
“West End Blues” - “West End Blues was recorded in the June 1928 sessions that signaled a powerful new partnership between Armstrong and pianist Earl Hines. Of hearing the legendary cadenza for the first time, trumpeter Max Kaminsky says, ‘I felt as if I had stared into the sun’s eye. All I could think of doing was run away and hide until the blindness left me.’”
And that feels like a great place to end it. The next chapter…sort of starts in the 1920s - see my earlier entry on Pine Top Smith - but the main event doesn’t come until the 1930s. When boogie-woogie became the hot thing and/or major stepping stone to the future.
Till then…
Before digging in, I’ve got a frustration to acknowledge: the audio on Spotify’s early holdings for Armstrong is…well, just crap, muddy and barely audible to boot. That made it hard to hear the music I was hearing, which made it hard to appreciate the same. Basically, I don’t have the same sense/connection to the music that I typically do, which means the sampler will be a short, mildly pissy list of songs (or something else entirely). If Youtube doesn't have better audio, I apologize in advance. Also, the Internet didn’t have much on Armstrong’s early period, so this post relies heavily on Wikipedia. As much as I hate to mono-source, sometimes it's what you have.
Now…Louis Armstrong. I’m confident that a strong majority of people of a certain age can pick out his voice and I think those same people have clear sense of the music he played. Going the other way, the rest of it, especially his early years, would surprise most of those same people.
Born in New Orleans, in 1901, Louis Daniel Armstrong grew up hard, as indicated by the name of a neighborhood he came in and out of, The Battlefield. Both his mother and father came in and out of his life, and to the extent that he spent some years being raised by the Karnoffskys, a family of Lithuanian Jewish street peddlers. That short period of his life clearly meant something to Armstrong, who honored it by wearing a Star of David to the end of his life. He also gained fluency in Yiddish and his first experience with a musical instrument of any kind, e.g., the tin horn he played to attract people to the Karnoffskys wagon.
He was living with his mother again when he dropped out of school at age 11. The same year (or thereabouts) saw him get arrested for stealing his stepfathers’s gun and firing a blank into the air. The legal system shipped him to the “Colored Waif’s House” (aka, 1920s juvie) and into the care of a man named Captain Joseph Jones, a fan of all things military, including discipline. The upside of Jones’ love of the military was the presence of a marching band in the “waif’s house,” and that’s where Armstrong first found brass instruments. It also put him in front of the famous New Orleans trombonist, Kid Ory.
The rest of Armstrong’s life didn’t begin there - there was still sometime in the dance halls of New Orleans’ Storyville district, a short stint of pimping that ended with Armstrong getting stabbed and his mother, Mary Albert, nearly choking a sex worker to death (so you can’t say she was never there for him) - but it did start when he started playing with the bands on Mississippi steamboats. He started in a band led by Fate Marable, who, in nothing else, taught Armstrong to sight-read music (Armstrong called this “going to the University”). The same job introduced him to Joseph Nathan “King” Oliver, a man who became a pivotal figure in Armstrong’s early career. When Oliver quit Kid Ory’s band to join the Great Migration, Armstrong provided a ready replacement on his first instrument, the cornet. And Ory lost him almost as fast and in the same way, when Armstrong moved North in 1922 to follow Oliver, a man he considered his mentor. Ory would join both of them before too long.
On arriving in Chicago, Armstrong reunited with Oliver, but met someone who would have an evern greater impact on his life, the pianist from Oliver’s ensemble, Lil Hardin. Oliver gave him a job and, with his Creole Jazz Band behind him and the Royal Gardens as a venue, they waded into Chicago's burgeoning jazz scene. Hardin, a fascinating person in her own right, as well as a regular early collaborator, had a more and less subtle influence. Having grown up in a more stable environment and with a college education (Fisk University), Hardin possessed a wider view of the world and its possibilities. Armstrong could read music by then and she encouraged him to broaden his knowledge by playing classical music in church concerts; she also worked to convince Armstrong that Oliver both dropped a ceiling on his potential (“he was wasting his talent on a secondary role”) and stiffed him financially. As her Wikipedia entry notes, she saw a country bumpkin in Armstrong and “worked to take the country out of him.” Within a year, she’d talked him into resigning his position with Oliver to go play with New York’s Florence Henderson Orchestra, then one of the biggest outfits in the country.
That skips ahead of a couple key moments, so, to back-track a bit. The work of taking the country out of Armstrong led to a romance - one that stung their bandmates, as several of them had tried to win Hardin’s hand (she was a stunner), only to see the “country bumpkin” be the one to hold it. The two of them married in February 1924, and…enjoyed a working honeymoon while touring with Oliver. Armstrong recording for the first time was another noteworthy development. The experience was far from elegant: they recorded with Gennett Records, which required a train trip to a town called Richmond in bum-fuck Klan-country, Indiana; the job didn’t pay much, the studio was small, and the acoustics and equipment of comparable quality. Still, it made the introduction to the studio experience. Oh, and Armstrong’s mother makes one more appearance. When she traveled to Chicago for a visit, she left virtually nothing behind besides worry and hunger. Hardin arranged an apartment for her, and Mary Albert repaid the favor by helping the two youngsters separate from previous marriages so that Lil Hardin could become Lil Harden Armstrong. Back to New York…briefly…
Joining Henderson’s orchestra put Armstrong in a place that drew a lot of attention. Apart from playing The connections he made opened doors to record with contemporary heavies like Sidney Bechet and the leading blues singers of the day, like Alberta Hunter, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Henderson worked to blend Armstrong into the act - with his singing (scatting) and tall tales from New Orleans worked into the mix. With his profile rising and his wife hundreds of miles away, Armstrong returned to Chicago to start the next chapter in his career.
Said chapter brings this post to Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Sessions,” a series of recordings he made starting in 1925 and running to 1928 with a self-selected ensemble of players. As noted in Syncopated Times:
“These were informal settings that all concerned remember as a good time. Louis picked all the musicians that he wanted to play on the sessions and the record company generally left them alone to do what they wanted.”
That covers the mechanics, but another source, WTJU.net, expands on what that meant:
“This was not a working group, Armstrong had other larger ensembles, such as pit orchestras, with whom he played nightly. This was a hand-picked group that he created exclusively for recording his music as it rapidly evolved. With these recordings, small-group jazz moves from a music dominated by polyphony and collective improvisation to one that features virtuoso soloists and daring flights of creativity. With these recordings, jazz becomes a soloist’s music leaving the collectivist aesthetic behind.”
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five was the first band to play with Armstrong’s name up top, but the ensembles themselves followed the structure of a regular New Orleans jazz band, e.g., “consisting of trumpet, clarinet, and trombone backed by a rhythm section”; trumpet lays down main melody, clarinet and trombone play around it.” His first group consisted of Armstrong (trumpet), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), and Kid Ory (trombone) for the front trio, and Johnny St. Cyr (banjo) and Lil (now) Armstrong (piano) as the rhythm section. An Okeh Records employee named Richard Jones helped organize the session and, as noted above, he largely let them play. That first session saw a fair amount of collaboration between both Armstrongs, Louis and Lil, with Louis contributing “Yes! I’m in the Barrel” and “Gut Bucket Blues,” and Lil pitching in “My Heart,” but the big session, the one that made them, was the third.
All the same players came in for that February 1926 session, but the momentum had picked up. Those sessions saw the Hot Five lay down “Oriental Strut,” “Georgia Grind,” “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Muskrat Rumble,” “You’re Next,” and, most famously, “Heebie Jeebies.” The records raised Armstrong’s profile high enough - particularly in the Chicago market - that Okeh took the chance of marketing “Heebie Jeebies” to white audiences - who very much responded. The 78 rpm record with “Heebie Jeebies” on one side made them stars of the national stage and, impressive for the times, with both black and white audiences. Okeh Records did the smart thing and signed Armstrong and anyone he brought in to a five-year recording contract.
The “anyone he brought in” comes in because Armstrong wound up recording with a completely different line-up when his Hot Seven came together in 1927. Some of it was practical - e.g., Kid Ory was touring with King Oliver when the session happened - some of it was personal - e.g., Lil and Louis had started the long process of drifting apart by then (it took till 1938 to become official) - but Armstrong called in an entirely new group for both the 1927 recordings and a second set in 1928. Most of the members came from the Carol Dickerson Orchestra, including Fred Robinson (trombone), Jimmy Strong (clarinet), Mancy Carr (banjo), and future, frequent collaborator, Jimmy Hines on piano; in order to grow the Hot Five into the Hot Seven, Armstrong added Zutty Singleton (and, later, Al “Baby” Dodds) on drums and Pete Briggs on tuba. Those 1927-28 sessions saw a couple guest spots, including Lonnie Johnson coming in as a session guitarist and vocalist on numbers like “I’m Not Rough,” “Savoy Blues,” and “Hotter Than That.” The more famous numbers from snippet of a period included “Willie the Weeper,” “Wild Man Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” “Twelfth Street Rag,” and “West End Blues.”
This period launched Armstrong’s career - at least until it ran into the iceberg of the Great Depression, a catastrophe that sank damn near everyone’s careers. He returned to New York in 1929 and found work playing at Connie’s Inn, a rival to the famous Cotton Club (and also a Dutch Schultz front); he also played the pit and landed a cameo in a Broadway production called Hot Chocolate, a play for which Fats Waller wrote the musical score. The same city also saw him reconnecting with people I haven’t even mentioned yet - e.g., Hoagy Carmichael, which afforded Armstrong the opportunity to make the most famous version of Carmichael’s “Stardust.” And then came the iceberg…
This overview skips over a bounty of details, even from the online materials; God only knows what you’d find in a book, but it, along with everything else I’ve read over the prior 21 entries in this series, provides a fair look into how careers in the music industry worked at the dawn of recording, and up to the Depression, for artists both black and white. Louis Armstrong had a fairly standard journey at the beginning, but, unlike…I’d say nearly everyone else I researched, he’s the one who achieved “household name” status. Out of the rest, I’m guessing only Robert Johnson, Lead Belly and Al Jolson come close - and the first two as names/legends, the latter for all the wrong reasons (and that’s more complicated than you think).
Thus endeth the 1920s. I have a 1930s cycle lined-up that, barring distractions [NOTE: Bet on distractions.], will take me to a 40th entry. At which point, this series will take a turn into more condensed timelines and, ideally, a wider variety of artists. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
About the Sampler
As noted above, it’s mostly unlistenable. You have to crank it to hear anything and what you can hear sounds like it’s playing from inside a box. With that in mind, and given that I’ve linked to most of the songs on the sampler above, I thought I’d use this space to pass on some quotes from that WTJU.net page, which has some pretty nifty musical/historical notes on the songs from Armstrong’s “Hot Sessions.” For instance:
On “Heebie Jeebies” - “Armstrong shows himself to have a highly personal manner of interpreting a song. He certainly wasn’t the first person to scat or even to record scatting, it’s just that his vocal style was so influential it seems that way.”
“Potato Head Blues” - “In an extended series of stop-time breaks, Armstrong moves fluidly around the underlying time, perfecting what must have been a startling virtuoso approach to soloing.”
“West End Blues” - “West End Blues was recorded in the June 1928 sessions that signaled a powerful new partnership between Armstrong and pianist Earl Hines. Of hearing the legendary cadenza for the first time, trumpeter Max Kaminsky says, ‘I felt as if I had stared into the sun’s eye. All I could think of doing was run away and hide until the blindness left me.’”
And that feels like a great place to end it. The next chapter…sort of starts in the 1920s - see my earlier entry on Pine Top Smith - but the main event doesn’t come until the 1930s. When boogie-woogie became the hot thing and/or major stepping stone to the future.
Till then…
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