Crash Course Timeline, No. 22: Louis Armstrong's "Hot" Sessions

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.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 9: OG Jass & a Few of Its Pioneers

What the hottest bands of the 1920s probably looked like...

I hadn’t planned on either doing a general post on 1920s jazz or touching on more half-forgotten names, but, when I learned that one of the first songs Bix Biederbecke learned by ear was the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag,” the lack of context started to bug me. And so…

What is jazz, who started it and where? To tackle the first question, and contra Jelly Roll Morton claim that he invented it, no one really knows the answer. One can nail down some specific firsts - say, that Jelly Roll Morton wrote the first published jazz composition, or that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (hereafter, “ODJB”) recorded the first 78 rpm album featuring jazz (“Livery Stable Blues,” b/w “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” Victor 18255) - but jazz, like the blues, had a long unwritten history that most people have the good sense not to fill in. In structure and theory, it has roots in blues and ragtime. Getting the a more useful answer, however, involves a couple twists and turns that still leave a handful of open questions.

“When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies.”
- Eubie Blake (quoted from Wikipedia’s overview, the main source for a lot of this)

Something forbidden, in other words, some new thing let loose in the wild of "real America." And yet the crowd went wild; in one of the oldest tales of American history, "real America" wanted jazz. The first ODJB 78 was sold as a novelty, only to surprise everyone by becoming a hit. Before too long, jazz and the people who played it came to dominate pop culture and ultimately become a big enough part in daily life that sense of the forbidden fall away. And, as often happens (which, here, means almost always), that didn't take long.

To return to the question of what jazz is, the Wikieditor had one theory on the origins of its name: it might have come from the slang term, “jasm,” which means “pep and energy” (...but when?). To flag some other, appealing theories:

“Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions.”