Birth of the Pop Star
L’Etoile, continued
This depression lastin’ and lastin’. Players can’t get gigs. Fletcher Henderson, Fletcher Henderson! had to shut down his band. King Oliver’s kingdom now composed of a few dive bars back home. Kid Ory moved back to California and raisin’ chickens. Bechet, one of the true greats, using’ his highly skilled hands to tailor clothes. Ma Rainey can hardly raise a tent show on the chitlin circuit. And that’ s a SHOW! Record companies want nothin’ to do with Bessie and she bein’ a national treasure. Bix, dead of bad gin. Some of them white boys doin’ ok. Bing Crosby comin’ up in the City of Angeles. Them Hollywood swells still got money. Benny Goodman comin’ up. Duke and Hines holding on. It’s hard man, it’s hard. I gave all those audiences thrills and chills with ten straight minutes of high Cs. Now what I got to show? Two busted lips. Gotta rest’em for maybe a year or so. Don’t know if I’ll get my embouchure back. What’s really eatin’ at me, this drunk, thieivin’ motherfucker Johnny Collins, my so called agent. He can’t line up gigs or recordings or film work. But he reeeal good at spendin’ my money. And he ain’t fixed these Mob beefs. Gotta lay low in L.A., can’t even think about catching a gig in Chi-town. Capone used to tell me “Louis, you stand under the shade of my umbrella.” I said “lucky I’m a short motherfucker like you!” He laughed, but he ain’t laughin’ now. In federal prison and for… tax evasion, tax evasion! after killing so, so many. It’s a fucked up world.
Look Louis, this fucked up world is a white man’s world. What you need is a solid white man for a friend.
You right, you right. And I think I might know who. Capone’s boy Joe Glaser. He’s “tough but fair” as they say. Meaning if a night club owner don’t pay me he’ll break their fuckin’ legs. And he’s sharp as a tack. Yeah sir, that’s who I need frontin’ for me. A white man, mobbed up, savvy, a real operator. Oh, he’ll take his cut, a deeeep cut. But he plays it straight and as they say he’s an earner.
In 1935 Joe Glaser took over management of Armstrong’s career. He took an egregious 50% cut. But he ended the mob beefs. He got Louis in Hollywood movies, national radio shows, top nightclubs, international tours and decades of successful recordings. Glaser’s Associated Booking Corporation went on to represent Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Dave Brubeck, Barbara Streisand, B.B. King and many others.
Armstrong synthesized major strains of American popular music. Louis Armstrong COULD play white. He DID play black. This syncopated code switching, or the inverse, would prove a key to success for future stars. He bridged black and white musical cultures with undertones of Caribbean and Native American rhythms, continental opera and Eastern European Jewish vocals. He melded the sweet sentimentality of Tin Pan Alley’s Great American Songbook with the harsh reality of the Blues. He brought a modern sensibility to the comedic and clownish entertainment of vaudeville in keeping with contemporary trends in Hollywood. He combined discipline and professionalism with freewheeling improvisation and the unexpected, swinging rhythms of syncopation. With consideration of her mentor, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith largely invented the American pop vocal style. Louis Armstrong sold it to the world. With his virtuosity both as singer and instrumentalist and his stylistic range he could sequence songs and take the audience on an emotional journey. From raucous, upbeat dance numbers, to sweet, memorable melodies, hard wrenching blues, leavened with bits of comedy, off the cuff raps, showmanship, virtuosic phrasing and improvisation, compelling harmonies, and always that hypnotic, swinging rhythm. This ability to take the listener on an emotional journey defines the great stars that follow Louis from Billie Holliday to Frank Sinatra, to Elvis, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton and many more.
Perhaps most importantly he made the ancient African musical tradition of call and response the central feature of American pop music. Call and response between instrument and instrument, call and response between singer and instrument, call and response between musician and audience. The unknown possibilities of interplay brings a frisson of excitement. In most traditional musics the players play, the audience listens. In traditional prestige music venues, whether the court of a king or aristocrat, or the bourgeois setting of symphonies and operas, the audience are the important people. Buddy Bolden and Ma Rainey broke that fourth wall separating performer and audience and made the audience feel a personal relationship with this mythological figure called the star. The American pop music culture flips the power dynamic. The star is the important person. The audience is a mass of equals. Originating in segregated, humble venues where Rainey, Bolden and their brothers and sisters performed Armstrong spread the star dynamic to national and global culture.
Et viola!
The birth of the pop star.
Red beans and ricely yours*,
Louis Armstrong.
Satchmo postscript. For the next thirty five plus years Louis tours the world, a global superstar. By 1945 the cool cats of BeBop deem Louis unhip, old timey, un-intellectual, a sell out to the white man, stagnating. A genius can hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time. 1958. Miles Davis “You know you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played - I even mean modern. I love his approach to the trumpet: he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat - with feeling. That’s another phrase for swing.” 1967. After a show in Los Angeles, Louis goes into the studio. It turns into an all night session. The record company president dislikes the song, wants something upbeat, and well, jazzy like Hello Dolly!, subsequently refuses to promote it. The song is not a Jazz number, no trumpet, features a sleepy orchestra, a gauzy dreamlike sound and Louis at his sweetest, sappiest, most sentimental self. The song could accompany a ride at Disney World or background a Coca-Cola commercial. The song does nothing on the U.S. charts but goes to #1 in the U.K. Gradually after Louis’ death four years later the song became his theme song from the grave, after dozens of ground breaking, boundary pushing songs, hundreds of classic Jazz recordings, this one became the one most associated with Louis Armstrong. I see trees of green, red rose too/I see them bloom for me and you/And I think to myself/ What a wonderful world.
Armstrong maintained a voluminous letter correspondence through the decades and frequently signed off “red beans and nicely yours” referring to the traditional Monday dish of New Orleans. The left over hambone from Sunday supper cooks with the beans producing a rich marrow infused broth. You can take the hambone out of New Orleans but you can’t take the hambone out of the boy.
1934
Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra
“On the Sunny Side of the Street” (D. Fields, J. McHugh)
A better and more fitting theme for an American hero, this American hero, born under a bad sign, in the wrong part of town, on the dark side of the street, dream a dream of you, the American Dream.
“Grab your coat and get your hat/ Leave your worries on the doorstep/ Life can be so sweet/ On the sunny side of the street/ Can’t you hear the pitter-pat/ And that happy tune is your step/ Life can be complete/ On the sunny side of the street/ I used to walk in the shade with my blues on parade/ But I'm not afraid, this rover's crossed over/ If I never had a cent/ I’d be rich as Rockefeller/ Gold dust at my feet/ On the sunny side of the street”
“Song of the Vipers” (L. Armstrong) Louis sho’ did charm the white folks singing all those comforting tunes. Yet he still got dat hoodoo. The band plays a staccato start stop march like a funeral second line band. The trumpet soars. Drums beat. Twirling sound .“Yeah! hoy! ubb, yeah, yeah ohh dah da dah mmm, mmm, yeah ho dat, do you know ohh ban, ohh ban, you ban, read me brother Brown, ohh ban, ohhh who.” The reefer smoke curls, twists, twirls, swirls like a viper. Strange, mysterious song, an incantation, into the unknown, primeval beat, Louis Armstrong , age 33, takes us back to the beginning. In the beginning was Congo Square. Darkness into light. The Logos and Pathos of American Pop Music.