By all accounts, Louis Armstrong made a bad first impression on Coleman Hawkins and the rest of the Fletcher Henderson orchestra when he ar-rived on the job in 1924. With his old-fashioned, thick-soled shoes fas-tened by hooks (‘‘the kind that policemen wear’’), long underwear show-ing at the ankles, a thick New Orleans accent, and a bashful manner, the twenty-three-year-old Armstrong could only have come off as a bumpkin—a social embarrassment to the cool, sharply dressed New Yorkers, who spent a good deal of their discretionary income to ensure that their physical appearance alone stamped them as an elite. Hawkins himself was only nineteen, but already a seasoned professional. As a highly skilled dance musician, able to adapt smoothly and efficiently to a variety of performing situations and well paid for it, he had climbed to the top and was settling in for a long stay. His distinctive persona had already begun to emerge: sophisticated, reserved, with more than a touch of condescension. From Armstrong’s perspective, Hawkins and the rest of ‘‘the boys’’ looked ‘‘a little stuckup.’’
First impressions can be deceiving. Within months, the New Yorkers were busy imitating the guileless, awkward newcomer—even to the point, as with the awestruck teenager Rex Stewart, of clomping around in heavy policeman’s shoes. The catalyst, of course, was Armstrong’s music. He may have struggled with the arrangements put before him at
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7 3that first rehearsal (in one account, a ‘‘medley of beautiful Irish waltzes’’;
in another, ‘‘By the Waters of Minnetonka’’). But given the opportunity to ‘‘cut loose,’’ his reputation was made: ‘‘all of the band boys just couldn’t play for watching me.’’
Armstrong’s approach to the role of African-American musician proved so compelling that it effected a subtle but crucial shift in the way his fellow musicians thought about what they were doing. Largely through his example, the ‘‘hot solo,’’ formerly a moment of incidental excitement in a dance band arrangement, became the focus of a new discipline, both deeply satisfying and unexpectedly prestigious (at least within the burgeoning circle of jazz aficionados). Armstrong himself emerged as the exemplar: the improvising virtuoso, the ‘‘mere’’ per-former who captures for himself some of Prometheus’s fire as a creative artist.
Hawkins may have been caught off balance, but he quickly adjusted his ambitions when confronted with the tangible evidence, artistic and commercial, of Armstrong’s triumphs. If Hawkins, like many others, had initially thought of music mainly as the exercise of a skilled craft, the deep impression that Armstrong left on his audiences raised the stakes.
Several decades later, asked to describe his greatest experience as a jazz musician, Hawkins cited the following epiphany at the Roseland Ball-room in 1925: ‘‘There were thousands of dancers, all yelling and clapping.
. . . The high spot came when Louis Armstrong began ‘Shanghai Shuffle.’
I think they made him play ten choruses. After that piece a dancer lifted Armstrong onto his shoulders. Fletcher Henderson kept on beating out the rhythm on his piano and I stood silent, feeling almost bashful, asking myself if I would ever be able to attain a small part of Louis Armstrong’s greatness.’’
This concession from the fiercely proud Hawkins is, admittedly, anom-alous; in its profession of humility, perhaps even disingenuous. The re-lationship between the two men who shared the spotlight in the Hen-derson band was never warm. Their inevitable rivalry, exacerbated by differences of class and temperament, was fueled afterward by Arm-strong’s well-deserved rise to celebrity. To say simply that Armstrong
‘‘influenced’’ Hawkins is to reduce a complex relationship to genealogy.
Anyone eager to apply literary critic Harold Bloom’s agonistic notion of the ‘‘anxiety of influence’’ to yet another field need look no further. ‘‘I don’t think Louis influenced Coleman Hawkins, except unconsciously, because Coleman hated Louis,’’ remembered trumpeter Cootie Williams.
‘‘It was when I was in the Fletcher Henderson band [in 1929] that I
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College of Musiclearned about this. I knew Hawk then, and he just couldn’t even stand the name Armstrong.’’ It is perhaps stretching things too much to cast Armstrong, who was only three years older than Hawkins, as a father figure in an oedipal drama (although musicians did call him Pops), but Hawkins was certainly faced early on with the unpalatable task of escap-ing his shadow. By some evidence, he actively resisted his debt to Arm-strong and spent the better part of a decade searching for his own distinct musical and professional identity.
It is unlikely, in any case, that Hawkins could ever have imagined following directly in Armstrong’s footsteps. To be sure, they had quite a bit in common. Both were opportunistic and ambitious young African Americans from the provinces who rose, on the strength of formal mu-sical training (in Armstrong’s case, the tutelage of Peter Davis at the Waif’s Home in New Orleans), on-the-job experience, imagination, and self-promotion to prominence in New York. But Armstrong had already staked out a different career path beyond being a trumpet player. Like many other black musicians of the 1920s, he saw instrumental virtuosity less as a discipline unto itself than as one of several skills that might be cultivated by the professional entertainer.
Jazz criticism tends to focus on Armstrong as an instrumentalist, em-phasizing his contributions to the nascent art of jazz. Gunther Schuller’s characterization of Armstrong as the new music’s ‘‘first great soloist,’’ an improviser whose ‘‘inventiveness and musical integrity’’ rose naturally above the ‘‘crass entertainment’’ of the time to take its place alongside
‘‘the highest order of previously known musical expression,’’ has been echoed by many other writers. Armstrong was, of course, also a singer.
As with Fats Waller, Nat ‘‘King’’ Cole, and George Benson to follow, his turn away from instrumental jazz per se to popular song and entertain-ment has been routinely regretted in jazz circles as a betrayal of art to commercial taste. It is better understood as the fulfillment of an ambition, however inchoate, to ‘‘make it’’ in show business. Noting Armstrong’s startling self-description as ‘‘actor’’ on a 1932 passport application, Gary Giddins explains in his biography, Satchmo: ‘‘He undoubtedly used the term in the same generic sense that every vaudevillian, minstrel, and cabaret performer of the day did. . . . From the time he sang for pennies in a boys’ vocal quartet in the streets of New Orleans, Armstrong was a showman as well as a musician.’’
Giddins does not dissent from Schuller’s characterization of Armstrong as a revolutionary instrumentalist of great artistic import. He seeks in-stead to situate this accomplishment in its proper context—as an artistry
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7 5that took on greater meaning from its context. Armstrong, he writes, discovered his me´tier when he ‘‘figured out how to make his music part of a larger presentation.’’ He was ‘‘an artist who happened to be an en-tertainer, an entertainer who happened to be an artist—as much an origi-nal in one role as the other. He revolutionized music, but he also revo-lutionized expectations about what a performer could be.’’ In the heat of live performance, the boundaries between abstract musical logic and the physical spectacle of entertainment melt away. Consider this eyewitness description of Armstrong in action from 1933, quoted at length by Gid-dins:
He announces ‘‘When You’re Smiling’’ and this time he has a new act.
He backs off, downstage left, leans half-way over like a quartermiler, begins to count, (swaying as he does) ‘‘one, two, three’’ . . . he has already started racing toward the rear where the orchestra is ranged, and he hits four, exe-cutes a slide and a pirouette; winds up facing the audience and blowing the first note as the orchestra swings into the tune. It’s mad, it’s meaningless, it’s hokum of the first order, but the effect is electrifying. No shabby pre-tenses about this boy! He knows what his audience will take to their hearts, and how he gives it to them. His trumpet virtuosity is endless—triplets, chromatic accented eerie counterpoints that turn the tune inside out, wild sorties into the giddy stratosphere where his tone sounds like a dozen flutes in unison, all executed with impeccable style and finish, exploits that make his contemporaries sound like so many Salvation Army cornetists. Alter-nately singing choruses and daubing with the handkerchief at throat, face, forehead (he perspires like a dying gladiator) while a diamond bracelet twin-kles from his wrist, he finally gets off the stage to rest.
Needless to say, such talents are not normally conjoined in a single individual, leaving the question that must have shaken even the self-confident Coleman Hawkins: how am I to compete with all that? The obvious answer is to play to one’s strengths. As he stood in silent witness to Armstrong’s charisma at the Roseland in 1925, his thoughts may have turned not just to whether ‘‘a small part of Louis Armstrong’s greatness’’
was attainable, but to what part.
Some choices were easy to make. Hawkins lacked the extroverted tem-perament of the entertainer. He typically played his instrument with eyes closed, oblivious to his audience. Nor did he have any particular gift as a singer, as he demonstrated on an obscure 1936 recording from Swit-zerland, bluffing his way through a pop song of his own composition,
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College of Music‘‘Love Cries.’’ The results, however embarrassing, are revealing. Clearly, Hawkins listened carefully to Armstrong and admired his singing enough to mimic accurately some of its more salient mannerisms: the ge-nially gruff delivery, slurred pronunciation, and vocalized syllables (‘‘mmmmm’’) familiar from any number of Armstrong recordings from the 1930s. Had the experiment been more successful, Hawkins might have developed singing as a sideline—an obvious advantage to anyone in show business. Instead, he let it lapse. Any singing he did would be, like his piano playing, for his private gratification.
His only option, then, was to continue to be a professional instrumen-talist, aiming for ‘‘greatness’’ within a public persona that Armstrong instinctively eschewed: the ‘‘studied virtuoso’’ who ‘‘walks to center stage, plays God’s music, bows again, and leaves.’’ If the ultimate goal was to carve out a niche as distinct from Armstrong’s as possible, Hawkins nev-ertheless found Armstrong’s example useful—but only after abstracting and refining it through more than a decade’s hard work into an idiom unmistakably his own.
‘‘One Hour’’
Just how close, and how far apart, Hawkins was from Armstrong by the end of the decade can be gauged by recordings that each made, within half a year of each other, of the same pop song: James P. Johnson’s ‘‘(If I Could Be with You) One Hour Tonight.’’
Throughout the 1920s, Coleman Hawkins prospered in Fletcher Hen-derson’s steady employ. He enjoyed his role as star soloist with New York’s premier black dance band, with its pied-a`-terre at the Roseland Ballroom on Broadway in midtown Manhattan. Now out of Armstrong’s shadow, he had ample opportunity to play solos, both in performance and on recordings. Indeed, his services had become so valued that his was the only salary in the band that Henderson guaranteed during periods of slack employment.
One sign of his rising stature was that he began to take more jobs in the recording studio independent of the Henderson band. Among these was a recording date on 14 November 1929, with a group called the Mound City Blue Blowers. Rather daringly for the time, the Blue Blowers was an interracial group, matching Hawkins and black New Orleans bass-ist Pops Foster with (among others) Glenn Miller, Eddie Condon, and Pee Wee Russell. It is in this context that ‘‘One Hour’’ was recorded. Haw-kins’s full-chorus improvisation on this recording is routinely cited in
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7 7jazz criticism as a landmark in the maturation of his style: ‘‘the first important example of Hawkins as a ballad player, perhaps that aspect of his art which was more imitated than any other.’’
Armstrong’s version came in quite another context. Since leaving the Henderson band, he had immersed himself in the turbulent musical life of Chicago’s South Side, with lasting effects. As the historian William Kenney has noted, the emphasis on visual spectacle in Chicago cabarets and floor shows encouraged black musicians to develop a ‘‘self-conscious act’’ to fit the ‘‘structured world of night-club entertainment.’’ Arm-strong’s stage persona proved particularly compelling, in part because it resolved the tensions of the black migrant experience. On the one hand, his indisputable professional success underscored the possibility of up-ward mobility. Despite his humble southern roots, he had risen on the strength of his instrumental facility and music-reading skills. He even earned the grudging admiration of Chicago Defender columnist Dave Peyton, the self-appointed guardian of bourgeois values of hard work and discipline, who routinely excoriated jazz musicians for ‘‘faking’’ and ‘‘bad habits’’ and dismissed their music as ‘‘sloppy New Orleans hokum.’’
At the same time, Armstrong’s performances embodied the African-American folkways that were denigrated by Peyton and threatened by widespread transplantation to the urban North. In Armstrong’s stylish blues phrasing, rhythmic nuances, and body language, South Side au-diences recognized themselves, and they took comfort in the successful integration of these down-home modalities into sophisticated entertain-ment. Milt Hinton remembered hearing Armstrong at the Vendome The-ater, which was crowded on Sundays by black audiences in formal dress:
It was like we were emulating white folks, like it was a big white theater.
. . . We were going to be just like downtown. And we’d sit there, my mother would have me by the hand, and we’d sit and listen to this overture which had a European environment. Then the people would be a little restless, and say ‘‘Well, that sounds nice,’’ and applaud it. Then somebody would say
‘‘Hey baby, play so and so,’’ and when Louis stood up and played one of his great solos, you could see everybody letting their hair down and say ‘‘Yeah, that’s the way it should be. This is it.’’
In the spring of 1929, Hawkins’s and Armstrong’s paths briefly crossed—surprisingly, in the world of mainstream musical theater.
Fletcher Henderson had been hired as the musical contractor for a new musical comedy, Vincent Youmans’s Great Day. Louis Armstrong had
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College of Musicjust returned to New York, and his new manager, Tommy Rockwell, eager to set him to work, recommended him for the first trumpet chair. What seemed to be a promising opportunity to appear on Broadway for all concerned turned to disaster when the management began arbitrarily replacing black musicians, including Armstrong, with white ones. Haw-kins survived the first cut, but as the production lurched toward Broad-way, even Henderson was displaced. This may have been a blessing, for Great Day flopped after only thirty-seven shows.
Armstrong himself had better luck in the theater. Later in the year, he earned a spot in the all-black revue Hot Chocolates, moving ‘‘out of the pit and on the stage’’ to sing and play Fats Waller’s new hit song, ‘‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’’ This performance convinced Rockwell to promote Arm-strong as a ‘‘single act’’—a front man for large dance orchestras—and to begin a series of recordings that received extraordinarily wide distribu-tion through both ‘‘race’’ record and mainstream pop catalogs. Thus it was that shortly after relocating to California to play at Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club in Culver City in July 1930, Armstrong recorded his own version of ‘‘If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,’’ with a full-chorus trumpet solo preceding the vocal.
If one places transcriptions of Armstrong’s and Hawkins’s solos side by side (with Hawkins’s transposed to match Armstrong’s key of E-flat for easy comparison; see music example 2), the similarities are striking. The two solos share the same basic rhythmic vocabulary (e.g., the pervasive double-time feeling) and characteristic melodic contours (e.g., the upward arpeggios in measure 5). In some places, they share the same idiosyncratic note choices. Had Hawkins’s solo not been recorded first, one might as-sume that he had consciously modeled his solo on Armstrong’s. Instead, the similarities are strong evidence of an underlying commonality of approach.
Both solos exemplify the technique known as harmonic improvisation.
Roughly speaking, this is the practice of deriving notes for an improvised line from the underlying chord progression. Such a technique is impres-sive in its own right for adding an air of sophistication or technical polish to a performance (or at least avoiding unpleasant clashes between melody and harmony). But it also contributes to the rhythmic effectiveness of the improvised line. Properly handled, harmonic improvisation is a subtle but essential component of the sense of rhythmic momentum in jazz usually known as swing.
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F7
5 B 7
8
E
3 G7/D C7
8
Hawkins (transposed)
3
Armstrong 1 B 7 B 7+5
E X . 2 .
Top line: ‘‘If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight’’ (1930), Louis Armstrong solo, mm. 1–6. Bottom line: ‘‘One Hour’’ (1929), Coleman Hawkins solo, mm.
1–6 (transposed from original key of A-flat).
Harmony and swing may not seem to have much to do with each other.
They even claim different pedigrees: as the musicologist Thomas Broth-ers has noted, the ‘‘fusion theory’’ of the origins of jazz ascribes chromatic harmony to Europe and its distinctive rhythms to Africa. But harmony is linked to rhythm through dissonance, as the following brief digression into elementary music theory should make clear.
In common parlance, dissonance connotes harsh and unpleasant sounds. Its meaning in music theory is less judgmental and more tech-nical. A dissonance is any combination of tones that is understood to be unstable and therefore requires resolution to a stable sonority, or con-sonance. This is the basic principle of tension and release in the tonal system, and it operates on many different levels. Notes that clash against the prevailing harmony at any given moment—nonharmonic tones, or what Hawkins would call ‘‘off notes’’—are the most obvious and
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College of Musicmediate generators of tension; but within a key, any chord other than the tonic, no matter how internally consonant, is inherently unstable and therefore dissonant. Dissonance implies forward movement, a drive to-ward resolution. It is in this sense that we speak of a harmonic progres-sion. In the repertory that jazz musicians of the 1920s and 1930s played, the forward momentum of the harmony is unambiguous and an impor-tant constituent of rhythmic drive.
A harmonic progression is commonly thought of as a succession of discrete and independent entities called chords, but this description is a kind of shorthand. When we say, for example, that G7moves to C (V7to I in the key of C), we are really describing the aggregate melodic move-ment of several different voices. Some implied melodic motions are more highly charged than others: the note F, when forming the dissonant
A harmonic progression is commonly thought of as a succession of discrete and independent entities called chords, but this description is a kind of shorthand. When we say, for example, that G7moves to C (V7to I in the key of C), we are really describing the aggregate melodic move-ment of several different voices. Some implied melodic motions are more highly charged than others: the note F, when forming the dissonant