On Music

COOK, BRUCE

On Music MAKING THE TRUMPET TALK BY BRUCE COOK "You don't miss your water till the well runs dry," blues-men sing. The line is usually taken to have romantic implications, yet to anyone who looks...

...It brings home something Louis himself said long ago: "Playing jazz is like talking from the heart...
...When I met Louis he was playing the same style that I wanted to play on the cornet...
...Other cuts that are less well known are almost as good?Two Deuces," "Knee Drops" and "Beau Koo Jack...
...Indeed, they probably sound far better than the original 78s on the day they were issued...
...Each time Hines trills on these recordings, I wince, and in listening to them, I found myself wincing quite a lot...
...Moreover, Columbia, the commercial record company involved, cooperated fully...
...Similarly, Louis' taste for a march style recalled for me the influence of march music in the development of jazz...
...This, of course, is the sort of scholarly enterprise we expect when Martin Williams of the Smithsonian jazz program puts a collection together...
...After he showed what could be done in an idiom that, for all its popularity, had commonly been regarded as a kind of joke, nobody with ears and the sense to pay attention ever laughed at it again...
...The two men were ideal collaborators...
...Davis was right...
...Before him, all jazzmen—Bunk Johnson, Kid Ory, even his musical stepfather Joe Oliver—seemed to be speaking in a kind of ur-dialect that had no proper vocabulary for the subtler, more ambiguous ideas he wanted to express...
...Louis, who started out as a trumpet virtuoso in the old brass band tradition, brought that training and technical skill with him into the modern era...
...In his hands and at his lips, the trumpet became a human voice...
...To the militant blacks of the '60s, that was precisely the trouble...
...West End Blues," "Fireworks," "Muggles," "Tight Like This...
...Louis made up his own language...
...What seemed revolutionary then sounds rather corny and dated today...
...Apart from a couple of Hines piano solos, Louis is featured throughout—in duets, quartets, quintets, and backing up an obscure '20s vamp named Lillie Delk Christian, who sounds less like a human being than like Minnie Mouse...
...Miles Davis, the angry man of jazz, for one, said of him at the time that whenever anybody blew anything, it went back to Louis Armstrong...
...But people tend to forget that the black musicians played slow marches and dirges all the way to the burial ground...
...And when I was playing on piano we'd sit there and play and we used to use each other's ideas and say 'Thank you' for it...
...The album also includes two numbers issued in Argentina that were never released in the U.S...
...Almost single-handedly, with his astoundingly fluent and inventive solos, Louis pulled jazz from primitivism into respectability...
...His death in 1973 unleashed a flood of maudlin tributes...
...Newspapers everywhere and most magazines ran lengthy obituaries...
...His fans, mostly white in his later years, loved the brilliant smile, the ebullient personality, the growling, good-natured vocals...
...Using his left hand solely for chords and rhythm, he improvised the melody with his right, as a player on a wind instrument might...
...The TV networks really went overboard: not only had a jazzman died whom the general public knew for once, but they had film, film and more film...
...As a result, listening to them is like hearing Louis Armstrong for the first time...
...He is, in this way, our contemporary: One can still listen to the early performances with enjoyment...
...Everybody knows about the old New Orleans funeral bands' carefree, trucking larks back from the cemetary when they performed happy rags and dance tunes...
...Yet styles change...
...In an excerpt from an interview included in the excellent liner notes, Hines tells of their first meeting, and of how Louis showed him something no other trumpet player ever had: "You see, many years ago when my father played cornet I wanted to play that same instrument but it used to hurt behind my ears...
...On holidays such as Mardi Gras, too, the black community of New Orleans marched to the accompaniment of brass bands that were often staffed by jazzmen...
...Remastering was done at its studios, and the quality of the tracks is remarkable...
...It talked personally, expressing moods more subtle and various than either the disciplined band musicians or the screaming, shouting old-time trumpeters had thought possible...
...On his best solos in this album, that sense of human voice—an earnest, sometimes practically conversational style—comes through clearly...
...Before him, the accepted manner was more florid and delicate (Lil Armstrong's piano on Louis' earlier Hot Five records provides a useful comparison), but for years after Hines, trumpet style was the only way jazz piano could be played...
...Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines/1928 contains some of his finest and most familiar efforts...
...But a few people had longer memories...
...Thus, when he criticized President Eisenhower in 1957 for shilly-shallying on integration?no guts," Louis announced forthrightly, while canceling a State Department tour of the Soviet Union—he shocked many Armstrong enthusiasts...
...One keeps catching things one never noticed before...
...Louis' solo breaks on "Squeeze Me," "Skip the Gutter" and "Basin Street Blues,' for instance, flow with such staccato precision they resemble bugle calls, and I found myself remembering that he started his career as bugler at the New Orleans Waifs Home for Boys...
...They called him a "Tom," a "house nigger.'' Besides, they could hear the decline—verifiable on every record he made in that period...
...And after I learned the piano and began to master it like I wanted to, I said, 'Well, what I wanted to play on the cornet is what I'll play on the piano,' and that's what I did...
...The reason is that for years the Louis Armstrong who was packing them in with "Hello Dolly" and one more round of "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" was just a shadow of that bright boy with the golden horn who blew up a storm in the speak-easies of Chicago...
...Louis' work is another story entirely...
...He simply jived his way through interviews...
...He was always "Satchmo" to them...
...The best are gone—and of them all, I miss no one more keenly than Louis Armstrong...
...they retain their freshness and intelligence...
...What he added was a distinctive, almost antithetical, quality of personality...
...His passing was a media event...
...Eventually, the incident faded, and from then on Louis said not one word to disturb the peace...
...It is a collection of performances with pianist Earl Hines, recorded mostly in Chicago when what was popularly called the "Jazz Age" was coming to an end...
...Box 5734, Terre Haute, Indiana, 47802...
...The line is usually taken to have romantic implications, yet to anyone who looks back to the giants of the classic era of jazz, it has a poignant pertinence...
...And now the Smithsonian Institution's jazz program has released a vast treasure trove of early Armstrong material in a two-record album, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines/1928 (available by mail order for $9.00 from the Smithsonian Collection, P.O...
...By the '50s, he had become an institution to mainstream America...
...Even on the Christian tracks, Louis and Hines manage to overcome the dreary banality of the singing...
...He was a genius...
...Nevertheless, it caused much less of a stir among blacks and in the world of jazz than one might have expected—nothing, for example, like the universal wail that went up two years later when Duke Ellington died...
...The music is superb...
...They never noticed the decline...
...In fact, Hines' piano technique, altogether new when he emerged with Louis in the '20s, came to be known as "trumpet style...
...The music he was making was just a hollow echo of the exciting licks he produced in his prime...
...You don't lie...

Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 3


 
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