TT 332: Footnote: My Own History With a Few Louis Armstrong Sides

All of us are touched by Pops

Since the summer I’ve been thinking a lot about Louis Armstrong.

The main event was the cover story for The Nation, “Louis Armstrong’s Last Word.”

I’ve also written quite a bit more about Pops here at Transitional Technology.

1. Background to the story

2. An alternate lede starring the Click Track

3. Dan Morgenstern, Gary Giddins, and "Roses for Satchmo"

4. Louis Armstrong Lists Some Records in 1934

5. The ‘60s-era harmony of “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World”

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Today, the final post about Armstrong (for now) reviews a few sides that are important for personal reasons. This “footnote” pairs with a similar post on Charles Ives from earlier this year.

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In the Nation story the great 1959 LP Satchmo Plays King Oliver gets a major mention, for the 1971 RCA reissue on cassette as The Best of Louis Armstrong was a key “gateway to jazz” for me.

Side two starts with “Frankie and Johnny,” duo with Billy Kyle, one of the many excellent pianists who played with the postwar Armstrong All-Stars. It’s a blues fable sung by Louis and swung by Kyle: a sensational performance. As a boy I loved this track and listened to it over and over.

Kyle is playing a “tack piano,” where metal tacks are placed between hammer and string in order to make the piano glint with a slivery, mechanical tone, a sonority especially suited for rolling chords and extended tremolos. The tacks can be driven straight into the hammers or the piano could have a Mandolin Rail.

The piano must be an upright, and it helps if the instrument hasn’t been tuned properly.

Tack piano seems to have been born in Hollywood as accompaniment to saloon scenes in Westerns. Often the diegetic tack piano track would be of Gay Nineties material, something like “A Bird in Gilded Cage.” Perhaps the metallic tack sonority was a way for a live player to imitate the mono-dynamic, tremolo-heavy music heard during the player piano craze at the dawn of the 20th century. (One needs a live musician — not a player piano — for the correct cinematic effect, namely the abrupt cessation of all sound when the villain makes a grand entrance though the swinging doors at the saloon.)

Tack piano then migrated over to middle brow ragtime, early jazz and blues at the dawn of the LP era. Hundreds of records were released in the 1950’s with tack piano featured front and center; Jerry Lee Lewis occasionally played tack piano. In this era it was a studio concept not unlike “surround sound” or “exotica.”

An informative essay on this topic is “Honky-Tonk Piano” by Dick Hyman, collected in Hyman’s book Piano Pro. Hyman confesses he recorded novelty piano records in this era under a variety of pseudonyms including, “Knuckles O’Toole, Willie ‘The Rock’ Knox, Rip Chord, Puddinhead Smith, Slugger Ryan, Good Time Charlie, and possibly others.”

The piano doesn’t seem like a dangerous or subversive object, but various descriptors like “Honky-Tonk” have tried try to imply something a bit counterculture. “Ragtime” suggests a rough texture, while “barrelhouse” suggests a rough environment. Ralph Sutton and Jay McShann made a record together called The Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players.

In a similar vein, tack pianos are intentionally trying to corrupt the European concert ideal. It is an attempt to make the modern piano a kind of folk instrument. The resulting effect was usually less dangerous than nostalgic: Roger Kellaway performs the closing theme to All in the Family on a tack piano.

Billy Kyle kills it on tack for “Frankie and Johnny” with Pops. It was 1959 and almost the end of the tack piano Gay Nineties/Ragtime/Blues fad, so Pops and Kyle got one on wax just in time.

I was so impressed with “Frankie and Johnny” that I tried to make my own piano a tack piano. Putting tacks in all the hammers seemed like a bad idea, but my Bush & Gerts did have a felt damper that could be activated by pedal in order to make the instrument much softer. My mom bought me a big box of paper clips, and I laboriously worked 88 of them onto the felt damper.

The experiment was a flop, for my amateur handyman skills resulted in an uneven sound.

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Among my most valued early sources was the slim and squat magazine Cadence: The American Review of Jazz and Blues. Bob Rusch would conduct substantial dialogues with musicians, a format that I eventually emulated with Do the M@th.

In the Cadence interview with bassist Mark Helias, Helias naturally talked about his famous employers like the avant-garde masters Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell. However, Helias also went on a substantial tangent concerning the 1947 record Satchmo at Symphony Hall, especially how great bassist Arvell Shaw sounded on “C Jam Blues.”

In the late ‘80s it was easy to mail order Helias’s fabulous brand new The Current Set and Desert Blue, but I had to burn a lot of gas in the family Pontiac going to used record stores in Minneapolis before Satchmo at Symphony Hall finally turned up somewhere.

The recording lived up to Helias’s recommendation, I listened to it a lot. Eventually I learned that the Sid Catlett feature “Mop Mop” was considered one of the most important pre-1950 drum solos, something that inspired Max Roach, Billy Hart and Jack DeJohnette. Arvell Shaw’s bass is hot in the mix, and Shaw’s playing on “C Jam Blues” was just as wildly inventive as Helias promised. Barney Bigard and Jack Teagarden play beautifully, of course. Pianist Dick Cary is a less familiar name but he’s right in there. Singer Velma Middleton is soulful on “Since I Fell For You.”

The full concert can be enjoyed on the recent deluxe reissue with notes by Ricky Riccardi. Listen to Pops leading the band home on “Jack Armstrong Blues,” where much of his complex phrasing could be played in a bebop context. (This track was new to me, it was not on the LP issue.)

Pops is the marquee attraction, but this is ensemble music. It was billed as “Louis Armstrong and the All-Stars,” and it’s really true: Everyone in the band is hot and engaged. Arvell Shaw and Sid Catlett are serious. I doubt there’s another small group record from the ‘40s that tops Satchmo at Symphony Hall in terms of documenting swing at the top table.

In the longer scheme of things, I now realize that I am always inspired by musicians like Mark Helias who see the whole progression on a continuum. “Ancient to the Future.” Louis Armstrong in the same breath as Don Cherry.

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In 2011–2013 I spent quite a bit of time with Lee Konitz, when Konitz was 82–84. I took several lessons, bought him dozens of lunches, and interviewed him twice.

(photo by John Rogers)

Lee could be a difficult contrarian, but whenever I felt myself get impatient, I just needed another dose of his alto saxophone. Stanley Crouch told me that Konitz phrased like Louis Armstrong, and I think Stanley was right. Indeed, of all the geniuses I’ve listened to up close and personal, Konitz might have been the closest to Pops. It has something to do with the blues, the beat, and a certain vocal quality to the phrasing.

Konitz made me sing during my lessons. I’m a terrible singer, I’ve always known this, and Lee assured me this was absolutely the case. (“Ethan, since you know so much about music, how is it possible that you sing so badly?”) But it became clear that he wasn’t going to let up on me singing with the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens.

Fine. I made a playlist on my iPod with three famous tracks from 1926 and 1927, “Potato Head Blues,” “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” and “Muskrat Ramble.” For months I walked around singing quietly to these immortal sides. One day in Brooklyn near the main library at Grand Army Plaza I matched Pops’s syncopations on “Muskrat Ramble” exactly. The world went a little dim and I stumbled. It was almost a blackout moment. Fortunately there was a nearby bench where I could sit down and think about what I had just experienced. This is a true story.

Not long after, Konitz came to a Billy Hart quartet gig. (He attended a lot of those performances because he loved Mark Turner.) Afterwards he told me, “Ethan, you are sounding a little better.”

“Thanks, Lee! I think it is because I’ve been singing with Louis Armstrong records.”

“A-ha!” Lee replied. “That will do it, there’s no doubt about that.”