Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony

CREATING THE JAZZ SOLO

ADVISORY BOARD

David Evans, General Editor

Barry Jean Ancelet

Edward A. Berlin

Joyce J. Bolden

Rob Bowman

Susan C. Cook

Curtis Ellison

William Ferris

John Edward Hasse

Kip Lornell

Bill Malone

Eddie S. Meadows

Manuel H. Peña

Wayne D. Shirley

Robert Walser

CREATING THE

JAZZ SOLO

Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony

VIC HOBSON

University Press of Mississippi

Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the

Association of University Presses.

Portions of Chapter 15 have appeared in a different form in Jazz Perspectives, 10, no. 1, 2017, 97–116.

Copyright © 2018 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States

First printing 2018

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hobson, Vic., author.

Title: Creating the jazz solo : Louis Armstrong and barbershop harmony / Vic Hobson.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2018] | Series: American made music series | "Portions of Chapter 15 have appeared in a different form in Jazz Perspectives, 10, no. 1, 2017, 97–116." | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017427 (print) | LCCN 2018020876 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496819796 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496819802 (epub instititional) | ISBN 9781496819819 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496819826 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496819772 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496819789 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Armstrong, Louis, 1901–1971—Criticism and interpretation. | Jazz—Louisiana—History and criticism. | Jazz musicians—United States. | Jazz—1921–1930—Analysis, appreciation.

Classification: LCC ML419.A75 (ebook) | LCC ML419.A75 H63 2018 (print) | DDC 781.65092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017427

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother

Jessie Olive Hobson

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: Singing Was More into My Blood, Than the Trumpet

CHAPTER 2: Singing Was My Life

CHAPTER 3: Always Had Music All Around Me

CHAPTER 4: Church Is Where I Acquired My Singing Tactics

CHAPTER 5: When I Was at School, I Played All Classical Music

CHAPTER 6: My Brazilian Beauty

CHAPTER 7: Me and Music Got Married in the Home

CHAPTER 8: I Was Singing Selling Coal

CHAPTER 9: Did Bunk Teach Louis?

CHAPTER 10: Going to the Conservatory

CHAPTER 11: Dippermouth Blues

CHAPTER 12: Fletcher Henderson: That Big Fish Horn Voice of His

CHAPTER 13: The Pride of Race: When Louis Sang with Erskine Tate

CHAPTER 14: Lil’s Hot Shots

CHAPTER 15: The Hot Five and Seven

CHAPTER 16: I Figure Singing and Playing Is the Same

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SINCE WRITING MY FIRST BOOK, CREATING JAZZ COUNTERPOINT: NEW Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues (2014), and despite the best efforts of senior lecturers Jonathan Impett, Simon Waters, and Sharon Choa, the School of Music at the University of East Anglia has been closed down. I am currently not lecturing, and the absence of an academic affiliation has made me particularly aware of the importance of the research network that made writing this book possible.

I should begin by mentioning the people who assisted with my first book who, because things were already at the proofreading stage, didn’t get a mention at the time. They include my sister Ingrid Harvey, Heather Munson, Shane Gong Stewart, John Langston, and Anne Stascavage. I am grateful for the work of William Rigby for copyediting this book.

Some of my early research on Louis Armstrong surfaced at the 2014 conference of the Jazz Education Network. I am particularly indebted to John Edward Hasse (Jazz Education Network), and David Robinson (Traditional Jazz Education Network), for their help and encouragement at the conference. This conference paper was expanded and submitted for publication in Jazz Perspectives under the title ‘I Figure Singing and Playing Is the Same’: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony. My thanks to Ken Prouty who is assisting me as editor to work through copyright difficulties.

It is through the foresight of archivists, jazz enthusiasts, journalists, and editors that jazz research is possible. The William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive in Tulane University began interviewing the jazz musicians of that city in the 1950s and today holds a treasury of recordings and transcripts of oral history dating back to the earliest years of jazz. Bruce Raeburn and Lynn Abbott have assisted me in too many ways to enumerate to access these collections and guide and advise me. It was through these connections that I came to know David and Sandi Wright, and David Krause of the Barbershop Society of America. I was pleased to be invited to their 2015 midwinter convention in New Orleans. It was good too to revisit the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC)—I was a Dianna Woest Fellow in 2009—in connection with this research, and my thanks to Daniel Hammer and Rebecca Smith for their interest in my research. The Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) at Rutgers University holds the manuscript of Louis Armstrong’s autobiography Satchmo (1955) and the notebooks that Armstrong wrote that were used to write Horn of Plenty (1947), by Robert Goffin, one of the earliest biographies of Armstrong. These notebooks are not complete. There is one notebook for 1918 and then a gap up to 1922 and the years beyond. In an effort to remove some of the uncertainty around Goffin’s book, I contacted John Chilton, who secured the notebooks that the IJS do have; unfortunately, John had no new information, and the earlier notebooks have not surfaced. Sadly, John will not see this book go into print as I learned with regret that he died as I was putting the final touches to the manuscript. The IJS also holds a manuscript written by Armstrong toward the end of his life that he intended to be a last autobiography. It was never published but nevertheless contains interesting and sometimes contradictory information. I am grateful to Dan Morgenstern, Christian McFarland, and Vincent Pelote of the IJS for their help and assistance in accessing the original and advice on the Goffin notebooks.¹ I am also grateful to Ricky Riccardi for his introduction to the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. While in New York I took the opportunity to meet up with Lewis Porter (Rutgers), who has taken an interest in my work for some years now, and also Jeff Nussbaum of the Historic Brass Society (HBS). It was a joint conference of the HBS and the IJS in 2005 that I consider a cardinal point in my research.

I am a trustee for the National Jazz Archive (NJA) in the UK. I have made use of this collection in the preparation of this book. It is through the foresight of Graham Langley, founder of the British Institute of Jazz Studies, who with Digby Fairweather and Clarence Blackwell went on to establish the NJA, that we have today such a valuable resource in the UK.² My thanks to David Nathan (NJA research archivist) for his help in accessing the collections, and to the trustees, Paul Kaufman, Nick Clarke, David Goodrich, Alex Wilson, Alis Templeton, Maria Regan, Roger Cotterrell, Jane Hunter-Randall, Penny Hutchins, Nathan Granger, Pedro Cavinho, and Jez Collins. The NJA could not function effectively without the support of our volunteers. Many thanks to Mike Rose, Alan Quaife, Christine Smith, Steve Carter, George Wilkinson, Judy Atkinson, and Louis Malcolm. The NJA has recently completed a second project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to support jazz research in the UK. Building on The Story of British Jazz, the Intergenerational Jazz Reminiscence Project collected oral history interviews from communities in the UK that developed to support the music. This was conducted under the guidance of Angela Davis (project manager) and Layla Fedyk (project archivist).

This is my second book for University Press of Mississippi. My thanks to Craig Gill and David Evans, who above and beyond their role as editors have been of great assistance in establishing connections to other UPM writers. I hope to be able to work more closely with Gerhard Kubik in the future, and my thanks to Karl Gert zur Heide for keeping me abreast of his research.

I came to academia somewhat later in life than is usual. I was fortunate to receive AHRC funding during my doctoral years and a scholarship to the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress; I am still drawing on the fruits of this in my ongoing research. In the absence of any present-day academic support, I have been fortunate to have been able to work freelance in the glass industry. My thanks to Malcolm Reynold (Penelectro) and Andrew Reynolds (Fives UK) for the opportunity to combine my research with a flexible working life that has made this book possible.

PREFACE

IT IS A DAUNTING PROSPECT TO WRITE A BOOK ON LOUIS ARMSTRONG. There is a wealth of literature about Armstrong’s life. So much has been written about him that it might seem there is little more to add. Although Armstrong’s contribution to twentieth-century music making has been widely discussed, surprisingly little has been written about why he played what he played. In recent years, the availability of transcriptions of Armstrong’s recordings and analysis of his playing has increased. This has enabled analysts to describe what he played—to identify blue notes and recurring motifs—but why he played as he did is less explored. In order to consider Armstrong’s development as a musician, this book does not get beyond the 1920s, and I have made no attempt to cover all aspects of Armstrong’s life during this period. I have only considered those aspects of his life that may have significantly affected his development as a musician.

In Creating Jazz Counterpoint, I attempted to bring together the historical record, oral history, and musical analysis to show how barbershop harmony is at the root of blues tonality and jazz counterpoint. At the time, this seemed a controversial claim. It is far less so only a few years later. Lynn Abbott had argued back in 1992 A Case for the African American Origins of Barbershop Harmony.¹ In the intervening period, few researchers have followed up on Abbott’s research. One notable exception is James Earl Henry in his PhD thesis: The Origins of Barbershop Harmony: A Study of Barbershop’s Musical Link to Other African American Musics as Evidenced Through Recordings and Arrangements of Early Black and White Quartets.² Despite the paucity of research since Abbott’s essay, the consensus has decisively shifted. I was fortunate to be present at the 2015 convention of the Barbershop Harmony Society held in New Orleans when Lynn Abbott was awarded life membership in the organization for his work in understanding the origins of barbershop harmony. Given that there is growing evidence that barbershop harmony is of African American origin, and that barbershop harmony played a significant role in blues and jazz tonality, the focus of this book is not to argue whether barbershop harmony influenced the emergence of jazz and blues, but rather how it influenced the emergence of jazz; in particular, how it influenced Louis Armstrong as the first great soloist of jazz. To do this it is necessary to use music notation, music theory, chord symbols, and barbershop theory and practice. This too brings challenges.

I am conscious that not everyone is musically literate. I am also mindful that not many people know how barbershop harmony functions. For this reason, I have decided to transpose many of the musical examples in this book into the key of C. I justify this for two reasons. The first reason is that it makes the argument easier to follow for readers who do not have a grounding in music theory. Jazz has always been a music that is approachable to musicians with very little understanding of music theory. It seems reasonable that it should be possible to explain how it functions in an approachable way too. The second reason for transposing most musical examples into the key of C is that early jazz musicians were not concerned with absolute pitch; they were, however, concerned with relative pitch. All schools in New Orleans used a common music syllabus based on the solfeggio system where each pitch is assigned a syllable. In this system, Do is the first note of the scale, Re is the next, and Mi is the next, and so on. Any note could be the start note of Do, and therefore absolute pitch was not as important as the relationship between the pitches.

Louis Armstrong made many recordings. Some have been transcribed in full, others in part, and some not at all. A transcription of a recording can only be an approximation of what was played. It would test even the most skilled transcriber to notate every nuance and inflection of even just a single note; a complete solo would be impossible. To what extent a transcription is acceptable depends on the type of analysis required. If a transcription is to be used to analyze how a musician imparts a swing feel in his or her playing, it may be necessary to introduce finer subdivisions of time from simple eighth, sixteenth, or thirty-second notes and instead consider percentages of swing. In a similar way, ethnomusicologists often divide pitches such that 100 cents are equal to one semitone of conventional music theory. This level of detail is not necessary for my purposes. My reason for using transcriptions is to explore the relationship between melodies, countermelodies, obbligatos, solos, and harmony. To avoid any possibility of prejudicing the evidence, I have decided to use wherever possible published transcriptions by other people. The only exception to this is Armstrong’s vocal chorus on Basin Street Blues (Example 47), as I know of no published transcriptions.

There is a difference between the notation of popular music and jazz in the early twentieth century and the way it is written now. Contemporary jazz musicians tend to use chord symbols. These chord symbols provide a shorthand way of relaying a lot of musical information. Chords are constructed by selecting alternate notes of a scale and sounding those notes together. A chord of C major seventh (Cmaj7) informs a musician that the chord contains the notes of C (the root), E (the major third), G (the fifth note of the scale), and B (the major seventh note of the scale). Early jazz musicians did not think in terms of chord symbols and they rarely appear in sheet music of the early twentieth century unless for ukulele or other stringed instruments. For the benefit of readers who may be more familiar with chord symbols than with notation, I have added chord symbols to the musical examples where required to make it easier for contemporary musicians to follow the argument.³

CREATING THE JAZZ SOLO

CHAPTER 1

SINGING WAS MORE INTO MY BLOOD, THAN THE TRUMPET

LOUIS ARMSTRONG IS PERHAPS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL INSTRUMENtalist and singer in the history of jazz. He is credited as being the first great soloist, one of the earliest jazz singers, and reputedly invented scat singing.¹ On the occasion of his seventieth birthday (based upon the belief that he was born on July 4, 1900, when it was actually August 4, 1901), tributes from the greats of jazz arrived in the offices of Down Beat.² Cootie Williams observed, Louis Armstrong is the greatest trumpet player I ever heard in my life.³ Fellow trumpeter William Cat Anderson said, Louis Armstrong is the greatest horn player that ever played.⁴ Speaking for his later generation, Dizzy Gillespie argued Louis was the cause of the trumpet in jazz…. He’s the father of jazz trumpeting.⁵ This was supported by Thad Jones: I think he’s probably the greatest living influence in trumpet playing today.⁶ The saxophonist and trumpeter Benny Carter acknowledged, He influenced so many instrumentalists—and not just trumpeters.⁷ This point was emphasized by saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who claimed Armstrong as our first important jazz soloist.⁸

Armstrong’s contribution to jazz was not only as an instrumentalist. As reed player Herb Hall opined, He started it—both trumpet and jazz singing.⁹ For reed player Franz Jackson, Armstrong seemed to make everyone sing, even people who could never sing. He made it sound so natural. Nobody ever did anything like that with their voice.¹⁰ Saxophonist Harry Carney said simply, The sound of his voice makes you happy.¹¹

Today Armstrong’s singing is appreciated in equal measure to his playing, but while much has been written about Armstrong’s playing, rather less has been written about Armstrong as a singer. One of the reasons for the initial resistance to acceptance of Louis’s singing is that his singing has been rather more controversial. In his early career, both Joe Oliver and Fletcher Henderson, according to Armstrong, were afraid of letting me sing thinking maybe, I’d sort of ruin their reputations, with their musical public.¹² In April 1923 Armstrong began his recording career, cutting forty-two sides with Oliver.¹³ He did not sing on any of these recordings. Later he joined Henderson, and ignoring the fact that Joe Oliver did not let him sing either (at least on record), Louis complained, Fletcher didn’t dig me like Joe Oliver. He had a million dollar talent in his band and he never thought to let me sing.¹⁴ Armstrong had more opportunity to sing when he began recording under his own name as Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five in 1925. Less clear is how his recorded output from these years is representative of the music he was performing and singing in the dance halls, clubs, and vaudeville shows. Although he probably had more freedom to sing in live performance after leaving Fletcher Henderson’s band, it was not until he was performing at the Vendome Theater in Chicago around 1926 that singing is known to have become a mainstay of his live performances.¹⁵

By the late 1920s, Armstrong had already expanded his Hot Five to the Hot Seven, and by 1929 he was recording under the name Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra. The Great Depression of the 1930s fundamentally changed the music industry, and Armstrong had to adapt. In the 1920s Armstrong recorded for record companies that catered to the expanding black populations of the cities of Chicago and New York, and the African American population in the South. With the Great Depression, a focus on niche race marketing was less attractive to record companies that preferred to sell to the mass market. The rise of radio as a cheaper alternative to costly phonograph records and the decline of vaudeville also began to affect the type of material that was recorded. With the rise of the mass market, and with radio providing a cheaper alternative to records, lyrics needed to be suitable for a wider audience of all ages.¹⁶ It is no coincidence that blues songs in Louis’s recorded output reduced dramatically after the Wall Street Crash. In the years 1929 to 1931, Armstrong did not record a single twelve-bar blues.¹⁷ The advent of talking pictures in 1927, with The Jazz Singer, also hastened the decline of the touring vaudeville shows. Armstrong was quick to capitalize on this trend. His earliest films were Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) and a Betty Boop cartoon of the same year. In his first film he sang Shine dressed in a leopard skin with the opening lyric Oh, chocolate drop, that’s me. He also appeared in the Betty Boop cartoon in a jungle scene dressed as a cannibal. The question that these films raise is the extent that racial attitudes have hindered serious investigation of Armstrong as a singer. While it can be argued that Armstrong’s trumpet playing in these films transcends the racist trappings of his environment, to make the same argument about Armstrong the singer and entertainer is, on the surface of things, a little more awkward.¹⁸

Succeeding generations of commentators have approached Armstrong’s role as an African American in segregated America somewhat differently. It is likely that many African Americans of Armstrong’s generation would have viewed Armstrong as something of a race champion. The song Shine, for example, was written by black composers Ford Dabney and Cecile McPherson, and its lyrics can be interpreted as an assertion of black identity.¹⁹ This could explain Terry Teachout’s observation that, in the film Rhapsody in Black and Blue, Armstrong comes out less like Uncle Tom than Superman.²⁰ However, this assessment would not have been universally accepted by African Americans at the time. Hampton Institute educator and author Robert Russa Moton in 1929 claimed that shine and darky were only slightly less offensive than nigger, and by 1933 the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, considered all three to be equally offensive.²¹ However progressive the song That’s Why They Call Me Shine may have been when it was first performed in 1910, by the 1930s some black intellectuals rejected popular culture and took a different view.²² After World War II, the bebop generation also took a different view of Armstrong’s role. Although he would change his mind later, Dizzy Gillespie initially criticized Armstrong for being an Uncle Tom … grinning in the face of white racism.²³ For some in the bebop generation it was possible to confront racism more directly than it had been just a few years earlier. In recent years there have been attempts to cast Louis as someone who transcended the racist society of his time: through subversive comic art … disrupting from the sidelines, as though a trickster, ‘winking’ at the audience.²⁴ Postmodern scholars may argue that Armstrong’s scat singing points at something outside the sayable … evading or going beyond the racial and political structures of the time, but published lyrics were very much of their time.²⁵ Minstrelsy and coon songs were a mainstay of American entertainment for both black and white audiences in Armstrong’s early years. And more than anything else Armstrong wanted to entertain.

There is little evidence in what Armstrong said about the lyrics that he sang that he saw them as either offensive or conveying subversive messages. Armstrong responded to his critics: There you go! See, now what’s wrong with ‘Shine’? I mean, the people are so narrowminded, they’re worrying about the title, they forgot to listen to all that good music! … And I think if we just take it in a little easier stride, I don’t know—a lot of people worry about a whole lot of unnecessary things and they don’t do nothing about it.²⁶ One song he recorded many times was When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.²⁷ In his early recordings, he sang the published lyric darkies are crooning. When he was persuaded to change these lyrics to people are crooning, at a subsequent recording session, he is remembered to have asked, What do you want me to call those black sons-of-bitches this morning?²⁸ In a radio interview in 1956, Armstrong discussed his views on the lyrics and titles of some of his songs: Now pertaining to titles and things, I remember the time we made a record called ‘Shine,’ ‘Black and Blue,’ things like that, why people would—you know, especially our people, the Negroes—they’d probably get insulted a little for no reason at all.²⁹ There seems little reason not to take Armstrong at his word. He was brought up in a period when racism permeated all aspects of show business, and Armstrong saw himself as an entertainer whose job it was to please the public. For him, the lyrics of his songs were not significant, but for others they have been, and this may have prevented Armstrong’s singing being explored with the same rigor as his trumpet playing.

And then there is the question of Louis’s vocal style: white audiences, in particular, needed persuasion to accept Louis as a singer; this is evident from Armstrong’s first autobiography Swing That Music (1936). Rudy Vallée wrote an introduction praising Armstrong’s trumpet playing before describing the utterly mad, hoarse, inchoate mumble-jumble that is Louis’s ‘singing.’³⁰ But, Vallée encouraged readers, if they studied more closely they would come to see that his singing is beautifully timed and executed, and acknowledged that he had perfect command of time spacing, of rhythm, harmony and pitch.³¹

John Petters has argued, Satchmo more or less invented the art of jazz singing. He would go on to say, the body of work Louis laid down in the 1930’s for Decca, where he performed mostly pop songs of the day, amply showcased this unique talent.³² However, Armstrong’s eagerness to please the public with popular song throughout his career often distanced him from those promoting the acceptance of jazz as an art form, and this too affected study of Armstrong’s singing.³³

Music critics often judged Louis’s singing inferior to his playing. In 1962 jazz writer Leonard Feather reflected on how to explain Louis Armstrong’s contribution to music to a generation reared on modern jazz. He concluded that it might be easier were it not that the personality who, as a singer and comedian rather than a trumpeter … had already [by the 1930s] forsaken the blues almost entirely in favor of popular songs. He went on to complain, Singing once incidental on his records (many of the Hot Five sides had no vocals), became indispensable.³⁴ This was written before Louis Armstrong’s biggest hit: Hello Dolly. Melody Maker headlined this recording as The Hit No One Wanted.³⁵ On one level, the Melody Maker story was a celebration of the persistence of Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, to get the record made.³⁶ But the headline can also be interpreted as a prediction of the reaction of many jazz critics. As Gunther Schuller lamented late in Armstrong’s career, he embraced singing as a full-time commitment, equal in its allocation to his trumpet-playing. And it was as a singer—of songs like ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘Mack the Knife’—that a large public was finally to know Armstrong in the last decade or so of his life. One cannot help feeling that his genius and art somehow deserved better than that!³⁷

Louis’s singing also had a utilitarian role. Barney Bigard remembered that in the late 1940s and early 1950s Louis worked so hard that his lip gave out—just like that. It lasted for about two weeks and he got mighty worried. But you know him, he just went along, did a lot of singing and eventually his lip got back into shape.³⁸ From the 1930s onward, singing provided a way to rest his lip between playing trumpet passages.

In his lifetime, the abiding image is of Louis Armstrong as a man of two exceptional talents. His first talent was as a trumpet player—the first great soloist of jazz—and the second a singer whose unique approach to singing was generally appreciated in its own right, but due to commercial pressures and the effects of age on his lip, had come to dominate Armstrong’s later years. After his death on July 6, 1971, a one off special collector’s magazine was published. Stanley Dance summed up the prevailing view: "The original Louis Armstrong was a trumpeter par excellence who threw in humorous vocalizations as a kind of bonus."³⁹

After his death opinion on the significance of Armstrong the vocalist began to change. Gunther Schuller, writing in 1986, observed:

To the listener orientated to classical singing, Louis’s voice, with its rasp and totally unorthodox technique, usually comes as a complete shock. The reaction is often to set the voice aside as primitive and uncouth. Actually, Louis’s singing is but a vocal counterpart of his playing, just as natural and inspired. In his singing we can hear all the nuances, inflections, and natural ease of his trumpet playing, including even the bends and scoops, vibrato and shakes.⁴⁰

Some writers would acknowledge Armstrong’s influence on other singers. In a chapter titled Armstrong the Celebrity, in their book Jazz: From Its Origins to the Present (1993), Lewis Porter, Michael Ullman, and Edward Hazell observe, His singing while continually entertaining, is not to be dismissed artistically: It influenced Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and a host of others.⁴¹ By 2001 Gary Giddins felt that he was being redundant in saying that the genius of Louis Armstrong can be relished in ‘Hello Dolly! as well as in ‘West End Blues.’ But there I go again making an argument I just said no longer needed to be made.⁴²

Although Armstrong’s vocal contribution is now generally seen as of equal significance to his cornet playing, with very few exceptions the prevailing view is that his singing and playing are not related. Brian Harker’s otherwise excellent assessment of Armstrong’s recordings of the 1920s argues that Armstrong’s singing had little direct effect on the transformation of jazz in the 1920s from an ensemble based music to a solo based music.⁴³ It is this assumption that this book challenges. I argue that Armstrong’s singing did have a direct influence on Armstrong’s ability to transform the earlier ensemble jazz to a solo based music that he played on his cornet.

The connection