The playing of Louis Armstrong was another powerful influence on the development swing. When Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman first heard Louis Armstrong play, they contacted him to come to New York and provide the kind of trumpet they were looking for. Armstrong had been in Chicago playing with his mentor King Oliver and racking up quite a name for himself. Louie’s wife, pianist Lil Hardin, told Louis he had to go, this was too important to his career to pass up and so Louis went. He never played with Oliver again although they remained close.
Louis played what came to be known as “licks” or “signatures” that trademarked his sound. They were so distinctive that the listener immediately knew he was hearing Armstrong even if he’d never heard that number before. This became not only a standard for future musicians but, in swing, entire bands. These licks were often resorted to when the musician or the section was low on inspiration. They could fall back on these licks to keep the momentum going. One of Armstrong’s hottest licks was to arpeggiate descending triplets which became a staple in jazz. Another was “the rip” where he would glide up to a high note in a devastating attack and then back off on the volume while playing in vibrato. Trumpet playing in the 30s and 40s was so dependent on rips that one is hard pressed to think of how jazz would have survived without it.
In the clip below, recorded in 1924, we hear how Armstrong’s playing influenced the emergence of swing as well as Redman’s subsequent arrangements. To accommodate Louie’s style, the arrangements became more fluid, more dynamic, more syncopated. Indeed Armstrong’s playing in the 20s is largely what carried jazz into the 30s which might not have happened without him. His playing opened new avenues in the music and therefore new possibilities. The orchestrated backing riffs had to sound more like improvisations giving the whole piece a much hotter, less contrived quality.
“Shanghai Shuffle”:
Fletcher Henderson Louis Armstrong Shanghai Shuffle Roaring 20's Victrola - YouTube
But Armstrong’s most enduring and essential contribution to jazz was his rejection of paraphrasing over changes. If you look at the jazz charts I posted way back, you’ll notice the chords written over each measure or bar of music. Those chords are called changes. Paraphrasing is simply playing the melodic line written on the staff and embellishing it a little bit without deviating much from it. One was paraphrasing the melody. Armstrong outgrew this convention in the late twenties by simply playing something else entirely in each bar and linking each bar together so that the melody was entirely coherent. What made this most remarkable was that it was entirely improvised, done entirely on the fly, making the piece come to life in a way that was almost organic, a living and breathing solo. Bix Beiderbecke referred to it as a “correlated chorus.” Louis would also paraphrase in an amazingly playful way such as playing the melody fairly accurately but then suddenly hitting a note and drawing it out long past its normal duration and then suddenly playing a very fast staccato of notes to catch up just before hitting the end of the bar—a technique called “compressing time.” No classical composer had ever dreamed of doing such things with melody. It laid a foundation for future jazz to such an extent that there would have been no jazz after the twenties without Louis Armstrong.
In Louie’s version of “St. James Infirmary” from 1928, notice his incredible use of vibrato in every line he plays which is every bit as important as the notes themselves. He also does a bit of correlated chorus towards the end after first paraphrasing the melody. All done with a strong sense of swing which no jazz artists had to the extent that Louis did. This is the stuff from which modern jazz was made. It represents the turning point of jazz from traditional to modern:
Louis Armstrong - St. James Infirmary - New York 12.12. 1928 - YouTube
Armstrong’s other contribution was to switch from cornet to trumpet in 1926 which opened a floodgate of future musicians—Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Harry James, Fats Navarro, Donald Byrd, etc. who changed the face of music. Armstrong’s contribution to the evolution of the trumpet (which he switched to because it was brighter than the cornet) was that his ability to hit high notes was far beyond what most other trumpeters could do but club owners and trumpet fans wanted to hear all players hit those notes. As a result, the trumpet had to be redesigned internally to allow the average trumpet-player to hit the notes Armstrong first played without any special modification (even Louis frequently suffered from a bleeding lip hitting all those high notes). There could have been no Swing Era without Armstrong.