Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [12]
The Louis Armstrong Hot Five in 1925, with Armstrong on the left and his wife, the pianist Lil Harden, on the right. Despite Hardin’s classical training the quintet played without sheet music.
2
“THE RHYTHM Of LIFE”
ONE WINTER NIGHT IN 1926, HALFWAY THROUGH HIS SET, a terrified Fats Waller found himself being bundled into a car at gunpoint and driven off at high speed. Shortly afterwards the pianist arrived at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, where a private party was in full swing. Capone’s men had decided to bring Fats as a twenty-seventh birthday present to their jazz-loving boss. For three days champagne flowed, showgirls cavorted and cocaine was almost certainly sniffed; when he was in prison Capone’s nasal septum was found to be perforated, a sign of extensive cocaine use. When the party juddered to a halt three days later, an exhausted Waller was sent home, his pockets stuffed with thousands of dollars lavished upon him by a delighted Capone.
Saxophonist Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow recalled that Al was grinning and good-natured in jazz clubs, always surrounded by seven or eight “trigger men” having a noisy good time, “but gunning the whole situation out of the corners of their eyes” and stopping anyone from leaving or entering. Capone’s bodyguards would pass out tips of $50 or $100 to the hat-check girls, waiters and musicians on his behalf. His favorite songs, as befitted a tough guy, were sentimental numbers. Al Capone prided himself on making crime into an efficient business, and part of this meant leaving behind the casual racial prejudice that characterized so much of early-twentieth century American life. Most criminal gangs were strictly segregated by race and religion, but Capone valued loyalty and motivation more highly than the color of a man’s skin. One by-product of Capone’s color-blindness was that during the twenties Chicago became the center of America’s flourishing jazz scene. All the greats of the era—Waller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton—played in Chicago, often in Capone’s clubs with an enthusiastic Capone in the audience.
Fats Waller came to Chicago from New York—he was born and bred in Harlem—but his friend and fellow musician, Louis Armstrong, had followed an established path when in 1922 he left New Orleans, heading north up the Mississippi River. Between 1910 and 1920, 50,000 Southern blacks had emigrated to Chicago to work in the new factories there. Hundreds of thousands more left the farms of the deprived South for Detroit and New York and other northern industrial centers where their labor would help build modern America. Chicago’s African-American population more than doubled during the 1920s.
Born at the turn of the century, Louis Armstrong had grown up on the streets of New Orleans, working at various odd jobs like delivering coal to the whores who stood in the drafty doorways of their “cribs” in skimpy lingerie, beckoning clients in. In his early teens, Armstrong saved fifty cents a week to buy his first blackened horn, “an old tarnished beat up ‘B’ Flat cornet” that cost $5 from a pawnshop. “From then on, I was a mess and Tootin’ away,” he remembered years later.
New Orleans was a city throbbing with music, where a wealth of vibrant traditions—the mournful energy of the freed slaves’ blues; the calypso rhythms of the West Indies; the syncopated beat of plantation banjo music, known as ragtime; the mysticism of Negro spirituals; the lyricism and sophistication of the Creole tradition; and the local love of marching brass bands—fused on the streets into an entirely new type of music. Young musicians like Armstrong learned and played by ear, constantly listening to and adapting each other’s playing, their lyrics reflecting the call-and-response cadences of words and phrases they heard on the street, improvising all the time. Just because they lacked the restrictions