Listenin' Louie

by Matthew "Fat Cat" Rivera

In Chicago on April 24, 1933, Louis Armstrong—“floating” on reefer as the tenor player Budd Johnson recalled it—made “Laughin’ Louie,” one of five sides he cut for Victor that day.1 His band sets off with a hurdygurdy beat and shouts a unison “yeah!” before Armstrong announces he’s about to practice the trumpet. Then all swing breaks loose with Keg Johnson roaring on the trombone, his brother Budd chasing him on tenor, and Armstrong sets off on an “old fashioned good one:” a single note inspires an uproar of laughter, twice, then with no accompaniment, Armstrong plays a beautiful melody. He swings it, but he doesn’t quell the hecklers. And then, magic. “Now here’s the beautiful part. Listen.” It’s the notes, it’s the way he makes them and places them, carefully, like a surgeon of the soul, following that beat, taking his time to hear a phrase just before he plays it, finally building to a herculean high concert F. It’s the notes and the audible silences around them, the big room tone of 1143 Merchandise Mart, the sound of anticipation, the sound of listening. No more heckling. Finis. This is the stuff that brims over the heart— the lyrical Armstrong, the identity, the humor, the spirit. It is also the stuff of Louis the listener, consuming the sounds and sights around him with avid observance, Louis the archivist, preserving his life on record, and Louis the artist, crafting it all into a flood tide of expression, a complete worldview. Vince Giordano has identified the old fashioned melody on “Laughin’ Louie” as Minnie T. Wright’s “Love Song” from 1920, which Armstrong probably played accompanying silent movies with Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra around 1926, and of course “Laughin’ Louie” pays homage to a huge hit of 1923, “The OKeh Laughing Record,” a gag recording of a struggling trumpet player who elicits laughter. Ricky Riccardi, Armstrong’s head archivist and curator, notes, “Louis loved ‘The OKeh Laughing Record’ and owned a copy of it, transferring it to reelto-reel tape many times and even joining in with the laughter one time when dubbing it with some friends.”2 Another dimension of Laughin’ Louie, then: memory. I can see Armstrong there in the recording studio, eyes closed, hearing the OKeh laughing record, hearing the Erskine Tate band, and then, Joe Oliver, Bunk Johnson, Buddy Petit, Kid Rena, the ancestors, as he sculpts each phrase. Finally he opens his eyes, looks up at the ceiling, and reaches that high concert F—and now, Louis Armstrong.

Here on Armstrong’s 122nd birthday, we take our offerings to the monument by celebrating his statements, that is, by playing his records. The opening credenza of “West End Blues;” the stop time breaks on “Potato Head Blues;" the scat chorus on “Heebie Jeebies;” the first recorded solo on “Chimes Blues;” the “Oh Memory” take of “Stardust;” the triumph that is “Swing That Music;” “Back ‘O Town Blues;” “That’s for Me;” At the Crescendo; Ella and Louis; “Hello, Dolly;” “What a Wonderful World;” even “Laughin’ Louie.” Each is a piece of the whole and a world unto itself. But as powerfully as he made these statements, Armstrong, it seems to me, listened twice as powerfully. Twice he tells us to listen on “Laughin’ Louie,” and thanks to his self-archiving, we know that listening was an essential part of his craft. On hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes he made during the last two decades of his life, Armstrong acts as an avid DJ, re-recording records from his vast collection, often listening with an open mic, and occasionally playing along with them. Like the collages of clippings, photographs, and scotch tape he created outside his reelto-reel boxes, on the tapes themselves we hear Armstrong collecting sources, compiling inspirations, memories, ideas, heart. We hear him listening.

It’s all there on “Laughin’ Louie.” Like an aural collage, taped together with laughs and cries of “yeah man!” Armstrong calls the recording a practice session, a glimpse at the creative process behind all those statements we celebrate on July 4th, August 4th, and every other day of the year. As with the tape collages and the recordings, he sutures his public and private personas, his personal and impersonal histories, in order to speak for himself. The word collage, strictly speaking, comes from the French for sticking or gluing, but in a more colloquial sense, it also can mean “having an affair, or an unmarried couple ‘living in sin.’”3 Today it may be difficult to hear the radicalism

3 University of Chicago, School of Media Theory, “Collage.” https:// csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/collage.htm of Armstrong’s combination of previously “unmarried” sources in both his collages and his music, but in “Laughin’ Louie,” it’s right at the fore: the humor of the first section of the record, a little ditty written by Clarence Gaskill, and then the heart wrenching “Love Song.” “Laughin’ Louie,” with its not-so-subtle association of getting high and high love, of a new pleasure madness and a decaying victorian sentimentality, of mass culture’s uncertain acceleration towards both liberation and Fascism, is in this sense a statement of the age.

Working in Armstrong’s archives over the past few months has added to my own densely layered collage portrait of Armstrong. A few details rise to the fore: a photograph of an old Armstrong wearing a pair of headphones that engulf his ears; a flattened pot leaf in one of Jack Bradley’s books; a letter to Armstrong’s once wife Lil filled with a slew of dirty jokes that FCC regulations would prevent us from reading over the air; a huge print of Armstrong eating spaghetti over the desk where I’ve been working at the scanner. Somewhere in the process of recently moving Armstrong’s massive collection from Queens College to the new Louis Armstrong Center, I overheard Alex, the main archives packer, comment on the numerous books about Hitler in Armstrong’s voluminous library. Ricky tells Alex, “Armstrong said you have to learn about your enemies before you can hate them.” And somewhere I hear that high concert F.