![]() So with Louis serving as our disc-jockey, let's dig into the original "Cornet Chop Suey": Yesterday, I shared a Voice of America interview with Louis where he introduced and discussed "Heebie Jeebies." From that same session, he did the same thing with "Cornet Chop Suey." Here he is talking about it in 1956, downplaying it as just an unpublished compisition, recorded to make some quick money to go to the cabarets, with no thoughts about royalties or anything like that. He probably didn't play it with King Oliver or Fletcher Henderson, but he probably did play it with Lil on piano at their Chicago home (her solo, while not an all-time classic, is one of her best ones, in my opinion). Because me, I can admire what Louis put into composing this work and how he must have worked on it until it sounded like perfection. If so, if you really need every note of your jazz to be freshly minted from the tortured artist's brain, I feel sorry for you. Now should this change anyone's opinion of "Cornet Chop Suey"? I should hope not. So here's "Cornet Chop Suey" two years before it got waxed, and it's all there: that incredible introduction, the melody and even every note of the stop-time chorus, marked by Louis as the "Patter" section. ![]() He made sure to stress that's how it was in the old days, when everybody was supposedly improvising. But once he got it down, that's it, only change a few notes here and there, as long as they fit. I don't have the quotes at hand (but-plug alert-they're in my book), but he talked about it with Richard Meryman in the 1960s, basically saying that everything he played was improvised at one point. Soloists such as Louis and Kid Ory and King Oliver worked on their solos and once they had it down perfect, well, why in the hell mess with it? They were playing for dancers and making records for a quick buck, never thinking that students at universities would be analyzing their every eighth-note rest. ![]() In fact, when I was a member of the Master's program in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers, when we got to the subject of Armstrong in our Jazz Historiography class, our professor, Lewis Porter, passed this around to make the point that improvisation in the early days wasn't exactly a given. The Library of Congress deposits were discovered in the 80s and have been writen about often since. Of course, some of you might not know where I'm heading, but here's the straight dope: every note of "Cornet Chop Suey" was written down by Louis Armstrong and registered at the Library of Congress on JANUARY 24, 1924! Two years before he recorded it!ĭon't believe me? Well, I don't know how good this is going to work, but Lawrence Gushee wrote a defintive piece on Louis and improvisation that now appears in the book "In the Course of Performance." That book is available on Google Books and you can scroll to page 300 to see a copy of it, right in Louis's hand. But that could never happen, not in these righteous days of pure jazz, when, if you weren't improvising, well, you might as well be playing dance band music with Vincent Lopez. The melody of "Cornet Chop Suey," which he wrote, is very forward-thinking, a harbinger of snake-like melodies that would come later on in the bop era (Scott Robinson recorded a wonderful updated take on this tune in recent years, but I'd love to hear a bebop front line of trumpet and alto tear through this melody in unison.wouldn't sound out-of-date for a second).Īnd then there's that stop-time solo, every note so perfectly placed and swinging, it's almost as if he wrote it out beforehand. He's in complete command of his horn, playing almost clarinet figures his trumpet (or cornet). You want to know what made Louis Armstrong such a revolutionary musician in the 1920s? Well, it's all right here for you. Well, that all changed with the third song written that day "Cornet Chop Suey." This is a piece that has gotten writers breathless for decades and I don't know how much I can add. Louis started the date by jiving around with his wife Lil on the blues "Georgia Grind," followed by creating the scat solo heard around the world on "Heebie Jeebies." But to this point, the Armstrong horn hadn't had much to do. We've reached the third song of Louis Armstrong's doozy of a session on Februand this one is a bona fide masterpiece. Cyr, banjoĬurrently available on CD: Both the JSP and Sony Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven boxes have it (I like the JSP better but the Sony has much better packaging if you go for that sort of thing) ![]() Louis Armstrong, trumpet, vocal Kid Ory, trombone Johnny Dodds, clarinet Lil Armstrong, piano Johnny St.
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