Friday jazz profile: Back to some basics with Louis Armstrong

 I have no order here.  What the hell.  Let's go back to the roots of jazz with Satchmo today.  Louis Armstrong.  For whatever incomprehensible reason, "St. James Infirmary" is on my mind, and nobody did it better than Satchmo.  This also gives me an opportunity to ramble about the essence of jazz.  I did this last week with Grant Green, but let's get even more fundamental.  Long before Louis sang, "What A Wonderful World," he was basically inventing jazz, along with King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton can piss off.  So here's what's going on.  At this point, jazz was barely distinguishable from blues.  King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and a few others in New Orleans are just playing around with structure in subtle ways, starting with compositions that are blues songs.  "St. James Infirmary" is a blues song, and it can be played in any number of styles.  But listen to what Louis does with it.  Listen for the hesitation, and in particular, note how he solos, at 3:32.

So here's the cool thing that Louis does, which is not only a main trick in his arsenal, but central to the development of jazz.  It's the hesitation.  He comes in just behind the beat.  Every time you expect him to play, or play a new bar, he hesitates just a tad.  Consistently, by the same amount, intentionally.  He's not late, missing the beat because he can't play.  There are crappy musicians who can't keep time.  We call them "punk" musicians.  Zing!  No, Louis is drawing it out, just as the musicians draw out each individual note for longer than you would expect naturally.  That creates the tension of the piece.  That way, when he does play rapid-fire, you get the contrast.  Nobody is playing anything dissonant, nobody is breaking the melody down the way bebop musicians later would, but all of the developments in jazz would follow from what Louis is doing.  He takes a simple piece, and starts playing around with the structure, in order to let the alternations create mood and tension.  Those alterations move the piece from "blues" to "jazz."  These days, plenty of musicians ride the line, and Satchmo's version of "St. James Infirmary" is so firmly rooted in blues that anyone playing like this today would get along just fine with the modern blues world.  The lines have been pretty blurry since T-Bone Walker anyway, and whatever Wynton Marsalis thinks, trying to define "jazz" is a fool's errand.  Once you start improvising by playing around with the structure of the composition, call it jazz.  Sure.  Just learn to appreciate that.