As we continue to confront the coronavirus pandemic, it’s worth remembering that roughly a century ago an influenza pandemic similarly wreaked havoc around the world and swept through the city that invented jazz: New Orleans.
Between Sept. 8, 1918 and March 15, 1919, the Crescent City suffered 3,362 influenza-related deaths – almost 1% of New Orleans’ population and twice the national rate, according to the Historic New Orleans Collection, a repository of data and primary-source documentation. Another analysis, from the University of Michigan, tabulates that “between October 1918 and April 1919, the city experienced a staggering 54,089 cases of influenza. Of these, 3,489 died – a case fatality rate of 6.5 percent, and an excess death rate of 734 per 100,000. Only Pittsburgh (806) and Philadelphia (748) – the two cities with the worst epidemics in the nation – had higher death rates.”
From a cultural standpoint, it’s a little terrifying to realize that one New Orleanian who would go on to do more than anyone to personify and popularize the fledgling art form – Louis Armstrong – was in the cross hairs of this disease. Which could lead any jazz aficionado to wonder: What would have happened to the course of music history if a teenage Louis Armstrong, who remains the face of jazz, had succumbed?
“With everybody suffering from the flu, I had to work and play the doctor to everyone in my family, as well as all my friends in the neighborhood,” Armstrong wrote in “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.” “If I do say so, I did a good job curing them.”
So Armstrong, who was 17 at the time and years away from the jazz breakthroughs he would achieve in Chicago in the mid-1920s, wasn’t just present during the pandemic – he was exposed to its victims at close range night and day. Had he been afflicted, the nascent art form he would help define might never have conquered the world as quickly as it did – or in the way that it did – thanks largely to him.
True, “New Orleans music” – as locals described their indigenous sound before the term “jazz” came into vogue in the 20th century’s second decade – had other progenitors before Armstrong. Cornetist Buddy Bolden, who was born in New Orleans in 1877 and died in obscurity in 1931 (after more than two decades in a mental institution), conquered the city with what was described as an unrivaled and thrilling clarion sound. When Bolden played what’s believed to have been blues-inflected, ragtime-influenced solos at the Mississippi River’s banks, it was said that people could hear him clear to the other side. Because no recording of Bolden’s work is known to have survived, his contributions are preserved only in words, not sound.
Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong’s senior by many years, was the first to prove that the elusive, improvised, seemingly chaotic music played in New Orleans’ bordellos, saloons and street parades could be articulated on paper. His “Jelly Roll Blues,” copyrighted in 1915, forever stamped jazz as a music that was suited to Western musical notation for other musicians to read, perform and improvise on. Morton’s recordings with His Red Hot Peppers, cut in Chicago, New York and New Jersey from 1926-30, brought jazz’s harmonic and structural sophistication to unprecedented heights. And his Library of Congress interviews with Alan Lomax, recorded in 1938, not only provided detailed accounts of the birth of jazz (complete with musical examples that Morton sang and played on the piano) but gave the world an intellectual framework with which to recognize jazz as a bona fide art form – one equal in complexity and sophistication to its European classical counterpart.
But it was Armstrong who in 1920s Chicago accomplished the triple feat of becoming the biggest jazz star of the era; the most brilliant trumpeter the art form had yet known; and the architect of solos so profound and ingeniously constructed that they’re studied, analyzed and absorbed to this day. The recordings Armstrong made with his Hot Five and Hot Seven ensembles in the Roaring Twenties became sensations because of his brilliant tone, comprehensive virtuosity and stratospheric high notes, helping establish Chicago as a jazz nexus and launching Armstrong into unending fame.
Armstrong may never have topped his musical achievements of the 1920s, but he went on to attain a degree of pop-culture stardom no jazz instrumentalist-vocalist ever has matched. Appearances in Hollywood films such as “High Society” (1956), “Paris Blues” (1961), “Hello, Dolly!” (1969) and in uncounted TV shows made him that rarest brand of celebrity, one universally known by a single name: Satchmo (short for “satchel mouth”). That he continued to perform around the world until his death in 1971, at age 69, brought jazz to millions of listeners and made him the embodiment of the music forevermore.
So what would have happened if Armstrong had not survived the pandemic of 1918-19? Which musician could have offered mass audiences a comparable combination of charismatic personality, unparalleled technique, singular sound and well-documented improvisational genius? Which trumpeter could have recorded solos of equal innovation, thereby pointing the way for acolytes such as Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and generations more? Who else could have given jazz such an indelible brand, yet one that was both welcoming to the uninitiated and satisfying to the cognoscenti?
The answer, of course, is no one. Without Armstrong, jazz would have lost the figure who set an exalted standard for all who came after and propelled an entire art form into global recognition.
Which makes you wonder: Amid all the death now surrounding us, how many visionaries and geniuses are we losing, and how will that loss echo for all time?
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
