One of the happiest side effects of the Louis Armstrong centennial celebration is the reconfiguration of this master musician’s catalog. For many years, much of Armstrong’s most important recordings were unavailable in record stores, but today his work is better represented than at any point in history.
The flip side of this coin is that the market is saturated with a glut of cheap product designed to cash in on the maestro’s renewed popularity in the wake of Ken Burns’ Jazz series. Armstrong revival is alarmingly heavy on his latest work, ironically elevating his status as a pop singer to preeminence over his position as the great jazz improviser, the Homer of swing. It would be a tragedy, although an ironic indictment of the priorities of the American entertainment industry, if this outstanding musician is eventually remembered for his least musically impressive work.
A guide to the swamp of releases in the Armstrong catalog is necessary to provide some perspective on his true worth.
There are more than 300 available titles under Armstrong’s name and more coming out all time. Unsurprisingly, more than a dozen of them are tided with some variation on the theme “What A Wonderful World,” the posthumous track that has become a calling card for musicians who want to trade in on his memory without doing any homework. While it’s hard to be too disappointed with any Armstrong recording you might pick up at random, the joys to be derived from getting your hands on the real thing are too great to deprive yourself of.
Like most genius artists, Armstrong’s brilliance is most dramatic at the outset of his career; when his conception arrived fresh on a scene that had not anticipated it and was changed forever. Like later 20th-century figures such as Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, Armstrong changed all the rules as soon as the world heard his startling new approach to music.
Armstrong’s recording career begins in 1923 with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band Band, the apotheosis of early New Orleans jazz, a group that included Oliver and Armstrong on cornets, Lil Hardin on piano, Honore Dutrey on trombone, Bill Johnson on banjo and the great Dodds brothers, clarinetist Johnny and drummer Baby Dodds. Armstrong’s first solo on “Chimes Blues” and other recordings he made with Oliver are available on Louis Armstrong and King Oliver (Milestone).
Within a year of his recording debut, Armstrong had changed the face of American music permanently. Arriving in Harlem in 1924 to join Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, Armstrong created an immediate sensation. His soloing style was such that he was creating new melody lines within the songs he was playing. We don’t have any musical documentation of what he must have sounded like in person with the Henderson orchestra, but we do have the testimony of his bandmates and admirers that they tried to copy this new sound and even went as far as trying to dress like Armstrong, who arrived in New York with ill-fitting clothes and boots.
Clarence Williams, a New Orleans native who was the top session producer for Okeh records in York, immediately hired Armstrong to record in his group, the Clarence Williams Blue Five, backing up a variety of singers. Armstrong began recording with Williams in a band that also included Sidney Bechet within three weeks of his arrival in New York. Armstrong also accompanied the world’s most popular blues singer, Bessie Smith, a tour de force collaboration between two musical masterminds.
These recordings are available on albums under Henderson’s and Smith’s names, but a better way to hear a cross section of these early Armstrong recordings, along with some of the best early work he did under his own name, is to get the box set Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934 (Columbia).
This comprehensive set covers material from Morton, Henderson, Smith and Clarence Williams sessions and samples liberally from the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions as well as early big band material by Armstrong as a leader. It is probably the single best Armstrong collection in terms of breadth and quality.
Okeh noticed that Armstrong’s presence on a recording, even unaccredited, made the record an almost certain hit, so when Armstrong decided to return to Chicago in 1925, where he and his wife, pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, had a house together, Okeh signed Armstrong to his own recording contract, and over the next three years Louis fronted the first records under his own name, the legendary Hot Fives and Hot Sevens.
Even the most seasoned Armstrong expert will find a world of delight in the incomparable Sony Legacy release The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Columbia). This is the mother-lode, what the renowned jazz educator and producer Phil Schaap calls “The Rosetta Stone of Jazz” in the liner notes. These recordings, made between 1925-27, show Armstrong creating swing rhythm in a tour de force of early jazz played at levels unmatched before or since. At the start of the session we hear Armstrong urging on banjo player Johnny St. Cyr on “Gut Bucket Blues”: “All those New Orleans cats really do that thing!” Armstrong exults.
The legendary tracks follow in dizzying succession: “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” “Potato Head Blues,” “Tight Like This,” “Muggles,” the magnificent “Fireworks,” with Baby Dodds playing the drums like a tap dancer.
The collection includes tracks that were listed as Hot Five recordings but featured other configurations, such as the astonishing duet between Armstrong and pianist Earl Hines, “Weather Bird.” These sides also give us our first glimpse of Armstrong’s singular vocal style. The vocals are crude, jokey and under-recorded, but you can hear Armstrong playing with the phrasing, moving against the rhythmic pulse just as he did in his playing, and employing scatting techniques.
A much briefer, but judiciously chosen and meticulously re-mastered overview of this same material is available as part of the Robert Parker series. Louis Armstrong 1923-31 contains 24 early Armstrong sides refashioned into Parker’s ingenious stereo reconfigurations. The wealth of sonic detail this process brings to the material may give purists cause for argument, but it’s welcome fare to the open-minded listener.
The Armstrong of the 1920s made his mark as a brilliant jazz soloist and improviser, aimed originally by his record companies to appeal to a black audience, but in the 1930s Armstrong became a mainstream pop artist with near universal appeal. By 1930 Armstrong’s singing had become just as popular as his playing and nearly as revolutionary. His live performances were galvanized by his mugging, comic antics and vibrant, growling vocals. Almost magically, he managed to transfer this wit and sheer joy into his recordings as well.
During the early 1930s Armstrong toured incessantly, both in the United States and Europe, where he became one of the first jazz players to enthrall European audiences. His reputation grew, not only on both continents but also in the media. He appeared in Broadway plays and Hollywood musicals. Between 1932, when he made his last Okeh record, and 1935, when he began his long-term association with Decca, Armstrong’s domestic sides were a handful of uneven recordings for Bluebird. He did, however, record six tracks in 1934 in a Paris studio for French Brunswick. These included the haunting, beautiful “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and a toe-tapping instrumental marijuana tribute, “Song of the Vipers,” which was immediately yanked off the market when the embarrassed record company discovered that a “viper” was a pot smoker. Some of this material can be heard on C’est Si Bon (Atlantic/Rhino).
Beginning in the late 1930s Armstrong suffered recurrent problems with his lip, which became so scarred and stiff that it sometimes perceptibly affected his playing from the late 1930s onward. But like a baseball pitcher who’s lost the edge on his fastball, Armstrong was able to adjust to his physical limitations. Armstrong continued to grow as a vocalist as well. His warmth and his ability to charge even the sappiest of tunes with sincere feeling made simple melodies yield every nuance of beauty. He recorded over 100 sides for Decca between 1935 and 1949 in front of various lineups, and his singing alone was enough to make the performances memorable. His playing is fully matured, luminous and revelatory on The Complete Decca Studio Master Takes 1935-1939 (Definitive Records) and The Complete Decca Studio Master Takes 1940-49 (Definitive Records).
Even in the worst of settings Armstrong usually managed to make virtually every track he played on sparkle with some aspect of his fertile musical imagination. He was all too often treated on particular sessions by the producer and accompaniment as an affable pop vocalist who also played trumpet and on these occasions the savvy Armstrong played to the level that was expected of him simply because he was a professional. But whenever he was afforded a real musical opportunity, or even rarer, a real challenge, Armstrong always rose to the occasion.
By 1947 the big-band era had ended. Although he would continue to use orchestras for some recording sessions, Armstrong returned to playing with small groups, known as the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, until his death. This small ensemble work, which harkened back to his earliest days playing New Orleans jazz, was the context Armstrong was most comfortable in, alongside such gifted collaborators as trombonist Jack Teagarden and, until 1952, his old friend, pianist Earl Hines.
In the 1950s and 1960s Armstrong recorded for a variety of labels, especially Decca, where he played some large-band sessions and backed the Mills Brothers, and Columbia, where he tended to record more adventurous material. There are many live recordings from this period, which collectively demonstrate that Armstrong’s shows varied very little from night to night over the last 20 years of his life. Even on the weakest-sounding of these shows, such as the late 1950s material captured on Vanguard’s Essential… Armstrong’s presence is clear and strong, making the records more enjoyable and dramatic than studio recordings.
But the best of the live records capture the quintessence of his art. Ambassador Satch (Columbia), a 1955 European set featuring the All-Stars lineup of Trummy Young on trombone, Edmond Hall on clarinet, Billy Kyle on piano, Arvell Shaw on bass and Barrett Deems on drums, smokes with maddening intensity: “Muskrat Ramble,” “Royal Garden Blues” and the perennial hard-rocking showstopper, “Tiger Rag,” are fueled by the ecstatic cries of an audience gone berserk. Another fine live set, Satchmo at Symphony Hall (Verve) was taken from a November 1947 Boston show. The California Concerts (Decca Jazz) show the All-Stars in top 1950s form playing to enthusiastic west coast crowds.
You can hear Armstrong ruminating on the old days on the excellent 1957 MCA retrospective Satchmo, which features Armstrong’s spoken observations on the material dating back through his career with updated versions of songs from “Dipper-mouth Blues” to “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” There are several live tracks, small-band studio recordings with the All-Stars and larger group sessions arranged by Sy Oliver.
Armstrong’s records with the Dukes of Dixieland and Oscar Peterson were unspectacular, but his work with Ella Fitzgerald, Ella and Louis (Verve) and Porgy and Bess (Verve), is superb, as is his epochal 1961 meeting with Duke Ellington, The Great Summit (Blue Note). To hear Armstrong sing Ellington’s material backed up by the Duke and a choice selection of sidemen is a revelation. When you realize that the session was recorded in two passes with virtually no rehearsal, the accomplishment is truly awe-inspiring and leaves you wishing there was more material like it.
The quality of Armstrong’s playing and overall execution on sessions where he was encouraged to display his chops was still impressive throughout the 1950s.The excellent set of blues pioneer W.C. Handy songs recorded by the All-Stars as Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (Columbia) prompted a similar cover set of Fats Waller tunes, Satch Plays Fats (Columbia), which is one of the high points of Armstrong’s later work. Louis had collaborated merrily with Waller in the 1930s and once again showed his affinity for Waller’s material. The reissue of this album includes some of the earlier material as well, offering a good chance to compare Armstrong’s relationship to Waller over the course of his life.
Armstrong continued to play with grace and distinctive style in the last decade of his life, but the physical limitations that clouded his playing ability often showed through. He remained one of America’s greatest vocalists right until the end as the string of latter day hits—”Blueberry Hill,” “Mack the Knife,” “Hello Dolly” and the posthumous release of “What A Wonderful World” proved. If you want to pick up a compilation that includes “What A Wonderful World” without ignoring Armstrong’s greatest early achievements, the Louis Armstrong (Columbia) collection from the Ken Burns anthology does a decent job of touching all the bases.
Certainly the moments of instrumental truth contained in the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens tower over the recorded legacy of that entire generation of musicians, but that doesn’t make the rest of Armstrong’s output worthless, even by comparison. In fact, comparing the different approaches Armstrong took over the course of his career misses the point because Armstrong towers over 20th-century music and his entire career was of priceless value. He was a star on the world stage, not just in the United States, and to the extent that jazz is now a world music Armstrong must be given the credit for opening those doors. He took New Orleans jazz and painted the globe with it. The Complete Hot Fives and Hot Sevens are the masterpieces, but the rest of the canvasses are valuable as well.
