To celebrate Seven Days of Satch, a week-long virtual festival produced by French Quarter Festivals Inc., OffBeat is republishing decades worth of Louis Armstrong content! For Day Four of our retrospective, we bring you an article by John Swenson first published in 2012 in which he lists the ten best Louis Armstrong albums since 1945.
Pops’ Tops: The 10 Best Louis Armstrong Albums Since 1945
Satchmo At Symphony Hall (1947)
The first live document of Armstrong’s return to the small group format after the big band era. The All Stars—Jack Teagarden on trombone, Barney Bigard on clarinet, Sid Catlett on drums, Arvell Shaw on bass and Velma Middleton joining Armstrong on vocals—all got featured spots in a set that covered the entire history of jazz up until that point, from Armstrong classics of the 1920s to the bop-era vehicle “Mop Mop.”
