Learning To Love Louis Armstrong

He's not corny, you are

Louis Armstrong in 1953 (photographer unknown to me)

Before we begin: Cornet player Graham Haynes has launched a month-long NYC residency under the auspices of FourOneOne Projects. It’ll run from March 12 through April 15 and include a master class, a conversation with historian and author Robin D.G. Kelley, and a variety of performances in multiple musical contexts. You can see the full list of performances and venues here.

(This is where I remind you that Graham Haynes has an album on Burning Ambulance Music: Echolocation, a collaboration with electronic musician Submerged. Physical CDs and digital downloads are available; get yourself one.)

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Hosted by Rihards Endriksons, journalist and artistic director of Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival, Such Music is a monthly radio program devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show. Since March 2023, the show has been produced in collaboration with Burning Ambulance. This month: Upright bass player Frank Meadows (USA) has recorded new music for Resonance FM, and Such Music has been granted an exclusive preview of the new release by أحمد Ahmed, the 5CD box Giant Beauty, to be released on April 8 by John Chantler’s Fönstret label. You’ll also hear music from recent releases by Roger Turner with Sandy Ewen, Arthur Bull and Alan Tomlinson, Gonçalo Almeida and Peter Jacquemyn, and John Butcher with a 13-piece ensemble. Listen on Mixcloud.

Ah, the tweet prompt. One of the best features of Twitter in its glory days. Someone would ask a question related to music and/or pop culture, and people would quote the tweet while answering the question, and pretty soon thousands of people would be weighing in, sparking conversations that would amuse, entertain, sometimes enrage, and generally eat up a boring afternoon at work. Although Twitter is mostly a wasteland these days, the tradition lives on, and this one popped up a week or so ago:

A lot of people, unsurprisingly, kept their answers within the realm of rock and pop music; I saw many citations of Steely Dan. I’ve loved Steely Dan since high school, so I couldn’t understand that. But there was an obvious answer from my own life, and he’s the subject of this week’s essay.

It’s impossible to imagine jazz without Louis Armstrong. Though he didn’t come out of nowhere — he apprenticed with King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson before setting out on his own — he stunned listeners virtually from the start. He wasn’t just a stylist with a strong individual sound; he was an absolute master of the horn. When he was living in Chicago in the early 1920s, he was reportedly able to blow two hundred high Cs in a row. His 1926 recording of “West End Blues,” with its unaccompanied trumpet introduction and the astonishingly long note he holds to begin his solo, remains a landmark in the music’s history. His entire improvisational style, extrapolating on songs’ chords and harmonies rather than just reworking their melodies, became the thing everyone after him did. In a 1958 interview, Miles Davis famously said, “You know you can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played — I mean even modern. I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad.”

I first paid serious attention to Armstrong almost 25 years ago, when Legacy Recordings sent me a promo copy of the 4CD set The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Before that, all I’d heard was “What a Wonderful World,” because a kid I knew in high school had the soundtrack to the movie Good Morning Vietnam, which he played for me. I was much more interested in James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good).”

But I wasn’t convinced right away. The Hot Fives and Sevens, as they’re known, didn’t click with me. Even “West End Blues” didn’t catch my ear at that time. I knew Armstrong’s music was important, but there was a difference between important and enjoyable. And these tracks, with their tootling, meandering melodies set to plinky-plank piano (with no drummer to lay down a swinging beat), just sounded like some Little Rascals-ass bullshit to me.

Just a few months after that, in early 2001, I watched the Ken Burns documentary Jazz, which might as well have been called Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Some Other, Lesser Musicians. Again, I was unconvinced, but I was deep into writing my first book New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz, and if the music wasn’t screaming, wailing and pounding, I wasn’t interested. I watched the whole series, but came away with the impression that Armstrong was core curriculum — the stuff you had to listen to in order to “understand” everything afterward. There are critics and scholars who still believe this; I’ve argued with them on Facebook. But frankly, being confronted with this perspective gets my back up. I’m likely to tell you to go fuck yourself, that you can’t tell me what I need to listen to. Every record stands on its own, and the broader context of history is a bonus, not a requirement.

I had to come around on my own, and it took me 20 years. And what ultimately did the trick was a fairly narrow slice of his large discography — the albums Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats, released in 1954 and 1955 respectively.

See, for me, Armstrong’s importance rests entirely on his mastery of the horn. No matter the context, when he puts the trumpet to his lips, his solo is a thing of beauty. It’s bluesy, lyrical, emotionally resonant, and when he feels like it, he can hold a note or repeat an upper-register crescendo until you feel like your lungs are going to explode. In 1960, he asked a journalist, “How many modern trumpet players could play my solos? You’d have to carry ’em out on stretchers.” And he does it all while consistently serving the song first and foremost.

But those songs… Even in the 1920s, when he was making the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings that made him a star, Armstrong was an entertainer, looking for hit records. Jazz musicians were not considered artists; they were competing in the popular marketplace. Because of that, he was perfectly willing to record novelty songs, corny love ballads, or anything else he thought an audience might go for. (“Irish Black Bottom”? Really?) By the 1930s, things had really devolved — he recorded songs like “Shoe Shine Boy,” “La Cucaracha,” “She’s the Daughter of a Planter From Havana,” and on and on. He seemed to be focused more on his unique, gravelly singing, though he always picked up the horn before the end of the song. (The solo on “La Cucaracha” rips, sadly.)

In the late 1940s, he rebounded, creatively speaking. A 2021 box set from Mosaic, The Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia And RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946-1966, shines a light on some of his later work. He recorded extensively for Decca (those tracks are included in the 1993 box The Complete Decca Studio Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars) and Verve in the 1950s, too, collaborating with Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and others, and in 1961 he and his band made an album with Duke Ellington on Roulette. There are also numerous live recordings compiled in a third Mosaic box, 2014’s Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars, which is amazing.

Plays W.C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats, both expanded in the 2021 box, feature his All Stars, a group that included trombonist Trummy Young, clarinet player Barney Bigard, pianist Billy Kyle, bassist Arvell Shaw, drummer Barrett Deems, and vocalist Velma Middleton. On these albums, Armstrong’s willingness to perform novelty songs is not really an issue, and he spends more time blowing than singing, anyway. But what I found most fascinating was the bonus material — rehearsals, alternate takes, inserts, etc. Many of the album versions of these songs were assembled from one or two less successful takes. Overdubbing was in its infancy in the early ’50s, so this was more about splicing. Take a verse from here, a solo from there, and you’ve got a complete version of a song. Of course, the goal was always to deliver a perfect take from start to finish, so you get to hear producer George Avakian working on arrangements with Armstrong. They instruct the band members on their parts, move people closer to a microphone so they can deliver chorus vocals, test a mic by having Armstrong deliver a ridiculous joke about an alligator, and on and on.

Is this extra material gonna be of interest to non-obsessives? Maybe, maybe not. It was a blast for me to listen to, though, because it wiped away my longtime belief that his persona, and his singing, were dumb showbiz hokum. While I was focused on jazz that was consciously aiming to be art, I wasn’t hearing him at his best. It was sort of like trying to get into Elvis by listening to nothing but the soundtracks to his movies. When you do hear Louis Armstrong at his best, though, like Elvis, it’s kind of hard to believe he was even from Earth.

If you think of Armstrong as some kind of New Orleans nostalgia act, or the cornball who sang “What A Wonderful World” and “Hello, Dolly!”… well, he was those things. But he was also one of the most incredible pure musicians to ever live, and to hear him in full cry on a deep, swinging, bluesy number is almost too much for your ears, heart and mind to process. The 2021 Mosaic box is for diehards, but I’m really glad I listened to it, because it broadened my own impression of Armstrong in a big way.

And the live box might be my favorite thing of all. It includes performances from the Newport Jazz Festival of 1956 and 1958, a nearly two-hour Chicago concert from 1956, a Carnegie Hall concert from 1947, and much, much more. There are even two tracks from a concert he gave in Ghana in 1956. (There’s an excellent article about that trip here.) Armstrong is in serious musician mode throughout, leading his band through rollicking, swinging jazz tunes in the New Orleans style, but playing them with such passion and fire that they never sound old-timey or corny.

Look, nobody’s perfect. And nobody’s born knowing everything. I didn’t like Louis Armstrong when I was young, but that was because I hadn’t heard the right records. I still don’t listen to the Hot Fives and Sevens. I have zero interest in his work from the 1930s and most of the 1940s, nor his work with Ella Fitzgerald (with very few exceptions, vocal jazz is simply Not For Me). But his best music from the 1950s is awe-inspiring, and if you haven’t heard it yet, I envy you, especially Plays W.C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats. Just start there, and see how deep you end up diving.

Before you go: I interviewed Ministry mainman Al Jourgensen for Stereogum. It was a fun conversation.

That’s it for now. Hey, why not buy some records before I see you next week?