Jazz Articles about Louis Armstrong
Bill Cunliffe, Doc Watkins & Louis Armstrong
by Joe Dimino
We begin our annual Christmas Hour of Neon Jazz with brilliant young composer Richard Williams and a song off his 2022 album Hollywood Christmas. Following that, we hear a live cut recorded by your trusty host at the historic Blue Room off 18 & Vine in Kansas City with pianist Charles Williams doing his best to honor the Peanuts gang. From there, we get into a host recent holiday albums including John Di Martino, Doc Watkins and the master of ...
read moreLouis Armstrong: Louis Wishes You A Cool Yule
by Chris May
Plenty of jazz fans loathe “holiday" albums, defined as many of them are by cheap sentimentality and fake bonhomie. If the eggnog does not make you retch, the tackily jazzed-up Christmas carols will. But Louis Armstrong's Louis Wishes You A Cool Yule is an exception. Armstrong himself was exceptional. As Duke Ellington observed, “He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way." Consider something else... Armstrong smoked weed pretty much every day of ...
read moreDangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld
by Richard J Salvucci
Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld T. J. English 420 Pages ISBN: # 978-0-06-303141-8 William Morrow 2022 The subtitle of this not uninteresting history by T.J. English could well be “Sex, Drugs, Jazz, and the Mob," because, for the most part, that is what you get. It is a flawed book, in part because there are errors of fact, some awfully florid prose, a few egregious typos, and more than a little magical ...
read moreThe Best Musical Almost No One Ever Saw: The Real Ambassadors
by Richard J Salvucci
The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation Keith Hatschek 279 Pages ISBN:978-1-4698-3784-4 University Press of Mississippi 2022 In the late 1950s, Dave Brubeck and Iola Brubeck decided that it might be time for jazz to visit Broadway. Iola, in particular, felt strongly about doing a project that blended jazz as an art form and as a sociopolitical commentary on the absurdity of racial segregation. The Real ...
read moreThe Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia & RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946-66
by Skip Heller
Louis Armstrong officially returned to small band leadership May 17, 1947 via a triumphant concert at Town Hall that was less comeback than reaffirmation. It was even the dawn of his second great period, full of recordings that stood tall with his epochal 1920's output, and the subsequently-assembled Louis Armstrong and his All Stars would immediately establish themselves as a staple of the live jazz circuit as well as a powerhouse recording unit. That era--to the purposes of ...
read moreHeart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong
by Keith Hatschek
Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong Ricky Riccardi 339 Pages ISBN: # 978-0-19-091411-0 Oxford University Press 2020 Louis Armstrong was arguably the most celebrated performer of the twentieth century. Known around the world for his prodigious talent on the trumpet, his inimitable vocal stylings, and as the foremost ambassador of jazz, Satchmo, as his fans lovingly knew him, cut an iconic figure in American music. While his public-facing ...
read moreAmerican Frederick Thomas: 'The Black Russian' Who Connected Jazz To The Margins Of Asia
by Arthur R George
The child of former slaves, Frederick Bruce Thomas' New York Times obituary called him “the sultan of jazz," for the jazz palace he founded in Constantinople (now jny: Istanbul) after World War I, a jazz borderland beyond even the music's early jny: Paris outpost. He was hosting bands in Constantinople in 1921 even before Louis Armstrong joined King Oliver (1922) or started the Hot Five (1925). Frederick Thomas had journeyed from his 1872 birthplace in Mississippi northward, and ...
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