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Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
The 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 ...
read moreJazz for James Bond and other Secret Agents, Spies and Detectives - Part 1
by Ludovico Granvassu
For a reason or another, movies about detectives, secret agents or spies have gone mano a mano with jazz, and so this week we'll feature jazz inspired by adventurous characters. In this first segment, the focus is on James Bond and how anyone from Louis Armstrong and Count Basie to Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas and Steven Bernstein, among others, have played with John Barry's compositions just like James Bond has played with Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger and whole bunch of ...
read moreThe Vinyl Frontier: The Story Of The Voyager Golden Record
by Ian Patterson
The Vinyl Frontier:The Story Of The Voyager Golden Record Jonathon Scott 288 Pages ISBN: 978-1-4729-5613-2 Bloomsbury Sigma 2019 It was a message-in-a-bottle on a truly cosmic scale. In 1977, two golden records containing images, music and sounds from Earth were attached to the sides of the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft and launched into deep space. The records were intended as a cosmic greeting and a message of peace to any ...
read moreThe Entertainers – Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Lionel Hampton (1929 - 1940)
by Russell Perry
Jazz has often been looked at through the lens of the conflict between art and commerce. In the 1930s, several artists successfully blurred these distinctions. Louis Armstrong adopted popular song as his vehicle for a successful career shift into the mainstream. Cab Calloway defined his popular hipster persona while fronting one of the most professional big bands of the era and providing an incubator for numerous future jazz starts including Dizzy Gillespie, Chu Berry and Milt Hinton. Lionel Hampton, a ...
read moreNew Orleans Diaspora – Louis Armstrong (1926 - 1929)
by Russell Perry
In the past two hours, we've heard the music of the newly conceived jazz orchestras of New York and the Harlem-style or “Stride" pianists. We touched on Louis Armstrong's contributions to the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and the invention of the big band soloist. In this hour, we return with Louis Armstrong to Chicago and listen to his seminal small group recordings. We are joined in this hour by John D'earth—trumpet player, composer, educator, member of the music performance ...
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