Louis Armstrong - The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 1 - 3

 

My introduction to Louis Armstrong was seeing him on TV as a little girl in the mid to late 1950s.  He always made me smile and laugh while he was mugging it up, telling jokes, singing, playing his horn, his ever present handkerchief and his huge grin.  At the time, I had no idea that Louis Armstrong possessed a level of influence comparable to that of Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso.

Louis Armstrong began his career in the bands of New Orleans' King Oliver and New York's Fletcher Henderson, at a time that was largely dominated by hokey vaudevillian pop music.  Having gained a reputation as a prodigious trumpet talent, Louis took advantage of newborn freedoms and kept his new music deeply rooted in the Southern blues tradition, which has become a cornerstone for all jazz to follow. His melodic invention extended to his voice, woefully unrecorded to this point.  With it, he introduced an entirely new way of singing popular songs.

The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 1

Volume 1 concentrates on the Hot Five material from 1925 and 1926.  The first band included Louis, Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, pianist Lil Hardin, and banjo boss Johnny St. Cyr.  These 20 recordings were made for the Okeh label.  The blues model on which all of these tunes were based is expanded upon and remade in the image of first the ensemble and then in the image of the soloist.  From "My Heart" and the amazing "Oriental Strut" to "Lonesome Blues," to "Come Back Sweet Papa," to the introduction of scat singing in Lil Hardin's "Skid-Dat-De Dat," the vibrant energy and professionalism just drip from these tunes.  But notions of harmonic invention are also present, places where the soloist slips outside the changes and moves toward reaching a musical unity with the ensemble by whatever means necessary as long as it swung.  The sound here is as good as it gets for the time, and after one or two listens, the hiss is barely recognizable. What's important is the fidelity of the music, and it's excellent.

The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 2

The second volume reveals the transition from quintet to septet.  The first four tunes have May Alix added on vocals, and then Harry Clark replaces Kid Ory, who briefly went off to start his own band.  In May 1927, John Thomas takes over the trombone chair, Baby Dodds joins on drums, and Pete Briggs on tuba to round out the septet.   But the band changes to a tentet a few days later on a different session with Earl Hines on the piano and bass added to the mix as well as a second cornetist.  The personnel changes were confusing during this era, but the music wasn't.  The sound here developed into something so gloriously complex and rich that neither New Orleans nor anyone else had heard anything like it before.  Duke Ellington, who was leading his first real band in 1927, was deeply enamored with these recordings, especially "Wild Man Blues," "Chicago Breakdown," and "Melancholy." In September of that year, the original band reunited, bringing it back down to the Hot Five for the remainder of 1927 and, as such, on tracks such as "Ory's Creole Trombone," "The Last Time," and the amazing "Got No Blues." The sound quality is slightly better here, in that there is a bit less hiss. The fidelity and integrity of the tracks themselves are nearly flawless.

The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 3

The final volume of Louis Armstrong's Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings features 25 tracks.  These recordings reveal how deeply and broadly Louis had begun to use improvisation as it played into the heart of the blues, as well as how complex the arrangements had gotten while still remaining accessible as music to be listened to and danced to.  They also represent the final three recordings Lil Hardin Armstrong made with the band, as she and Louis were divorced in early 1928 (with no less than Lonnie Johnson on guitar -- check his solo on "I'm Not Rough"). Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, and Johnny St. Cyr, all original members, also departed.

Earl Hines enters the picture with the next Hot Five, as does Fred Robinson on trombone, Jimmy Strong on clarinet and tenor saxophone, Zutty Singleton on drums, and Mancy Cara on banjo.  Louis and Hines both sang in this formation, which accounts for the vast majority of the material found here, beginning in June 1928 with the OKeh single "Fireworks" and including the famous "Basin Street Blues" as well as "Sugar Foot Strut," "West End Blues," and Hardin's classic "Don't Jive Me," among others.

The band changed names and some members later in the year. Hines and Robinson remained, but the great Don Redman joined on clarinet and alto and became the arranger, as did Dave Wilborn on banjo and guitar. This faction, known as Louis Armstrong & His Savoy Ballroom Five, recorded such monstrously successful cuts as Louis' "Muggles" (slang for marijuana in the 1920s), "Weather Bird," and Redman's amazing "Save It, Pretty Mama."  On the 12th of December, a week after this session, the Savoy Ballroom Five actually included seven members, with Mancy Cara and Jimmy Strong being added back into the fold for new trea tments of "St. James Infirmary," "Tight Like This," and "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya." Throughout, what is heard is a tightening of arrangements by Redman, whose musicality and sense of harmonic unity is as keen as Duke Ellington's in this period, and the fact that improvisation played a role that was as central as that of a bridge in a pop song later in the century.

Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are influential because they revolutionized jazz music by introducing the concept of solo improvisation and improvisational techniques such as swing and syncopation.   The accolades that have been floating around for decades: "The Rosetta Stone of jazz", "The roadmap of American music",  "The musical shot heard 'round the world", and "The Dead Sea Scrolls of Jazz", are all true.

For the freeload, have you made a New Year's resolution?