Our Lindy 3 and 4 teachers Peter and Julia present us every Monday with an Album of the Week, always including some amazing historical context and fun trivia. This made us really enthusiastic about learning more about the culture and the music. So we thought we’d share the love by putting all of them on our website.
This is the Album of the week for the 29th of January. Louis Armstrong’s Satchmo at Symphony Hall.
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Peter:
“Of course we all know and recognize Louis Armstrong ‘Satcmo’ for his gravelly voice, huge cheeks while playing the trumpet or cornet and showmanship leading big bands and singing jazz classics (e.g. Mack the knife ;).
A New Orleans original, he arrived in New York in 1924 and joined Fletcher Henderson’s band for a while before founding the Louis Armstrong hot five (and later Seven), which also included his second (of four!) wives Lil Hardin, but also Kid Ory (trombone) and Johnny Dodds (clarinet) – here, he excelled as a soloist on the trumpet showing innovative ways of improvisation, at times straying far from the melodies and being an early adopter of scat singing (check out ‘Hotter than that’ for an example of both). A funny anecdote/legend from this time is that during the 1926 recording of the song ‘Heebie Jeebies’, he is said to have dropped his lyrics and, not wanting to disturb the process, decided to fill in the blanks with random syllables and thereby inventing scat singing. (This has been myth busted several times over but still a funny story.)
Starting around 1935 and for over 10 years, he led a big band – and we can clearly hear a shift from sharp virtuoso on the trumpet to all round entertainer. A good example: ‘On a cocoanut island’ from the Decca (where were these studios again) singles – if you’ve been to Herrang dance camp, you might recognize this one!
1947, big bands had become more and more obsolete as the swing era wound down, and he decided to disband his big band and looked for different ways to continue his career.
Our album of the week comes from this time – he was requested to play in a smaller combo in Boston’s Symphony hall. A very danceable number is ‘Royal Garden Blues’. The album is full of amazing solos of the artists – I particularly like the interaction between drummer and Clarinet in C-Jam Blues, where the drummer accents different counts across two phrases in the Clarinet’s solos – you’ll only be able to hit all those after listening to the song a few times.
Another beautiful yet intense and painful (‘my only sin is in my skin’) number is Fats Waller’s composition on Andy Razaf’s ‘Black and Blue’, an expression of the many racial injustices in the early 20th century.
He continued touring in these small combos he called Louis Armstrong and his All Stars many many countries (also acting as an official music ambassador to the US) and Collaborating with famous artists such as last week’s Ella Fitzgerald on ‘Ella and Louis / again’ (Stompin at the Savoy). There’s a cool recording of her impersonating ‘Pops’ from the Newport Jazz Festival 1957 around his borthday – ‘I can’t give you anything but love’, starting around 02:45.
At 62, he recorded the title song to the Musical ‘Hello, Dolly’, which soared to the top of the charts and booted two Beatles songs from there. He became the oldest person to land a number one hit in the US of A ever.
Last trivia – he liked the occasional smoke of Marijuana and was one of the first stars arrested for drug possession.”
Thank you very much for sharing this with us Peter!