Louis Armstrong: Home and Away

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The New York Sun

At first glance, the two discs that make up “Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Yeast Show & Louis’ Home-Recorded Tapes” may seem like two batches of material thrown together for no apparent reason, other than that both feature previously unissued private recordings excavated from Louis Armstrong’s own collection. Either disc, particularly the one with live radio performances from 1937, could be described as the most important Armstrong discovery to be released since his death in 1971. Yet taken together, they form an especially vivid picture of Louis Armstrong the man, musician, and mensch.

The double-disc set was issued by Jazz Heritage not long after the 107th anniversary of Armstrong’s birth last month and just in time to announce the start of a festival celebrating the instrument that he taught the world to play. It includes a recording of Armstrong on NBC’s “Fleischmann’s Yeast” radio show in 1937 and a batch of home-recorded tapes that have never been heard. On Sunday, the Sixth Annual Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT) will begins with a special three-horn salute to Satchmo staged at the man’s own house in Corona, Queens.

First of all, the radio performances from 1937 constitute one of the most significant jazz finds imaginable — on a par with Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie or Bird and Dizzy at Town Hall — because there’s precious little live Armstrong from the (comparatively) early years. Notably, the Fleischmann’s radio treasure trove owes its existence to, of all unlikely individuals, Rudy Vallee. Remembered fondly as a pioneering crooner, bandleader, movie comic, and early broadcast icon, Vallee, who also played saxophone, wasn’t exactly regarded as a major force in jazz. However, when he took a vacation from April to July of 1937 (he was invited to the coronation of the king of England), he temporarily relinquished the reins of his extremely popular Fleischmann’s Yeast-sponsored radio series to Armstrong. It was the first known example of a black musician hosting and starring in a major prime-time variety series.

Armstrong was a genius when it came to the art and craft of recording, and he was able to switch on his considerable charisma even in an empty recording studio in the middle of the night, facing no one but a tired group of musicians and engineers looking at their watches.

Armstrong explodes with energy on these 24 live tracks. Hearing him do a few tunes that he never otherwise recorded is no small bonus; as both singer and player, Armstrong is brilliant even on lesser products of Tin Pan Alley, like “The Love Bug Will Bite You (If You Don’t Watch Out),” on which he turns an annoyingly repetitive lyric into scat-inflected virtuoso merrymaking. I’m especially fond of “That’s Southern Hospitality” (misidentified in the booklet as “That’s What I Like,” which also was recorded by Vallee and the last of the Mammy Singers, Phil Harris), because it delivers a bonus in the form of Armstrong singing the verse as well as the chorus. There’s also an ingenious treatment of the old college football march “Washington and Lee Swing,” which he makes into a sequel to his famous parade theme “High Society.”

But the live versions of well-established tunes from the Armstrong canon are no less valuable. In general, it’s said that Armstrong’s recordings from 1935 onward (when he returned from Europe and began his long associations with manager Joe Glaser and Decca Records) are more mature and less frantic, but less inspired, than his best work from 1925-34. Yet the Fleischmann tracks show an Armstrong cavorting with as much zaniness and sheer electricity as he did on his early work. His version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Lazy River,” which Armstrong had already made into a classic in 1931, is even more supercharged here than his original performance of the song, with musical director Luis Russell getting a piano solo and vocal encouragement from the star himself. “Lazy River” virtually launched the career of Armstrong’s fellow Crescent City funster Louis Prima, who was representative of several entire generations of jazzmen who learned to play and sing through a process of what we could call Satchmosis.

* * *

Whether in the radio booth or onstage, Armstrong always played zestfully for an audience. But on his private tapes, which were recorded on his own decks in his house in Queens, Armstrong mostly plays, sings, talks, and carries on for his own enjoyment. It’s a much more introverted Armstrong; he offers spoken commentary on a variety of topics. Sampled from thousands of hours he recorded in the 1950s and ’60s, the tapes offer Satchmo scatting over a Sousa March and playing an all-too-short upper register variation on “Over the Rainbow.” He dictates letters to “Mr. Glaser,” his manager, and to the British critic Max Jones. He exchanges wisdom with a couple of European trumpet students and shares adorably naughty nursery rhymes with a little girl. He mourns departed musicians he knew and loved, such as Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan, and Big Sid Catlett. At one point he hits upon a fruit theme and sings both “Blueberry Hill” and “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” showing us, in his phrasing, how songs can be “Satch-uated.”

As for the more serious aspects of jazz history, the most essential performance offered here is Armstrong playing an astonishingly beautiful trumpet solo over the 1923 record he made of “Tears” with his greatest mentor, Joe King Oliver. It’s a stunning moment, one of the most gorgeous in all of Armstrong’s career. But I have to confess a certain fondness for his treatment of the song that compares life to a bowl of cherries, which had been introduced on Broadway in 1931 by Vallee, the man who did Armstrong and American music in general such a major favor six years later. If anyone can provide an object lesson in how to “live and laugh at it all,” as the song goes, it’s Louis Armstrong.

wfriedwald@nysun.com


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