[Dixielandjazz] Louis Armstrong reviewed - London Telegraph

[Robert Ringwald]

Let Satchmo Blow Your Blues Away
by Charles Spencer
London Telegraph, October 24, 2011
When Louis Armstrong died in 1971, I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.
He struck me then as a rather embarrassing entertainer with more than a touch of
the Uncle Tom about him, playing the fool to ingratiate himself with his audience.
What an insufferably priggish and ignorant teenager I was.
I spent much of my life convinced that I hated jazz until a few years ago when I
actually took the trouble to listen to it, since when it has become one of the greatest
pleasures and consolations of my middle age.
And Armstrong was surely the greatest jazzman of them all. Indeed, I believe he was
one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, as significant in his own sphere
as Picasso and Stravinsky were in theirs. Like Guernica and The Rite of Spring, Louis
Armstrong's West End Blues, with its thrilling opening trumpet solo, is one of the
defining works of the modern age.
Philip Larkin, not a man prone to indiscriminate praise, described Armstrong as "an
artist of Flaubertian purity and a character of exceptional warmth and goodness".
And when the poet appeared on Desert Island Discs, and chose Armstrong's Dallas Blues
as one of his eight records, he described Armstrong as the "combined Chaucer and
Shakespeare of jazz".
Meanwhile, the superb jazz writer Richard Cook, who died, far too young at 50, in
2007, has described Satchmo's solos with his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands in the
1920s as "stunning in their virtuosity and unprecedented in their range, unleashing
all the possibilities of improvisation in the idiom... If the world's music still
swings today, it is in large part because of what Armstrong was doing more than eight
decades ago."
For anyone who wants to discover the full range of Armstrong's music, from his earliest
work to his final years, a tremendous new box set has recently been released called
Satchmo -- Ambassador of Jazz. It is the first collection to cover his entire career,
and contains 10 discs, featuring 150 of his greatest recordings, as well as rare
and unreleased tracks, an interview with the great man, and a 1956 set from the Hollywood
Bowl at which Armstrong was described by one critic as being in "Herculean form".
The bad news is that this treasure trove doesn't come cheap. Amazon is selling the
set at £114, but then it is a thing of great beauty. It is packaged in a replica
of Armstrong's trumpet case, and, as well as the superbly remastered discs, there
is an evocatively illustrated book about Armstrong's life and career.
I have been living with this wonderful music for several months now, and cannot imagine
a more cheering antidote to the anxious times in which we live. When Armstrong blows,
swings, and sings in that wonderfully gravelly voice, the world's cares seem to fall
away.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

"All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened
immigration policy on the part of the American Indian."  Pat Paulsen