Daniel Louis Armstrong was born in the Perdido district of New Orleans, on August 4, 1901. Despite the dire poverty of his upbringing (the child of a broken home, he was raised by his mother and a variety of surrogate fathers), in ‘Black Storyville’ Louis Armstrong grew up surrounded by music and, like his fellow-New Orlean contemporary Sidney Bechet, his youthful imagination was fired by the local tradition of street-bands. As a child he would follow their processions in wonderment, blowing his own tin whistle in sympathy, thus absorbing the ornate New Orleans style, naturally inheriting (as Rudy Blesh famously recalled) the laurels from his two legendary predecessors, Messrs. Bolden and Keppard.

By a fortuitous turn of events, on New Year’s Eve 1912 (according to the story later perpetuated by Louis Armstrong himself in Satchmo - My Life In New Orleans), the already street-wise but over-exuberant eleven-year-old was arrested for firing a stepfather’s pistol into the air “within the city limits” and remanded to the Coloured Waifs’ Home. The temporary incarceration would provide him the golden opportunity to master the cornet, with encouragement of the establishment’s governor, Captain Jones, who also ran its brass band. However, if we are to believe sometime Bolden sideman Bunk Johnson (1889-1949), after “fooling around with my cornet every chance he could get” Louis Armstrong needed only to be showed “how to play the Blues”.

At fourteen Louis Armstrong earned his living as an odd-job man but such was his playing that he was soon rated the finest cornettist in and around New Orleans’ red-light district, Storyville. He replaced his youthful idol and mentor, the larger-than-life Joe ‘King’ Oliver (1885-1938) in Kid Ory’s Brown Skinned Babies in 1918 and from the following year worked with ragtime pianist Fate Marable’s band on Mississippi riverboats, making a name for himself in clubs in and around New Orleans. In 1922 he joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago as second cornet, at the newly opened Lincoln Gardens. While resident there, Louis made his first records (for Paramount and Gennett) and met his future (second) wife, the Memphis-born, classically trained pianist, bandleader and composer Lil Hardin (1898-1971). Hardin spurred Louis towards better things and with her compliance in 1924 he quit the Oliver band for a larger outfit fronted by his old friend Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952), at New York’s prestigious Roseland Ballroom.

With the Georgia-born Henderson (himself a noted pianist, songwriter and arranger), Louis Armstrong found ample opportunities for solo playing – he was Henderson’s featured soloist at the Apollo and Roxy theatres and by this time was already something of a celebrity among the wider jazz fraternity, having recorded (for a variety of labels – Gennett, OKeh, Paramount) not only with Henderson but also with Clarence Williams’ Blue Five and such blues singers as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. However, the larger ensemble – which worked from arrangements - was far removed from the more intimate, spontaneous Oliver ensemble.

During early 1925 Lil returned to Chicago to form her own New Orleans-style band at the Dreamland and in October. Louis Armstrong, now billed ‘The World’s Greatest Jazz Cornettist’, joined her Dreamland Syncopators, an improvisational group from which the Hot Five (by 1926 also dubbed Lil’s Hot Shots) recordings followed by natural progression, quickly reinforcing Louis Armstrong’s fame among his peers. The revolutionary recording-studio group at first comprised Louis and Lil, with Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds (1892-1940) on clarinet and banjoist Johnny St Cyr (1890-1966). The earliest ‘Five’ and ‘Seven’ sessions (particularly the masterly Cornet Chop Suey, ‘Potato Head’ Blues’ and Muskrat Ramble) enshrine for posterity Louis’ brilliant attack and his rhythmic and melodic inventiveness within the florid New Orleans framework, and from these discs, the first in a series seminal in the history of small groups, Armstrong the mature soloist already shines out.

1927 saw the formation of the (in gramophonic terms) more marketable ‘Hot Sevens’. These recordings featured some original Hot Five players, with trombonist John L. Thomas (1902-1971) replacing Ory and bassist Pete Briggs (born 1904) and Johnny Dodds’ drumming brother Warren ‘Baby’ (1898-1959) added –Tracks 6, 7, 9 –12). From 1926 Louis had also been the starring front-man with the band of Chicago violinist Carroll Dickerson (1895-1957) at the Savoy Ballroom (Track 8) and in June 1928 Armstrong took back to the studio a revamped Hot Five recruited from the Dickerson outfit: trombonist Fred L. Robinson (1901-84), clarinettist-saxophonist Jimmy Strong (1906-1942), Mancy Cara (really Carr, 1900-?), drummer Arthur ‘Zutty’ Singleton (1898-1975) and Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines (1903-83), Dickerson’s former pianist at the Sunset Café – Tracks 18 & 19. These sessions produced sides which according to Burnett James, “for invention and imagination” remain unparalleled in jazz history.

Louis’ transition from Columbia (OKeh)’s “race” jazz series to its more dance-orientated pop series reflected the greater demand for his big-band recordings (often featuring Louis the vocalist). The group which either Louis Armstrong or the record company dubbed for this purpose ‘Savoy Ballroom Five’ (misleadingly, the personnel varied to up to ten players), by mid-1929 the future formula of Louis the pop star soloist and/or vocalist was already established with such best-selling sides as Mahogany Hall Stomp and ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.’

Peter Dempsey (2008)