ReDiscoveries

No jazz-centric visit to New York City is complete without a trek out to Queens. At 46th Street in Sunnyside stands the apartment building where famed cornetist Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke's alcoholism finally killed him in 1931. Farther out, in Corona, is the newly enlarged and expanded Louis Armstrong House Museum. The actual house Armstrong bought in 1943 and lived in until his death in 1971 is just the way it was when his fourth wife, Lucille, died there in 1983. The long white couches, bright blue kitchen cabinets, and wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape decks behind his desk in the upstairs den remain, all extraordinarily well-preserved. Just north of there, in Flushing Cemetery, you can visit Armstrong's grave.

Pops, as he was affectionately known by friends and fans, was an inveterate maker of scrapbooks and tapes of his music. By spring 1969, he had a pair of Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder/players up and running. One of his then-new treasures was a set of tapes made by the BBC from television broadcasts recorded the preceding summer. Music from those tapes—13 tracks in all, four for the first time ever—has just been released on CD, LP, and streaming, as Louis in London.

Louis in London was produced by Ricky Riccardi, director of research collections for the Armstrong House Museum and today's foremost Armstrong expert, and Ken Druker, VP of Jazz Development at the Verve Group at Universal Music. The tapes were transferred, mixed, and mastered by Kevin Reeves at Nashville's East Iris Studios.

Other than being a welcome addition to the catalog of an essential artist now gone for 53 years, the best news about Louis in London is the high quality of the sound. It's clear and crisp—a rarity for audio from TV broadcasts—and multilayered, with depth and dynamic range. It is much improved from the nine tracks reproduced here that were also released in 1971 on Louis Armstrong's Greatest Hits Recorded Live, one of the last albums released during Armstrong's lifetime. This is not an audiophile album, but it's more than listenable, and the vinyl, which was pressed at Precision Record Pressing in Canada, is quiet enough and reasonably accurate.

Like all Armstrong performances by the All Stars, the small group he and manager Joe Glaser formed after shutting down the big band in 1947, the set list here is predictable. The unadventurous repertoire of the All Stars years is an area of constant discussion among Armstrong aficionados, and the question is always the same: Why didn't he branch out and challenge himself and his band by adding new material or nuggets from his glorious past rather than leaning on the same set list night after night, year after year?

In the All Stars' early years, the group had the instrumental chops to play anything Louis could call for. The original All Stars—clarinetist Barney Bigard, upright bassist Arvell Shaw, drummer Barrett Deems, pianist Billy Kyle, and trombonist Trummy Young—were a tight, muscular unit. Albums such as Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954) and Satch Plays Fats (1955) are landmarks of Armstrong's post–Hot Fives and Hot Sevens career. Those early masterpieces, which changed the course of jazz, are often cited as a reason that much later the trumpeter and singer was uninterested in varying his tired live set list, despite the radical changes in jazz that had occurred by the 1950s. Armstrong reasoned, some say, that having made his mark on jazz with the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, he was content later in life to make himself and his adoring audiences happy.

The late 1960s lineup was a totally different group than the one that recorded those 1950s classics. By the time of this 1968 appearance on the BBC's Show of the Week, Tyree Glenn was playing trombone and singing, Joe Muranyi was on clarinet, and Marty Napoleon was on piano. Buddy Catlett played bass, and Danny Barcelona was the drummer. While not in the same league talentwise as the earlier incarnation, this later group provided proficient musical backing for the charismatic Armstrong. On an extended version of Armstrong's biggest hit, "Hello, Dolly!," this version of the All Stars keeps up a flexible, swinging accompaniment.

The first track on Louis in London, the perennial opener "When It's Sleepy Time Down South," brings up another controversy that has long surrounded Armstrong. With embarrassing lyrics like "When old mammy falls on her knees," this tune was cited as evidence that Armstrong—who mostly skirted civil rights issues throughout his career—was insensitive and out of touch.

His usual response to that was simple: He enjoyed entertaining people. And he loved that song.

By 1968, embouchure issues, which he had experienced often over the years, had degraded his ability to play the trumpet. Armstrong's genuine and unique phrasing had become the most formidable of his talents. All the tunes that he became most famous for as a vocalist are here in the London collection. Besides "Hello, Dolly!," he gives warm, sparkling renditions of "Mame," "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," "Mack the Knife," and the song he's become best known for since his death (thanks to the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam), "What a Wonderful World."

What's truly special about these tracks is Louis's joy and enthusiasm for making audiences happy, which jumps right out of the record grooves. In his excellent liner notes, Riccardi refers to Armstrong's oft-printed quote about being on earth "in the cause of happiness." With Louis in London that compassionate mission has been emphatically accomplished