Louis Armstrong - Spotlight on Louis Armstrong '2021

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. Lets Fall In Love
02. A Kiss To Build A Dream On (Single Version)
03. On The Sunny Side Of The Street
04. When Youre Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)
05. Aint Misbehavin (Single Version)
06. Im In The Mood For Love (Single Version)
07. Dream A Little Dream Of Me (Single Version)
08. La vie en rose (Single Version)
09. Cest si bon
10. Blueberry Hill (Single Version)
11. I Only Have Eyes For You
12. That Old Feeling
13. I Cover The Waterfront
14. When Its Sleepy Time Down South
15. Struttin With Some Barbeque (Single Version)
16. Basin Street Blues (Single Version / Pt.1 & Pt.2)
17. Cheek To Cheek
18. East Of The Sun (West Of The Moon) (Stereo Version)
19. Ive Got The World On A String
20. What A Wonderful World (Single Version)
21. Summertime
22. That Lucky Old Sun (Just Rolls Around Heaven All Day) (Single Version)
23. Evntide (Single Version)
24. When The Saints Go Marching In
25. Hear Me Talkin To Ya (Single Version)
26. Life Is So Peculiar
27. Lets Call The Whole Thing Off
28. It Takes Two To Tango (Single Version)
29. You Go To My Head
30. Would You Like To Take A Walk?
31. The Gypsy (Single Version)
32. Marie
33. Hello, Dolly!
34. Old Man Mose
35. Swing That Music (1936 Single Version)
36. Jeepers Creepers
37. Lazy River
38. Its Been A Long, Long Time
39. Cabaret (Single Version)
40. My Buckets Got A Hole In It (Single Version)
41. Perdido Street Blues (Single Version)
42. Jubilee (Single Version)
43. (Back Home Again In) Indiana (Live (1955 Crescendo Club))
44. A Fine Romance
45. You Rascal You (Ill Be Glad When Youre Dead)
46. It Aint Necessarily So
47. Body And Soul (Stereo Version)
48. Lets Do It (Lets Fall In Love)/Blues In The Night
49. Groovin
50. Stompin At The Savoy


 Read MoreBorn in 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Armstrong had a difficult
childhood. William Armstrong, his father, was a factory worker who abandoned the
family soon after the boys birth. Armstrong was brought up by his mother, Mary
(Albert) Armstrong, and his maternal grandmother. He showed an early interest in
music, and a junk dealer for whom he worked as a grade-school student helped him
buy a cornet, which he taught himself to play. He dropped out of school at 11 to
join an informal group, but on December 31, 1912, he fired a gun during a New
Years Eve celebration, and was sent to reform school. He studied music there and
played cornet and bugle in the school band, eventually becoming its leader. He
was released on June 16, 1914, and did manual labor while trying to establish
himself as a musician. He was taken under the wing of cornetist Joe King Oliver,
and when Oliver moved to Chicago in June 1918, Armstrong replaced him in the Kid
Ory Band. He moved to the Fate Marable band in the spring of 1919, staying with
Marable until the fall of 1921.

Armstrong moved to Chicago to join Olivers band in August 1922 and made his
first recordings as a member of the group in the spring of 1923. He married
Lillian Harden, the pianist in the Oliver band, on February 5, 1924. (She was
the second of his four wives.) With her encouragement, he left Oliver and joined
Fletcher Hendersons band in New York, staying for a year and then going back to
Chicago in November 1925 to join the Dreamland Syncopators, his wifes group.
During this period, he switched from cornet to trumpet.

Armstrong had gained sufficient individual notice to make his recording debut as
a leader on November 12, 1925. Contracted to OKeh Records, he began to make a
series of recordings with studio-only groups called the Hot Fives or the Hot
Sevens. For live dates, he appeared with the orchestras led by Erskine Tate and
Carroll Dickerson. The Hot Fives recording of Muskrat Ramble gave Armstrong a
Top Ten hit in July 1926, the band for the track featuring Kid Ory on trombone,
Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Lillian Harden Armstrong on piano, and Johnny St. Cyr
on banjo.

By February 1927, Armstrong was well-enough known to front his own group, Louis
Armstrong & His Stompers, at the Sunset Café in Chicago. (Armstrong did not
function as a bandleader in the usual sense, but instead typically lent his name
to established groups.) In April, he reached the charts with his first vocal
recording, Big Butter and Egg Man, a duet with May Alix. He took a position as
star soloist in Carroll Dickersons band at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago in
March 1928, later taking over as the bands frontman. Hotter Than That was in the
Top Ten in May 1928, followed in September by West End Blues, which later became
one of the first recordings named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Armstrong returned to New York with his band for an engagement at Connies Inn in
Harlem in May 1929. He also began appearing in the orchestra of Hot Chocolates,
a Broadway revue, and was given a featured spot singing Aint Misbehavin. In
September, his recording of that song entered the charts, becoming a Top Ten
hit.

Armstrong fronted the Luis Russell Orchestra for a tour of the South in February
1930, and in May went to Los Angeles, where he led a band at Sebastians Cotton
Club for the next ten months. He made his film debut in Ex-Flame, released at
the end of 1931. By the start of 1932, he had switched from the race-oriented
OKeh label to its pop-oriented big sister Columbia, for which he recorded two
Top Five hits, Chinatown, My Chinatown and You Can Depend on Me before scoring a
number one hit with All of Me in March 1932; another Top Five hit, Love, You
Funny Thing, hit the charts the same month. He returned to Chicago in the spring
of 1932 to front a band led by Zilner Randolph; the group toured around the
country. In July, Armstrong sailed to England for a tour. He spent the next
several years in Europe, his American career maintained by a series of archival
recordings, including the Top Ten hits Sweethearts on Parade (August 1932;
recorded December 1930) and Body and Soul (October 1932; recorded October 1930).
His Top Ten version of Hobo, You Cant Ride This Train, in the charts in early
1933, was on Victor Records; when he returned to the U.S. in 1935, he signed to
the recently formed Decca Records and quickly scored a double-sided Top Ten hit,
Im in the Mood for Love/You Are My Lucky Star.

Armstrongs new manager, Joe Glaser, organized a big band for him that had its
premiere in Indianapolis on July 1, 1935; for the next several years, he toured
regularly. He also took a series of small parts in motion pictures, beginning
with Pennies from Heaven in December 1936, and he continued to record for Decca,
resulting in the Top Ten hits Public Melody Number One (August 1937), When the
Saints Go Marching In (April 1939), and You Wont Be Satisfied (Until You Break
My Heart) (April 1946), the last a duet with Ella Fitzgerald. He returned to
Broadway in the short-lived musical Swingin the Dream in November 1939.

Satchmo at Symphony HallWith the decline of swing music in the post-World War II
years, Armstrong broke up his big band and put together a small group dubbed His
All-Stars, which made its debut in Los Angeles on August 13, 1947. He embarked
on his first European tour since 1935 in February 1948, and thereafter toured
regularly around the world. In June 1951 he reached the Top Ten of the LP charts
with Satchmo at Symphony Hall (Satchmo being his nickname), and he scored his
first Top Ten single in five years with (When We Are Dancing) I Get Ideas later
in the year. The singles B-side, and also a chart entry, was A Kiss to Build a
Dream On, sung by Armstrong in the film The Strip. In 1993, it gained renewed
popularity when it was used in the film Sleepless in Seattle.

Ella and LouisArmstrong completed his contract with Decca in 1954, after which
his manager made the unusual decision not to sign him to another exclusive
contract but instead have him freelance for different labels. Satch Plays Fats,
a tribute to Fats Waller, became a Top Ten LP for Columbia in October 1955, and
Verve Records contracted Armstrong for a series of recordings with Ella
Fitzgerald, beginning with the chart LP Ella and Louis in 1956.

Good Morning Vietnam [Original Soundtrack]Armstrong continued to tour
extensively, despite a heart attack in June 1959. In 1964, he scored a surprise
hit with his recording of the title song from the Broadway musical Hello,
Dolly!, which reached number one in May, followed by a gold-selling album of the
same name. It won him a Grammy for best vocal performance. This pop success was
repeated internationally four years later with What a Wonderful World, which hit
number one in the U.K. in April 1968. It did not gain as much notice in the U.S.
until 1987, when it was used in the film Good Morning, Vietnam, after which it
became a Top 40 hit. Armstrong was featured in the 1969 film of Hello, Dolly!,
performing the title song as a duet with Barbra Streisand. He performed less
frequently in the late 60s and early 70s, and died of a heart ailment in 1971 at
the age of 69. A year later, he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement
Award.

As an artist, Armstrong was embraced by two distinctly different audiences: jazz
fans who revered him for his early innovations as an instrumentalist but were
occasionally embarrassed by his lack of interest in later developments in jazz,
especially his willingness to serve as a light entertainer; and pop fans, who
delighted in his joyous performances, particularly as a vocalist, but were
largely unaware of his significance as a jazz musician. Given his popularity,
his long career, and the extensive label-jumping he did in his later years, as
well as the differing jazz and pop sides of his work, his recordings are
extensive and diverse, with parts of his catalog owned by numerous companies.
But many of his recorded performances are masterpieces, and none are less than
entertaining. ~ William Ruhlmann

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