Louis Armstrong Satchmo Meets Big T

Louis Armstrong nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an inventive trumpet and cornet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance.

This 10-CD set is as good a compendium of the genius of Louis Armstrong as anyone could wish for. It’s all here: the early years with the King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson bands, the glorious period of the Hot Fives and Sevens, the big band recordings of the Thirties, the collaborations with contemporaries such as Ella Fitzgerald. Then there are the later recordings, when Satchmo’s celebrity empowered him to soar over many political and racial divides. There’s also a fascinating unreleased Hollywood Bowl concert from 1956, a CD of “out-takes” from recording sessions, and a revealing interview with Dan Morgenstern.

No thanks to a concert schedule that gave recording sessions a low priority, Louis Armstrong's period at Verve was unconscionably short - only a little over a year (August 1956 to October 1957). But since Verve chief Norman Granz liked to record his artists a lot, Armstrong's Verve sessions produced quite a harvest - six albums on eight LPs, including three with the redoubtable Ella Fitzgerald - substantial portions of which are included in this well-packed two-CD set. The albums Ella and Louis Again and Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson get the most exposure with eight tracks apiece, the first Ella and Louis album gets five, I've Got the World on a String gets four, and Louis Under the Stars and, strangely, the Porgy and Bess album with Fitzgerald only get three each…