Napoleon 1955

Arthur Honegger - Christophe Colomb (1994)
Classical | EAC: FLAC+Cue+Log | 1 Cd, Covers | 254 Mb
Label: mode - Date: 1994

Honegger was keen to reach the widest possible public while retaining his own musical ideas. He had already collaborated with numerous distinguished writers for the theater and had supplied scores for films, such as Abel Gance's Napoléon. All of this experience made readied him for a collaboration with William Aguet when Christoph Colomb was proposed for Radio Lausanne in 1940.

This compilation contains selections from five different nightclub engagements; Bop City in New York in 1950, Club Hangover in San Francisco in 1952, Storyville in Boston in 1953, Basin Street in New York in 1955 and the Brant Inn in Ontario in 1958–featuring five different iterations of Armstrong's All Stars, featuring top sidemen such as Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, Earl Fatha Hines, Arvell Shaw, Cozy Cole, Marty Napoleon, Milt Hinton, Barrett Deems, Edmond Hall and more. The exciting nightclub performances on this collection are not only being released for the first time, but every track is taken from the Research Collections of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, with the majority emanating from Armstrong's personal reel-to-reel tape collection. This important new release once again demonstrates with finality that Pops was always tops.