Now You Has Jazz

In the spring of 1959, when Louis Armstrong took the stage in Belgium to play the concert captured on this DVD, he had much to smile about. The irrepressible trumpeter and singer had cut his first records with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band some thirty-six years earlier. In the interim, he had completely redefined the possibilities of both instrumental jazz and popular singing. His concept of what it meant to swing had become the very essence of jazz rhythm, and his ceaseless ability to create coherent melodic improvisations over a given set of chord changes had reconstructed the very nature of the jazz ensemble.

The first disk surveys film music from the thirties and forties; jazz was no longer "jungle music" (i.e., ludicrously termed as "non-white" music), but still "youth-oriented," as the liner notes assert. Off the bat, the best track is most certainly the eighth, Artie Shaw's all-too-brief Nightmare (from MGM's Dancing Co-Ed).

Five CD sets containing 100 classic tracks by legendary artists, one of the biggest selling and best remembered musical icons of all time.