Speak Now Or Hereafter Hold Your Peace
CD Masters of Jazz/Media 7
In the 1990s this series came with a new approach to releasing, and on the other end, listening to jazz music, presenting in chronological order everything recorded, including alternative takes and surviving live documentation of a chosen creative jazz artist. In this way you could follow his or hers development.
The CD format allowed for that with a playing time of approximately 70 minutes and with the possibility to program certain numbers if you don’t want to hear everything.
And they came with a thick book containing comments by jazz scholars.
In the Armstrong series it was Irakli De Davrichewy who has spent his life keeping up the memory of his idol, mostly as a devoted musician but also sometimes as a writer.
He is also credited as a producer, and in this volume 7 he has ”discovered” a new Armstrong item that was previously credited to Joe Smith. I quote him saying: ”Surprisingly, nobody seems to have taken the trouble to make a serious comparison between the cornet work here and that of Louis and Joe Smith when playing behind singers. If they had, they would surely have been able to hear that it is indeed Armstrong and not Smith.”
I fully agree; there is no doubt about the identity of the cornet player here. Fletcher Henderson plays piano, and the singer is ”Coot” Grant, who earlier, probably in the same month, October 1925, had recorded some vocal duets with a larger group, also including Louis Armstrong.
An interesting thing when you listen to this series with record sessions chronologically is that it’s not until volume 8 that you reach the first Hot Five session. With about 23 tunes on each CD, it means that Armstrong made more than 160 recordings as a sideman before getting started under his own name.