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There you go! Bebop is alive and well in China, no shortage of talent that would make Pops eat his words had he been alive today.
Originally Posted by Jimmy blue note
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06-25-2025 11:53 AM
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That West End Blues cadenza has long been the ringtone on my phone.
I think Louis was often constrained in the music he recorded later in life by record companies/producers. I've read that some of the tunes were presented to him and his band at recording sessions, and they hadn't even heard them before. Back in the '60s and '70s musicians didn't often get to decide what they recorded, the record companies controlled everything and put profits over everything else. That he could take somewhat banal songs and make them memorable is a testament to his talent. He could say more with one note than most other musicians could say in a 10 minute solo.
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This is in no way limited to the 60s and 70s. The acoustic blues man as we know it is a construct of record companies. Originally Posted by sgosnell
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He could play whatever he wanted. As the big bands faded, Armstrong made himself into an all-round entertainer, singing pop songs, appearing on television and making films. In 1956, he was freed from his exclusive contract with Decca and worked as a freelance for other labels. Norman Granz teamed Armstrong with Ella Fitzgerald, the Oscar Peterson Trio and Buddy Rich. Together they made successful records for Verve. Armstrong had many hits, including We Have All the Time in the World and Hello Dolly — which had twenty-two weeks in the charts in 1964 and displaced the Beatles from their run of hits. At the same time, he contributed to more serious music, such as Dave Brubeck's high-concept jazz musical The Real Ambassadors in 1963. Originally Posted by sgosnell
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The Sydney Morning Herald reported, in October 1954, that Armstrong was asked if he could play bebop. "'Bebop?' he husked. 'I just play music. Guys who invent terms like that are walking the streets with their instruments under their arms.'
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It was once said that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.
Well, all jazz is a series of footnotes to Louis Armstrong.
Try transcribing fragments of Armstrong's lines! Extremely humbling and ear-opening. That will teach you to appreciate him real quick.
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And Seneca before him. Originally Posted by brent.h
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That would be a little weird, since Seneca lived about four hundred years after Plato. Originally Posted by ruger9
Poor Shakespeare only had Seneca. What a life.
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Whoops... I thought Plato was 4th century AD, not BC. My mistake. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Oh and if you haven't already read this:
6 Surprisingly Modern Solo Techniques from Louis Armstrong • Jazzadvice
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Very nice. Yes I knew Louis liked to use the upper extensions of chords but I couldn't remember where I could find a good example... this is one. Originally Posted by brent.h
The Ebmaj7 on F7 thing I usually attribute to Prez, but of course Pops had it first.
Playing b9 and b13 on G7 on Basin Street is kind of obvious though if you pay attention to the prevailing key and what the melody implies, and the melody also creates 'upper extensions' over the other dominant chords. Really I do wonder if modern jazz analyses get too concerned with the individual chord of the moment and forget that for jazz standards these chords are appearing within a prevailing key. Honestly, if you go back to classical music and write out chord symbols for everything you'd get some Soduku going on, but that's often missing the logic behind such things.
A fun one for this is 'Sandman.'
(That said - note that Charlie Christian didn't give a stuff about this stuff, probably because he was a guitar player. It is common at least by the Bop era to play individual dominant chords as their own thing in Round the Houses progressions like this - see that Sonny Stitt solo on All of Me for instance.)
Anyway having gone through a period of transcribing pre-war jazz musicians what I came away with was the realisation that the pitch choices don't differ very much between bop and pre-bop. The overwhelming difference is rhythmic feel and tone colour. Early jazz is more varied with tone colour, vibrato, growls, shakes, swoops and so on and so forth being a feature of many players (although Louis himself had a 'clean' style). Lester Young's influence started too push that out of fashion and Bird's style made it completely out of style by the 50s. Rhythmic feel in early jazz is usually straighter - bonsritmos (Andrew Scott Potter) suggested that early jazz is based on a different rhythmic substrate than bop, which he relied to the Ketu rhythms of Opanije in the case of 20s jazz and Jinka in the case of 50s jazz. (So a move from a straight 2-3 clave type of feel with the 'big four' to the more familiar triplet 'spang a lang'.)
I've yet to find a better description of the rhythmic properties of various eras of jazz.Last edited by Christian Miller; 06-29-2025 at 09:21 AM.
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Great link. Originally Posted by brent.h
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Here's Armstrong with his orchestra in 1939. By then, recording technology had improved quite a bit since the 1920s, so you can hear him playing against the big band super clearly.
Check out his solo at 2:11, a masterclass in phrasing with just the humble F minor scale.
My favourite bit is from 2:48 to 2:53. Amazing time feel and storytelling with just 3 notes! Quite antithetical to bebop!
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I really liked the call and response with the band in his solo, that would probably be cool in a small group too. Originally Posted by brent.h
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another GEM from 1936!
highlights
1:11 solo starts
2:00 soaring above everything
2:24 how to play to a crowd!
Last edited by brent.h; 07-16-2025 at 06:11 AM.
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I never really thought about it, but there was a time when La Cucaracha wasn't silly kitsch.
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Check out this amazing 16 bar solo with just a few notes at 0:47.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=616G-4Cl0s8&t=47
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Originally Posted by brent.h
That link was blocked in the USA. Is this the same track? It came up when I searched "When You're Smiling 1929" but I don't hear a solo at the start.
https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...Smiling%201929
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I was able to use a VPN to check the US blocked version. This is the same recording. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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is that a friggin 5:4 polyrhythm i hear? (2:04)
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Sounds like it!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Great Scott!
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Armstrong was to jazz what the Wright Bros. were to flying.
A Louis Armstrong story that stuck in my mind (I may have the details wrong): he and his band recorded Hello Dolly in a long recording session, along with a stack of other Broadway tunes assigned to him. Just another day's work. Later the producer and record company played the tunes back, realized that Hello Dolly had hit potential, and released it as a single.
Meanwhile, Armstrong and band were out on a tour. They played a show and heard requests for Hello Dolly from the crowd. But they couldn't remember it - they'd recorded it, but they'd thought it was just another tune, nothing special. So on intermission, they went to a cafe, played Hello Dolly on the jukebox, and re-learned it to play on the second half of the show!
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Here's Pops reminding us to stay calm and relaxed at 312-ish bpm:
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I use this for part of my double bass workout. Originally Posted by brent.h
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