Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong by Ricky Riccardi

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Ricky Riccardi is Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum and author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years. He runs the online blog, "The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong," and has given lectures on Armstrong at venues around the world, including the Institute of Jazz Studies, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Bristol International Jazz and Blues Festival and the Monterey Jazz Festival. He has co-produced numerous Armstrong reissues in recent years, including Satchmo at Symphony Hall 65th Anniversary: The Complete Concert, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Cheek to Cheek: The Complete Duets, Pops is Tops: The Verve Studio Albums, and two volumes of Decca Singles for Universal Music, in addition to Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars for Mosaic Records.

Those of us who know Ricky - and I only “know” him through our internet correspondence and our friendship on Facebook - have always suspected him of having too much fun.

The proof of this is in the pictures I’ve seen of him in which he is unfailingly smiling.

Of course, the fact that he spends his time “working” in the company of the research collection of the Louis Armstrong House Museum and, when he’s not doing that, in the bosom of a loving and caring Italian-American family might have something to do with his incessant happiness.

Pops and the warmth and affection of all-things-Italian-American would be enough to keep a smile on anybody’s face all the time.

He has a new book out - HEART FULL OF RHYTHM By Ricky Riccardi [Oxford, 414 pages, $34.95] - and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has put the following feature together to help give you an informed view of it.

"Riccardi's Heart Full of Rhythm is the best account we have of Armstrong's vital work with big bands; the research is impeccable, the ardor contagious." -- Gary Giddins, Author of Bing Crosby: Swinging On A Star The War Years, 1940-1946

"This book is an exuberant treasury of new information about one of the most significant and influential musicians of all time. Most significant here is that this careful researcher torches the cliche that Armstrong rose in a 1920s flash and then fell onto the swords of commercialism. In soaring prose, Riccardi walks you through vital musical/cultural decades while re-introducing a man we thought we knew but who was even greater." -- Robert G. O'meally, Founder and Director Of Columbia University's Center For Jazz Studies and Editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and The Romare Bearden Reader

"At last! A thrilling and intimate journey through the most undervalued period of Armstrong's career! Every chapter is a revelation!" -- Catherine Russell, Grammy Award-Winning Jazz/Blues vocalist and daughter of Luis Russell

"This vitally American story has been expertly told in this superlative biography SWING THAT MUSIC indeed!" -- Loren Schoenberg, Senior Scholar/Founding Director, National Jazz Museum in Harlem

"Riccardi's meticulous scholarship and his exuberance for all things Armstrong make Heart Full of Rhythm a must-read for all interested in Armstrong, jazz, and our shared cultural heritage." -- Jon Faddis, Trumpeter, Conductor, Composer, and Educator

"Dedicated research, access to ideal sources, and fine storytelling combine to shed new light and insight on the most interesting and least well-documented period of Armstrong's fabled life. Riccardi has done it again, but even more so." -- Dan Morgenstern, Director Emeritus of The Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University

"A vibrant portrait of Armstrong focused on his career from 1929 to 1947, when he had a decisive impact on both jazz and popular music... Riccardi, whose previous book covered Armstrong's later years, brings the same erudition and enthusiasm to his latest. An appreciative, deeply informed biography."--Kirkus

"Riccardi brilliantly sums up the life and work of Armstrong."--Publishers Weekly

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

Appeared in the October 10, 2020, print edition as 'That Satchmo Swing.'

‘Heart Full of Rhythm’ Review: That Satchmo Swing Louis Armstrong’s big-band sound carried his jazz innovations into new territory

By Will Friedwald

HEART FULL OF RHYTHM

By Ricky Riccardi

Oxford, 414 pages, $34.95

In the fall of 1935, the lyricist Sammy Cahn was hired to write songs for his boyhood hero, Louis Armstrong. The songs were to be a part of “Connie’s Hot Chocolates of 1936,” a revue that would be performed at Connie’s Inn, the famed New York nightclub recently relocated to Times Square from Harlem. Cahn, who was 22 years old at the time, would write, among other numbers for the show, “Shoe Shine Boy,” and go on to pen such hits as “Come Fly With Me” and “Time After Time.” One evening, Armstrong decided to take the young lyricist uptown for a night of club hopping. As Cahn later told me (and also recounted in his 1974 memoir, “I Should Care”), they went from one Harlem “nite spot” to another until the early hours of the morning, and in every club they found the same thing: A guy playing trumpet, singing and doing his version of Louis Armstrong. Cahn recalled that the 10th and final joint they visited featured a particularly dreadful Satchmo clone. “Louis, why are we here?” Cahn asked. “This man just tries to do everything that you do.” To which Armstrong replied, “Well, maybe he does something I don’t do!”

Ricky Riccardi’s new book, “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong,” covers the period from 1929 to 1947, and as such is a prequel of sorts to the author’s “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years” (2011), which took us through the final phase of Armstrong’s life and career. (Armstrong died, at age 69, in 1971.) As with “What a Wonderful World,” “Heart Full of Rhythm” is an all-encompassing, vividly detailed biographical portrait of one of the richest careers in all of music.

The new volume begins in March 1929, shortly after Armstrong recorded his final session with pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, concluding the 1925-28 series known collectively as the Hot Fives (and sometimes Hot Fives and Hot Sevens). Everything Armstrong would go on to do afterward would forever be compared to these early triumphs—and almost always found wanting. Indeed, nearly all the writing on Armstrong canonizes his 1925-28 work while dismissing virtually everything else. It wasn’t until Gary Giddins’s capsule biography, “Satchmo” (1988), and Terry Teachout’s “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong'' (2009) that any book gave more than passing mention to the final four decades of Armstrong’s life—the period that Mr. Riccardi covers in his two volumes.

Mr. Riccardi, the director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, N.Y., takes us through every recording session, and what seems to be an equally exhaustive list of surviving audio and video documents, including radio shows and movies. He starts with a remarkable double date in March 1929: Armstrong played an outstanding small-group session (with a so-called mixed band that included Jack Teagarden) followed by a big-band session with the Luis Russell Orchestra. The session-by-session analysis never gets tiresome, thanks in part to an abundance of firsthand reminiscences, especially by many of Armstrong’s sidemen, that illuminate virtually every date (especially from the 1930s).

What could have been a dry collection of record reviews instead becomes, in Mr. Riccardi’s hands, the most interesting part of the whole work. We encounter buried gems like Armstrong’s majestic 1941 big-band version of “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which opens with Armstrong beautifully delineating both the lyrics and music with his horn. The author also dutifully acknowledges those occasions when Armstrong’s producers saddled him with “inferior material.”

Remarkably, Armstrong’s critics (both at the time and ever since) have consistently failed to celebrate the greatness of the musician’s post-1928 work; virtually every review Mr. Riccardi quotes keeps comparing Armstrong’s big-band work to the Hot Fives, getting everything wrong and completely missing the point. Writers in the so-called Negro press came much closer to understanding and giving Armstrong’s big-band years the acclaim they deserve.

Armstrong showed how the dance-band format could serve as the perfect canvas to display his spectacular solos, particularly on bravura instrumental features like “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” “Swing You Cats” and “High Society.” The backgrounds provided by his best musical directors (Luis Russell, Joe Garland, Teddy McRae) brilliantly showcase his soaring trumpet, even as Armstrong gradually moved from sheer gut-busting and lip-ripping technique (solos in which he would play 200 or more high C’s and, inevitably, do personal harm to his “chops” in the process) to a more melodic style. These were also the years when Armstrong began featuring himself more frequently as a singer and, appropriately, performing first-rate popular songs, both new numbers and standards. In his vocals, Armstrong excelled both as a comedian (on novelties like his surreal classic, “Laughin’ Louie”) and a lover (on romantic airs like “When Your Lover Has Gone,” which would inspire Frank Sinatra and multiple generations of great crooners to come). The era is rife with masterpieces, especially the 1935-36 sessions, on songs like “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “Solitude,” which combine sterling brass playing and warm, flawless vocalizing, both in the service of excellent songs.

Mr. Riccardi rightly points out that many of Armstrong’s most memorable sides from this period come from unlikely sources and combinations—Hawaiian songs (with guitars and ukuleles), genuine and ersatz Latin numbers, pre-Civil War plantation songs with the Mills Brothers—even while collaborations with fellow titans like Teagarden and Sidney Bechet yielded magnificent results.

The period of Armstrong’s greatest fame was perhaps the 1950s and ’60s, when he toured the world with his All Stars, and was a constant presence on the pop charts and on every television variety show. Sadly, by then, as Armstrong’s clarinetist Joe Muranyi told me, “Pops had lost the black audience—his people—and it really hurt him.” By the late ’40s, younger musicians were already starting to think of Armstrong as an Uncle Tom, although as modern trumpeter Jimmy Owens once told me, “Nobody who played the trumpet ever thought of Pops as an Uncle Tom.”

Still, the period of Armstrong’s greatest influence was undoubtedly the mid-to-late 1930s, those big-band years when not only every club in Harlem or on 52nd Street, but every joint in Chicago or New Orleans and even London, Paris and Berlin had a guy (or, in the case of Valaida Snow, a gal) trying to be Louis Armstrong. (As I once said, the entire world learned to play and sing jazz via the process of Satchmosis.) “He used to walk down Seventh Avenue in New York and all the young trumpet players would just follow him like you would follow Joe Louis,” said one of those younger players, Harry “Sweets” Edison. “He was an idol.”

—Mr. Friedwald is the author of “Straighten Up and Fly Right: The Life and Music of Nat King Cole.”