OSIE JOHNSON: An Undistinguished Distinctive Drummer

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“In studio work, you’re always under the gun. You’re expected to play the parts right no matter how difficult they are …. It’s a matter of being precise and right, all the time. It’s brain surgery, that’s what it is. And every operation has to be a success. There are no failures – a failure and you’re gone.”

- Alvin Stoller, drummer

Burt Korall, a writer who, among his other significant writings about Jazz, authored two books on Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz, only makes one reference to him when he cites him as “… the gifted drummer, Osie Johnson,” on page 200 of the second volume, The Bebop Years.

There is also a reference to Osie in Gary Giddins’ Vision of Jazz: The First Century where in the context of talking about Bud Powell and the drummers he performed with he notes: “He worked only with the best: Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Roy Haynes, Art Blakey, Art Taylor, Osie Johnson – percussionists who complemented his dynamics, speed, and shifting rhythms.” [p. 321]

Outside of incidental references such as these, you’d be hard-pressed to find any information about Osie other than in the ever-reliable Encyclopedia of Jazz.

The lack of mention of Osie is made even more striking by the fact that this was a drummer who was everywhere, and I mean everywhere apparent, on the New York studio and Jazz scene especially in the 1950s and mid-1960s.

Osie worked with all of the top arrangers –Manny Albam [with whom, he was close friends], Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, Bob Brookmeyer, Hal McKusick, Al Cohn, Gerry Mulligan, George Russell – the list is endless. The Lord Discography cites Osie’s name as having appeared on 670 recording sessions!

He toured with pianists Earl “Fatha” Hines, Erroll Garner and Dorothy Donegan as well as tenor saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins and clarinetist Tony Scott. Osie, who made his own album as a singer – A Bit of the Blues [RCA CD 74321609832] -  was a favorite of vocalists Carmen McRae and Dinah Washington, both of whom he wrote arrangements for in the 1950s.

Osie had studied theory and harmony in high school in Washington, D.C. and privately, so he knew music and was an excellent reader, both of which may help explain why he was so heavily in demand at recording sessions.

He was the staff drummer for extended periods of time on both the NBC and CBS studio orchestras in New York City and he appeared as a freelance percussionist on a slew of independent TV commercials and radio jingles.

Perhaps, part of the reason for his obscurity was due to the fact that he died in 1966 at the relatively young age of 43 from renal system infections that led to kidney failure.

Fortunately, Georges Paczynski in the second volume of his prize-winning Une Histoire de la Batterie de Jazz has three entire pages devoted to Osie and his style of drumming. Fortunately, that is, for those who read French as the work has not [to my knowledge] been translated into English.

Paczynski includes Osie along with Harold “Doc” West, Rossiere “Shadow” Wilson, Gus Johnson, Gordon “Specs” Powell and Alvin Stoller in his chapter entitled – La fin de l’ère swing - les batteurs charnières.  With charnières translated to mean “hinge” or “pivotal,” the author is grouping Osie among those drummers whom he considers to be among those who made the successful transition from the Swing Era to Bebop.

Many better known Swing Era drummers never did make this transition, among them Davy Tough and Gene Krupa.

To be able to do so was a considerable accomplishment as it required getting out of playing down into the drum kit [think hands on snare and an incessant bass drum beat] and playing up, onto the cymbals using the snare and the bass drum for accents.

Keeping time in this manner involved a total reorientation in the way in which a drummer thought about time.

Drummers like Osie and the other transition drummers in Paczynski’s grouping who accommodated the change in style did so by keeping things simple.

They became, first-and-foremost, timekeepers with a steady ride cymbal beat and an accent here and there.  Nothing complicated requiring the independence and heightened coordination of a Max Roach or a Philly Joe Jones or a Joe Morello.

More drumming to establish a pulse and to keep things moving along. Clean, simple, and staying out of the way; Osie just blended in with the musical environment instead of trying to dominate it – it was a style of drumming that was more felt than heard.

In fact, Osie’s drumming bordered on the indistinct and yet, everyone loved playing with him precisely because as Paczynski explains:

« En fait, il est absolument impossible d'identifier Osie Johnson. A l'inverse d'un musicien qui ne peut investir son jeu trop personnel et « engage » dans tous les contextes musicaux, il est capable de s'adapter avec plus ou moins de bonheur a toute proposition musicale, et est constamment sollicite en tant que tel. »

A very loose translation of which would read:

“In fact, it is absolutely impossible to identify [in the sense of classifying] Osie Johnson. He was the opposite of those who try and interject their personality into the music. Instead, he tried to contentedly fit himself into all musical contexts, and he was sought out by other musicians precisely because of his willingness to do so.”

A number of times in his essay, Paczynski stresses the fact that Osie emphasized drumming “fundamentals” in his playing: a rock solid beat, precision in the placement of accents, a perfect placement of kicks and fills and a clear and uncomplicated sound from both the drums and the cymbals.

Oh, and he was an excellent reader for as Alvin Stoller, Osie’s counterpart as an in demand studio drummer on the West Coast stated: “In studio work, you’re always under the gun. You’re expected to play the parts right no matter how difficult they are …. It’s a matter of being precise and right, all the time. It’s brain surgery, that’s what it is. And every operation has to be a success. There are no failures – a failure and you’re gone.”

More indications of what makes Osie’s style so distinctive can be found in the following question that was put to the online drummer chat group:

“What do you all recommend for tuning a 5x14 brass snare to capture a tight, crisp sound with minimal after ring? The snare sound I'm after is similar to the following:

1. Osie Johnson's playing on "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" from Sonny Stitt's Now! (mp3 attached). The first 20 seconds of the track provide a good snapshot of Johnson's crisp snare sound.

In order to achieve that kind of sound, do I need to have

a) both top and bottom heads tuned the same
b) the top head tuned higher/tighter than the bottom head
c) the bottom head tuned higher/tighter than the top head
d) ??

At the moment, I have my Tama 5x14 brass snare tuned with top head close to 90 and bottom head a little over 80, I believe (according to my Drum Dial). I have a standard Remo Coated Ambassador on the batter side.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer!”

An answer to this question might also serve to explain the title of our piece on Osie – “An Undistinguished Distinctive Drummer.”

The title is not a Zen koan [an insoluble intellectual problem: think – “What was your true nature before you mother and father conceived you?”]

Osie Johnson was unfortunately undistinguished as a drumming stylist, and yet, his drumming was immediately discernible. He was distinctive without trying to be so.

Most of Osie’s distinctiveness did begin with the sound of his snare drum, which he tightened to within an inch of its "life." How he kept it from tearing in two is beyond me.

So the choice from the chat group options would be – “a) both top and bottom heads tuned the same”  - although a much more complete answer might address everything from the quality and composition of the maple shell that formed Osie’s snare drum to the type of drum heads he used, ad infinitum.

The most instructive portion of the chat group question is the example that was sent along with the annotation - The first 20 seconds of the track provide a good snapshot of Johnson's crisp snare sound.

We have used the very same track - "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone" from Sonny Stitt's Now! - in the video below, but we would rephrase the chat group statement to read: The first 20 seconds of the track provide a good snapshot of Osie Johnson's approach to drumming.

For in addition to his distinctively crisp snare sound, this short segment reveals Osie playing time on the hi-hat before switching to the ride cymbal, his gentle but insistent sense of swing and the lightness of his touch which allowed him to fit into the music almost seamlessly.

This is a perfect illustration of the drummer as an accompanist and also the reason why melody and harmony guys loved working with Osie: his drums are not resonating and booming, his accents are not distracting and he isn’t calling attention to himself with complicated drumming figures.

On this track, Osie is a musician among a group of musicians intent on making music and therein lies the key to his success and to his distinctiveness.

Whatever the musical context – piano trio Jazz, small group Jazz or big band Jazz – Osie always sounds just right; he fits in.

And he always nails it, characteristically.

For all of his blending in, I would venture to say that anyone – musician or not – that is familiar with Osie Johnson’s playing would recognize it … “after [listening to] the first 20 seconds” of a recorded track.

Very few drummers have ever been as distinctively undistinguished as Osie Johnson.

Communicating With JazzProfiles

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

I use Blogger as the platform to format and publish JazzProfiles. It’s free of charge and very compatible with other applications that Google hosts.

But if you have ever tried to leave a comment about any of the features that post to the blog, you know that Blogger isn’t very accommodating in this regard. I’m not sure why this is the case as other blogging platforms such as Wordpress make it very easy for readers to interact with the blog author.

For the most part, I have been satisfied with this arrangement as it allows me to dwell in relative anonymity and to focus on preparing pieces for the blog.

It takes a great deal of time and effort to research and write the features that I bring up on JazzProfiles on an almost daily basis, and populate them with images, graphics and audio-visual examples of the music and the musicians under discussion.

Besides, since I am not an authority on Jazz, I’ve always assumed that the readers of the blog would rather spend their time perusing its contents than corresponding with me.

However, should you like to leave a comment, ask a question or make a request, please feel free to contact me at scerra@roadrunner.com/ and I’ll do my best to provide you with a timely response. I will also negotiate the abstruse Blogger platform and nest your comment under the appropriate feature.

I plan to place a listing of “Readers Comments” in a permanent section of the blog’s sidebar and update it regularly.

All of this by way of saying that the editorial staff at JazzProfiles welcomes your communications.

Dutch Jazz Guitarist Jesse van Ruller: From Amsterdam, Bilthoven and Utrecht

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Jesse van ruler is an old soul whose musical personality is firmly embedded in the here-and-now, he plays the lingua franca material with fresh perspective and idiomatic nuance.”

-Ted Panken, Jazz DJ and author

“While American audiences like to think they have a corner on the jazz market, there's no denying the fact that this art form native to the Unites States has also become a universal language being practiced throughout the world. One might even further suggest that there have been several key contributors to the jazz legacy who have come from foreign lands, thus leaving their own personal stamp on a music that now is multi-faceted and multicultural in scope.  From a guitarist's perspective, few would deny that European artists such as Django Reinhardt and Rene Thomas hold their own in the pantheon of jazz plectrists alongside American heavyweights such as Kenny Burrell or Wes Montgomery.

Add to the list of distinguished European guitarists the name of Jesse Van Ruller, the first non-American to win the illustrious Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition and an Amsterdam native who is beginning to perk the interest of American audiences with his original style and talents as a composer.”

- C. Andrew Hovan, Jazz author

One wonders, where does the Jazz path begin for a young guitarist born in Amsterdam in 1972, who grew up in Bilthoven, a small village near Utrecht in The Netherlands?

Next to drums, guitar is perhaps the most popular instrument in the world.

But one would think that contemporary youngsters who are interested in popular music, grow up dreaming of becoming a rock guitarist and not a Jazz instrumentalist.

With Jazz radio and television broadcasts vanishing at hyper speed, where does a youngster even hear Jazz today?

Put another way: Holland has a population of 16,696,00; Utrecht has a population of 316,448; Bilthoven has a population of 31,592: how does someone “find” Jazz from such a limited population base [cf: the population of Beijing alone exceeds 20 million]?

For Jesse van Ruller, his journey into Jazz began serendipitously as suggested in the title to his first Criss Cross CD Here and There [1217] and recounted by Ted Panken in these insert notes  to the recording:

"As a kid, I liked the Pop music that was on the radio, like Queen and Van Halen, and the music my parents listened to, like Fleetwood Mac, the Stones, the Beatles and Bob Dylan," Van Ruller relates. "When I started playing guitar, it was Classical first. I started electric guitar at 11, and started improvising a little bit, without the harmony, but on one chord most of the time. When I was 14 and heard George Benson, who plays jazz harmony, but in a Pop way that I understood and was used to, I loved it immediately.

The jazz aspect was completely new and mysterious to me, the notes he played were so different than the notes you heard from Rock players, and I wanted to figure out how it worked.

Then I found out about John Scofield, and went to the library and borrowed Still Warm.  It was a new world. From that moment, it took me and it's never let me go."

The aspirant gobbled up guitar vocabulary, paying close attention to iconic recordings and occasionally traveling from Bilthoven to nearby Utrecht to hear local guitarists. "I never got into transcribing much," Van Ruller says. "I listened, and then figured things out by ear, not in a systematic way, but more playful, trying this and that.

"I don't think I play like John Scofield, but he was my bridge from Pop music to Jazz. Probably what I liked so much about him was the dissonance of his lines, and the way he phrases; he sounds like a saxophone player to me, which is something I've always wanted to get.

Then I read an interview where Scofield mentioned other guys, older guitarists like Jimmy Raney and Wes Montgomery, and also Pat Martino and Pat Metheny, whom I didn't know at that time. So I went to the library and found some of their records.

"Wes Montgomery is like our godfather for his unparalleled groove. Jimmy Raney was probably the first guitarist I heard who was not a Fusion or Jazz-Rock player; I love the way he outlined the harmony so tastefully within his very melodic lines. And Pat Martino was a huge influence in terms of emphasizing notes or accents in lines and playing dynamically.

"When I got to the Hilversum Conservatory, I discovered Peter Bernstein, who is now a friend. I got a lot from hearing how he treated the tradition, taking the whole background of Wes Montgomery and George Benson and Pat Martino, and making his very own voice. He confirmed that it was possible for someone closer to my age to play in the tradition, but still make your own music, have your own sound. Where I was learning, everybody had to play at least Fusion, everything new was cool, but you were considered old-fashioned and boring for liking music that had been played before, and it was hard to dare to play it.  Peter gave me hope."

During conservatory years, Van Ruller developed his talent with a vengeance. Not long after his 1995 graduation, a friend (the singer Fleurine, who brought him to New York that year as a sideman on a record with Christian McBride, Ralph Moore and Tom Harrell) urged him to attend that year's Thelonious Monk Competition, which he entered and won, the first European to earn the prestigious prize.

"It had a big impact on my career," Van Ruller acknowledges. "I had a lot of press attention in Holland; it was quite special for a Dutch guy to win a competition like that. From that moment on, I made records, and I played a lot."

As you can see, for someone of his generation, it was more a matter more of good fortune and lucky associations that helped Jesse discover the secrets of Jazz.

Jazz fans of all ages are certainly a major beneficiary of Jesse’s voyage of self-discovery.

Jesse appears with trumpeter John Swana performing John’s Philly Jazz with bassist John Patitucci and drummer Eric Harland.

Joe’s Bar Mitzvah, an original by fellow Dutchman, alto saxophonist Benjamin Herman, finds Jesse performing with Hammond B-3 organist, Larry Goldings and drummer, Idris Muhammud.

Jesse is the resident guitarist with the Amsterdam-based, Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw, and he and this excellent big band perform his original composition The Secret Champ on this closing video.

The Cal Tjader - Stan Getz Sextet

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Getz’s session with Cal Tjader looks forward with some prescience to the bossa nova records that were to come. Certainly the coolly pleasant backings of Tjader's rhythm section make up a cordial meeting-ground for tenor and vibes to play lightly appealing solos,....”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

Although the title of this feature is very formal, in reality, the Cal Tjader - Stan Getz quartet was never a working group.

It was a “one off” that came together to produce a February 1958 Fantasy LP with the same title as this piece [Fantasy F-3266/OJCCD-275-2].

In today’s terms, the sextet on The Cal Tjader-Stan Getz Sextet was a hybrid made up of two players from vibraphonist Cal Tjader’s regular working group at the time - pianist Vince Guaraldi and guitarist Eddie Duran - and two musicians from the quartet then on tour with tenor saxophonist Stan Getz - bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Billy Higgins.

Ralph J. Gleason offers this background as to how the LP came about in his insert notes to the recording:

“WHEN STAN GETZ played the Black Hawk in San Francisco ..., the time was ripe for the recording of an album that had been under discussion for a long, long time.

Cal Tjader had been an admirer of Stan Getz ever since the latter first shot to national jazz fame as the tenor saxophone star of the Woody Herman band and Stan had heard Cal and played with him at various sessions since Cal first went out as a member of the Dave Brubeck Trio. However, recording Stan with the Tjader group wasn't easy. They never seemed to be in the same part of the country at the same time. It wasn't until Stan came to the Black Hawk to fulfill a short engagement, during a period when Cal was laying off prior to reforming his group, that it was possible to work it out.

Getz' group at the Black Hawk featured two young jazz players who were totally unknown then: bassist Scotty LaFaro and drummer Billy Higgins. But they gassed Tjader as they had gassed everyone who heard them in the club. And it was decided to use them on the date along with Vince Guaraldi, Tjader's regular pianist, and Eddie Duran, the wonderful young guitarist who has been growing in stature in recent years for his in-person appearances and his work on his Fantasy albums.

Most jazz record dates, as anyone who has ever attended one knows, begin late and are one long tortured attempt to get enough material done right to fit on one LP. Once in a long while a date will jell from note one. This was one of those dates.

A critic journeying across the Bay to San Francisco to catch what he thought would be the last two hours of the date almost missed the whole thing. The album was recorded in record time (no pun intended) with less than three hours work. No tune, except two, had more than one take and even then it was a tossup as to which to use. …

As Vince Guaraldi, the swarthy Borgia of the piano, put it when the date was over, ‘When you got it, you got it.’ And they have.”

This album has long remained one of my favorites for the reasons mentioned in this excerpt from Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960: [paragraphing modified]

“Tjader suffered to some extent from the general lack of imagination that characterized much of Fantasy's jazz product in the late 1950s. While other jazz producers of the day, such as Norman Granz or Orrin Keepnews, constantly strived for different formats, personnel, and concepts for their artists, Fantasy tended to churn out a steady stream of similar-sounding albums, usually featuring Tjader's working band.

One of the few exceptions to this rule, Tjader's collaboration with Stan Getz showed the benefits of mixing Cal with new blood from beyond the occasionally anemic Fantasy roster. In addition to Getz, the session featured Scott LaFaro, Billy Higgins, Vince Guaraldi, and Eddie Duran. The band drew on some of the permanent fixtures in the Tjader repertoire—Cal's waltz Lizanne, the blues Crow's Nest, and Guaraldi's Ginza Samba—with Getz leading the way with a charged tenor performance.”

This video is set to Vince Guaraldi’s Ginza Samba to give you a taste of what’s on offer in this wonderful recording.

"Grazie!" - Marco, Enzo, Lorenzo and Matteo

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

By way of background Marco Pacassoni graduated cum laude from the Conservatorio Statale di Musica "Gioachino Rossini"  a music conservatory in Pesaro, Italy and with the same distinction in Professional Music from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA

In the broadest sense of the term, Marco is a percussionist with a particular emphasis on mallets.

He has studied with Gary Burton, Ed Saindon, Victor Mendoza, Daniele Di Gregorio, Eguie Castrillo, John Ramsey, Steve Wilkes.

In 2005 Marco won the award of the best Italian Jazz talent at "Chicco Bettinardi Competition" organized by Piacenza Jazz Festival.

Marco has been played with Michel Camilo, Alex Acuna, Horacio "el negro" Hernandez, Steve Smith, John Beck, Amik Guerra, Trent Austin, Italuba, Gerrison Fewell, Chihiro Yamanaka, Partido Latino, Bungaro, Malika Ayane, Raphael Gualazzi, Luca Barbarossa, Francesco Cafiso, Massimo Manzi, Marco Volpe, Massimo Moriconi, Filippo Lattanzi, Daniele Di Gregorio, Alessandro Ristori, Paolo Belli, Luca Colombo, Cesare Chiodo and many others...

Marco is on the percussion faculty at Liceo Musicale Rinaldini in Ancona and at Urbino University which provides for “Italian Semesters” for students from University of Texas, San Antonio.

Marco has taught Master Classes of Vibraphone at prestigious american colleges such as Oberlin Conservatory (Ohio), University of Minneapolis (Minnesota), Eastman School of Music (Rochester), Columbus University (Ohio), Cleveland University (Ohio). In 2014 Marco’s book on harmony and composition book was published by Rodaviva Edizioni.

Marco leads his own quartet whose members are Enzo Bocciero, piano and keyboards, Lorenzo De Angeli, semi-acoustic bass and Matteo Pantaleoni, drums.

They have released a number of CDs the most recent of which is entitled Grazie [2016]. You can located order information about Grazie and the group’s other CDs via this website: www.marcopacassoni.com. Some of the Marco Pacassoni Quartet’s earlier CDs are also available through Amazon.

Grazie is comprised of ten original tracks: five by Marco and five that were penned by Enzo Bocciero, who also wrote the insert notes for the disc. The recording is an homage to Marco’s late father and is intended as an appreciation for his father’s efforts to assist him with a career in music.

In many ways the music on this CD is exactly the way you would expect to hear Jazz at the outset of the 21st century. Even the fact that the musicians who made this music are based in Italy is not surprising because of Jazz’s international expansion since its inception a hundred years ago.

The music on Grazie is contemporary and very reflective of the one world influences made possible today by social networking and the instant connectivity of the digital transmission of information brought about by the world wide web.

Marco, Enzo, Lorenzo and Matteo have taken the Jazz influences from the music’s 20th century forms and combined it with how they hear the music today. Compositional structure and the basic forms of melody, harmony and rhythm remain essentially the same but the musicians have added their own textures and their own unique styles of improvisation.

Modal Jazz, irregular tempos, “complex rhythmic-harmonic weaves,” counter-melodies, riffs, and a host of other elements common to modern or mainstream Jazz are applied to new stylistic influences to create wholly different sonorities.

So while you know upon listening that the music on Grazie is Jazz, you’ve never heard it played in this manner before.

What is apparent throughout the recording is the very high level of musicianship on display. Marco, Enzo, Lorenzo and Matteo are all accomplished individual musicians who also perform very well as a group.

The "Grazie" or "Thank You" in the title of this piece also has a personal connotation for me in that listening to the music of the Marco Pacassoni Quartet helped move my ears in new directions.

All too often, those of us who evolved with the music from previous periods in its development know where Jazz has been and we get comfortable within these established forms of the music.

Yet, Jazz has always grown and developed, in today's parlance, it has morphed into new forms by incorporating new and different influences. Young musicians are particularly receptive and willing to try new approaches. So, in this regard, my thanks to Marco, Enzo, Lorenzo and Matteo for helping me keep current in the music.

I found Grazie to be a very rewarding musical experience. See what you think by listening to the following audio only file that features the group’s performance of Violet Wall, the opening track on the CD.

The Shark’s Pretty Teeth: Pops on Mack The Knife

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following by Terry Teachout appeared in the July 28, 2017 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

How Louis Armstrong turned a song about the vicious exploits of a murderer in 18th-century London into a jazz hit.

“For all the enduring success of their other collaborations, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill are both best remembered for “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”), their caustically witty 1928 adaptation of John Gay’s 1728 “Beggar’s Opera,” which portrayed low life in 18th-century London. But it was not until 1955 that the American public at large first heard any part of “The Threepenny Opera”—and it was Louis Armstrong, the most important figure in the history of jazz, who introduced them to it.

In September of that year, Armstrong and His All Stars recorded “Mack the Knife,” Marc Blitzstein’s English-language version of “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” a “murder ballad” about the vicious exploits of the show’s principal character that was the most popular number in “The Threepenny Opera.” Armstrong’s deliciously swinging cover version became a hit single, one of a handful of small-group jazz recordings ever to do so, and he would perform it the world over until he died in 1971.

Armstrong was introduced to “Mack the Knife” by George Avakian, his producer at Columbia Records. Mr. Avakian, who was determined to put his beloved Satchmo back on the pop charts, had recently seen the 1954 off-Broadway revival of “The Threepenny Opera.” While the original 1933 Broadway production had closed after just 12 performances, this small-scale staging, newly translated by Blitzstein, the author of “The Cradle Will Rock,” became a sleeper hit, ultimately running for six years. Mr. Avakian came home certain that “Mack the Knife” had the makings of a hit single, but he was unable to persuade any of Columbia’s other artists to play his hunch. Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner and Gerry Mulligan all turned him down flat, finding the simple tune to be too repetitious.

It was Turk Murphy, a San Francisco trombonist, who suggested that the song might suit Armstrong. Murphy wrote and recorded a combo arrangement that Mr. Avakian brought to the trumpeter, who agreed on the spot to record it. His attraction to “Mack the Knife” was easy to understand. Not only was Weill’s riff-like melody instantly appealing, but Blitzstein’s rendering of Brecht’s lyric, an acid-etched portrait of a switchblade-wielding street thug, was no less immediately memorable: “Just a jack-knife has Macheath, dear / And he keeps it out of sight.” Armstrong found the song richly evocative of his New Orleans childhood, laughing out loud as he listened to the demo. “Oh, I’m going to love doing this!” he told Mr. Avakian. “I knew cats like this in New Orleans. Every one of them, they’d stick a knife into you without blinking an eye!”

Murphy’s arrangement was a spare sketch well suited to the talents of the All Stars, the instrumental combo that accompanied Armstrong. “Dig, man, there goes Mack the Knife!” the trumpeter rasped genially by way of introduction. Arvell Shaw and Barrett Deems laid down a springy, pulsing two-beat accompaniment on bass and drums over which Billy Kyle, the All Stars’ pianist, strewed Basie-like twinkles. A muted Armstrong played the penny-plain melody, with the clarinetist Edmond Hall and the trombonist Trummy Young riffing softly behind him. Then he put down his horn and told the tale of the bloodthirsty Macheath with a glee that had nothing whatsoever to do with the grim lyric, translating it into New Orleans-flavored Satchmo-ese: “Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear / And he shows them a-poi-ly white.” Armstrong also overdubbed a trumpet obbligato behind his vocal. At the end he pulled out his mute, shouted “Take it, Satch,” and led the band through a rocking out-chorus.

The results were irresistible, and no one tried to resist them. Released as fast as Mr. Avakian could slap it onto vinyl, “Mack the Knife” rose to No. 20 on Billboard’s pop chart. Though Bobby Darin’s cover version, cut three years later, sold even better, it was Armstrong who turned “Mack the Knife” into a jazz and pop standard that has since been recorded by such artists as Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Haley and the Comets, Peggy Lee, Sonny Rollins and Frank Sinatra. But Armstrong’s version remains sui generis, a quintessential example of his fabled ability to take unlikely sounding songs and make them his own.

In 2015 “Mack the Knife” was made part of the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, a roster of “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” audio recordings “of enduring importance to American culture.” The other recordings enshrined in the registry range from Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” to Martin Luther King Jr's “I Have a Dream” speech. Satchmo would have been proud.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author of “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” and “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” a play about Armstrong. This essay, commissioned by the Library of Congress for the National Recording Registry, was adapted from “Pops.”