Hot Five Centennial Celebration Part 2: Archival Presentation and Listening Session

On Saturday, November 8, 2025, I co-hosted an afternoon event at the Louis Armstrong House Center dedicated to the impending Hot Five Centennial. I’ve given many Archival presentations since the Armstrong Center opened in 2023, often alternating with Matthew “Fat Cat” Rivera (of Hot Club of New York fame), who handles our Listening Sessions.

We knew the Hot Five Centennial was a big moment so we decided to join forces to present a hybrid Archival/Listening presentation in which I would tell the backstory of how the Hot Five came to be, while Matthew would spin the original 78s from our Archives of the three songs recorded on November 12, 1925. It was a good plan and I’m happy to report that we followed it–with a lot more Lillian Hardin Armstrong than anyone could have possibly anticipated.

This was because of one of the most exciting acquisitions I’ve ever been a part of in my 16 years with the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Earlier this summer, we were contacted by Dave Sunenblick, son of Bob Sunenblick, founder of Uptown Records, who passed away in 2018. It turns out that Bob Sunenblick had contacted one of Lil’s nephews some years back and obtainedfour boxes of artifacts that belonged to Lil. Bob didn’t do anything with them except keep them in his garage. When he discovered them after his father’s passing, Dave Sunenblick graciously donated them to us.

The boxes arrived in late July. Midway through opening the second box, our Executive Director Regina Bain remarked that my hands were shaking. The explanation was simple: I was going through Lil’s photo albums, record collection, college notebooks, correspondence, photographs, and so many other items I never thought I would ever see and hold. Then there the reel-to-reel tapes, which had mysterious notes about Paris and about Lil’s unfinished autobiography. Matthew Rivera was immediately hired to transfer the tapes and soon let me know that we had hit the motherlode: nearly six hours of Lil reading chapters from her unpublished/unfinished autobiography in the early 1960s!

It is going to take some time for the Museum to arrange, preserve, catalog, and eventually digitize the new Lil Hardin Armstrong Collection, but I had to make the discovery of the tapes the focal point of the first half of our presentation on November 8. (And this will most likely be the first of several posts dedicated to sharing new discoveries about Lil!)

Thus, without further ado, please enjoy the video shot by Sam Martinelli of this very special event and keep coming back for more Hot Five-related posts in the days and weeks to come!