Welcome back to the next installment in our series of posts inspired by the first Louis Armstrong Hot Five recording session of November 12, 1925. We’ve come along way since the initial posts and have ended up chronocling the impact George Avakian’s Columbia Records album reissues of the 1940s had on the reputation of this vaunted group. Part 5 introduced Avakian’s backstory and the first “Hot Jazz Classics” album, King Louis, while Part 6 analyzed the three landmark albums of Hot Five reissues Avakian produced between 1941 and 1947.
But then in 1948, Columbia introduced its revolutionary “microgroove” technology, ushering in the era of the Long-Playing record–or LP. The “albums” Avakian had produced up to this point were literal albums with multiple records in sleeves, cover art, and liner notes. The word “album” would be retained (and is still used even in the streaming era), but now Columbia shifted its focus to 10-inch and 12-inch LPs that could hold as much as 45 minutes of music on a single disc. The technology was invented by Dr. Peter Carl Goldmark; Avakian remarked in an interview of the effectiveness of this photo of Goldmark standing between stacks of Columbia’s old albums of 78s while presiding over a much smaller stack of LPs containing the same music:
Avakian now had a new duty at Columbia: taking the old albums of 78s (note that the phrase “78s” didn’t exist before 1948–they were just records–but the LP technology introduced the new speed of 33 1/3 rpm, necessitating a new way to distinguish between the records) and sequencing them for LPs. He discussed his methods in a 1993 Smithsonian oral history interview with Ann Sneed:
“That was also the kind of philosophy that I personally developed when I was in charge of the pop album department at Columbia and LP came along, because Columbia engineers invented it. I had to convert so many pop albums to 10-inch LPs and then create new ones. So the idea behind the creation, as well as the sequencing of the material, was always, think of a half-hour program. Have a good opener. Have something that makes the person turn the record over and listen to the second half, just as they ended the first half of a half-hour program with something that would make you hang on through the one-minute commercial.”
It might seem surprising that it took three years for Columbia to turn its attention to the pioneering albums of jazz reissues Avakian produced in the 1940s, but in 1951, the label announced its “Golden Era” series, which would contain multiple 12-inch LPs devoted to artists such as Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong. Though Avakian had already produced four Armstrong reissues on 78, he decided to start from scratch and assemble four new volumes organized by theme: the Hot Five, the Hot Seven, Louis’s recordings with Earl Hines, and a compilation of “Favorites” covering 1929-1931, each one featuring Avakian’s new lessons in sequencing.
Thus, without further ado, here are the four volumes of The Louis Armstrong Story that hit markets in 1951, opening with Volume I, the Hot Five:
And like last time, we must share the Spotify playlists (though don’t mind the different cover art as I went with the later 1956 reissues of these same records, which will be explained at the end of this post):
Note that of the 12 tracks, Avakian selected 11 that were on his 1940s albums, but swapped in “Hotter Than That” for “Savoy Blues.”
Here’s Volume II, devoted to the Hot Seven, with lots of new stuff that didn’t make it onto the 1940s sets:
The Avakian sequence, via Spotify:
Volume III, Louis and Earl Hines:
Gary Giddins talked about the effectiveness of this particular flow, with “Basin Street Blues” opening side 1 and “West End Blues” opening side 2; without any flipping necessary, here it is on Spotify:
And Volume IV, “Favorites”:
And finally, a Spotify playlist for Favorites (though let the record show that Sony has never really done well by Louis’s 1929-1932 output so I’ve had to cherry-pick the best available tracks from several different streaming compilations; Avakian’s LP still sounds better!):
As they had in the 1940s, the press once again lined up to praise Avakian’s efforts. Here’s an article from the May 7, 1951 Chicago Daily Tribune that was clipped and saved by Louis Armstrong himself:
Louis also saved a copy of the June 1, 1951 issue of Down Beat, which featured a large ad for the series (points off to Columbia’s art department for flipping Louis and making him a lefty!):
The same issue featured an ecstatic review from Down Beat editor Jack Tracy (who later became one of the biggest detractors of Armstrong’s All Stars). “These four Masterworks LPs are an immensely important colection of sides by one of the most influential jazzmen to ever blow a horn,” Tracy wrote. “They cover four of the most productive years of Louis’ life–1925, ’27, ’28, 29. Countless words have been written about almost every one of these sides. This will not be an addition. Most of the material stands the test of time, some sounds rather ancient and primitive compared to what many musicians are putting down today. But it all contains the wonderful warmth and surge that is Armstrong’s, a tremendous personality. Many accolades to George Avakian, without whose insistence I’m sure these LPs would never have been contemplated.”
Here’s Tracy’s full review, in the center of a packed page:
Avakian’s old partner-in-crime at Columbia, John Hammond, also wrote a glowing review of the albums–well, most of the albums. “Some of the greatest jazz ever recorded has been elegantly packaged by Columbia on four twelve-inch LP discs entitled ‘The Louis Armstrong Story,'” Hammond wrote. “The first three ‘volumes’ show Louis at the height of his powers as instrumentalist, singer, virtuoso, and ensemble artist, while the last catalogues his decline into a self-conscious commercial showman. All of the magic and excitement of improvised jazz are in these records, which are essential to a knowledge of America’s unique contribute to music.” Here’s the complete review, saved only in a battered copy by Jack Bradley (or possibly Jeann Failows):
At the end of his review, Hammond sharpens his knives and criticizes the other big Armstrong release of the time, Satchmo at Symphony Hall. The previous year, Avakian had overseen the release of Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall on Columbia Records, one of the biggest selling jazz albums of all-time. The major labels began seeking out other live concerts to put out in LP form, with Decca striking gold with Satchmo at Symphony Hall, recorded in 1947. (Our tribute to that album can be found here.)
Metronome magazine decided to review all of the albums at once to give a portrait of “Louis” 1925-1947″ in their August 1951 issue. They even put him on the cover, along with Duke Ellington:
And here’s the article, written by Editor Barry Ulanov, who was pretty tough on Armstrong during the “Jazz Wars” of the 1940s. He can’t quite bring himself to agree with Avakian that Armstrong was “the greatest single figure in jazz,” but overall, it’s a very positive piece. Even with the usual swipes at the current-day Armstrong (“The tone is thinner, the ideas are thicker and not so original”), Ulanov can’t help concluding that Satcyhmo At Symphony Hall “makes a fitting companion piece to ‘The Louis Armstrong Story,’ remindng us that Louis is still here, still blowing well, still associating himself with talented jazzmen, still a vital force in jazz.”
Perhaps the most valuable article that came out of the onslaught of press that greeted the arrival of the Louis Armstrong Story series was written by someone involved with intimate knowledge of the original sessions: Louis Armstrong! Esquire magazine had the brilliant idea of having Armstrong write his own thoughts and feelings on a number of the sides from the Columbia albums, publishing the results as “Jazz on a High Note” in its December 1951 issue. You might be familiar with this piece from it being published in the anthology Louis Armstrong In His Own Words, but here it is as it appeared in print; Louis’s autograph even appears on the cover along with other contributors to the issue, including Damon Runyon, Fred Astaire, Frederick Lewis Allen, Alex Ross, and many more:
The article begins with a striking piece of art by Robert Riggs:
Here’s the rest of Riggs’s piece an an Editor’s Note: “Mr. Satchmo Louis Armstrong couldn’t be expected to write about the Jazz of the Twenties in the usual way simply because he is a very unusual personality. Herewith, recording by recording–eighteen of them–Satchmo tells his own jazz story as it really happened: the people, the places, the inspirations. As always, he says what he has to say with freshness, originality and meaning–the way he would play it on his horn.”
Armstrong kicked it off with “Potato Head Blues” above and continues below with “Twelfth Street Rag,” “Chicago Breakdown,” “Muskrat Ramble,” and “Gut Bucket Blues”:
Here’s the continuation of “Gut Bucket Blues,” followed by “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” “Heebie Jeebies,” and “Yes! I’m in the Barrel”:
“Yes! I’m in the Barrel” continues in the next portion, along with “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Skid-Dat-De-Dat,” “Ory’s Creole Trombone,” “The Last Time,” and “That’s When I’ll Come Back to You”:
And the final page contains Louis’s reflections on “Weary Blues,” “Basin Street Blues,” “Got No Blues,” “I’m Not Rough,” and “Hotter Than That”:
I love that article and can read Louis’s written reflections all day, but I think there’s something buried in between the lines (if not outright at the surface at times) that I think is worth bringing up: he truly didn’t remember about half of these recordings! He has his anecdotes and stories down pat for favorites like “Gut Bucket Blues” and “Heebie Jeebies,” but he often pivots or speaks in generalties when confronted with one of Avakian’s 1940s previously unissued discoveries or with lesser heralded numbers like “Got No Blues.” It also seems to me that Esquire sent him a list of tunes to discusss because he flat-out alludes to not remembering certain songs; too bad the list didn’t include “West End Blues” or “Weather Bird” or some others that he might have a little bit more to say about. Regardless, beggars can’t be choosers and it’s a gift that such an article even exists.
So George Avakian was the toast of the jazz world once again for issuing 48 sides on The Louis Armstrong Story series….but there was a problem: Armstrong recorded way than 48 sides in the 1925-1931 period of time covered on these albums. What about the rest?
Enter the bootleggers!
Yes, the rise of the LP also led to the rise of the music pirates and Louis Armstrong’s early recordings were prime for pirating, especially now that tape had been introduced. Anyone with access to the original 78s could dub them to tape and have the results pressed into vinyl…without paying the original rights holders. (At least that was the goal.) The sketchy Jazz Panorama label put out an LP in 1951 titled Chicago Days, featuring 12 Hot Fives recorded in 1926 that had not been part of any of Avakian’s Columbia productions, going back to the 78 albums of the 1940s. Here’s the cover (the back cover was blank, no liner notes, personnel, photos or anything):
They followed up with 12 more sides on Fireworks:
But then there was 23-year-old Dante Bolletino, who started Paradox Industries, Inc., for his music pirating endeavors. For his Armstrong series, he decided to wear his pirating on his sleeve, putting them out on a label with the name Jolly Roger, the name of the old pirate flag. Jolly Roger ended up doing an entire run of Armstrong records, beginning with his Hot Five sides and continuing through his big band work for OKeh and RCA Victor in the 1930s. Here are two 10-inch LPs from 1951 that collected Armstrong’s early works, none of which were on Avakian’s 1940s albums (though a few did make it onto the LPs):
Magazines such as The Record Changer reviewed these issues glowingly, while also acknowledging that they were made without licensing from Columbia. The Record Changer dug a little deeper and discovered that Jolly Roger was paying RCA Victor to press its records–with later volumes including bootlegs of Armstrong’s RCA Victor sides! (I don’t want to get too sidetracked, but December 1951 issue of The Record Changer has a fascinating debate about the practice of bootlegging, complete with quotes from Bolletino, who was frustrated at the major labels not issuing enough classic jazz, and executives at Columbia and RCA; click here to go to Archive.org’s collection of 1951 issues and scroll towards the end for December.)
Eventually, Columbia sued Bolletino and brought along a surprising partner in their lawsuit: Louis Armstrong himself. The case was more or less open-and-shut with a New York Supreme Court judge ruling in favor of Columbia and Armstrong, even awarding Armstrong $1,000 in damages. The case did receive a lot of publicity; Armstrong himself saved this article from the August 23, 1952 New York World-Telegram and Sun:
The judge made Bolletino turn over his stock of 6,000 Jolly Roger LPs to Columbia, where they were destroyed. In conducting research for this post, I came across an article in the Des Moines Register with a photo of Columbia employee Santo Tolerico destroying them!
Naturally, bootlegged copies of old, out-of-print recordings continued popping up (and still pop up in the streaming age), but it’s fascinating that the music of the Hot Five was at the center of the first litigation. It’s also important to note that Avakian and Columbia didn’t add any more volumes to The Louis Armstrong Story. As evidenced by his earlier quote, Avakian put a lot of effort into his sequencing of these LPs and was very pleased with how they came out. Record collectors had been on the fringes since the 1930s–Avakian was one himself–but the major labels were not interested in catering to the group Gary Giddins once referred to as “idiot completists.” When Columbia or RCA turned to its back catalogue, it was for intelligently programmed standalone album compilations, without any thoughts of putting out every recording or every take by a seminal artist.
Thus, if you were an Armstrong fan in the 1950s, Columbia Records owned the rights to all of the OKeh classics from the 1920s–yet had never put out a reissue (on 78 or 33 1/3) of “Big Butter and Egg Man,” “King of the Zulus,” “Don’t Forget to Mess Around,” “Come Back Sweet Papa,” “Georgia Grind,” “Droppin’ Shucks,” “I’m Gonna Gitcha,” “Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa,” “Sweet Little Papa,” “Lonesome Blues,” “Georgia Grind,” “Irish Black Bottom,” or “You Made Me Love You”–and those are just the 1926 Hot Fives! For those, you needed to find an original 78 or one of the “Hot Club” reissue 78s from the 1930s or a bootleg or a foreign issue.
This made for some difficulties as the 1950s wore on and the music of the Hot Five was treated more and more like art. In 1956, Grove Press published an influential book of jazz criticism, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, by the French writer André Hodeir (translated by David Noakes). Hodier’s chapter on the Hot Five was titled “A Great Classical Figure Among the Oldtimers (Concerning Eight Recordings of the Hot Five).” Hodier’s piece had a great impact on how the Hot Five was viewed, but there was an issue: it originally appeared as an article in a special 1949 edition of the French periodical Jazz Hot and was a review of a Hot Five album of 78s that was released at the time on the European Odeon label; here’s an ad:
By the time of the 1956 publication of Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, none of those eight sides had been reissued by Columbia! And they wouldn’t be for quite some time–but that’s a story we’ll save for next time.
Back to the early 1950s, Armstrong and Columbia Records successfully teamed up to defeat Dante Bolletino in the Jolly Roger case of 1952, but Armstrong was still under an exclusive contract with Decca Records. In fact, Columbia wasn’t paying him any royalties for The Louis Armstrong Story LPs, a holdover from Armstrong’s original deal with OKeh Records, which paid him a flat fee for each session (extra for original compositions), but without provisions for royalties. Now, flash forward to the early 1950s and the recordings of the Hot Five are being reissued by a major label, publicized in every newspaper and magazine, disected and analyzed by critics and musicians–and Armstrong wasn’t getting a dime.
This rankled him, as he mentioned on one of his reel-to-reel tapes, made in late 1951 at the home of Ronnie Anger, a Canadian record collector. Armstrong was determined to get as many of his early recordings on reel-to-reel tape as possible, so whenever he met a collector in 1950s, he had them spin any rare 78s for him so he could dub them to tape and have a copy for his files. In this next segment, Anger had just finished spinning “Yes! I’m in the Barrel” from the first Hot Five session of November 12, 1925:
LAHM 1987_3_49
In case you can’t make it out, after Anger’s description of the Hot Five, here’s a transcription of their dialogue:
Ronnie Anger: You wrote a lot for the group, too, didn’t you, Louie?
Louis: Yeah. Well, I think that last tune, ‘I’m in the Barrel,’ I think I wrote that.
Anger: Oh yeah.
Louis: Yeah, well, I used to sit on the back steps when I lived with Lil and write five or six numbers at a time, take ‘em downtown and sell them to the OKeh, you know, right quick.
Anger: They were wonderful records.
Louis: Yeah, we wasn’t paying no attention to the royalties and all that that day. All we wanted money then and forget it! I wish I had held about a half-cent interest in ‘em, I’d be all right. I’d sell them back, you know. They tell me that Columbia bought all them tunes.
Anger: Yeah, that’s a Columbia record I played.
Louis: You don’t get a nickel from that. They’re selling like hotcakes, too. It’s one of them things, you know.
Soon after that conversation, RCA Victor introduced the 45-rpm format in 1952, a new way of playing singles that would render the old 78s obsolete in a few years. 7-inch 45s were not ideal for albums, but Columbia did their best to address the new format with a series of Extended Play–or EP–releases, including another run of The Louis Armstrong Story, now with different color covers; here’s volumes 3 and 4 in yellow and purple respectively:
Thus, Columbia was finding new ways to make money on these recordings and Armstrong still wasn’t getting any of it. But 1952 was also the year when George Avakian was formally named Columbia Records’s Director of Popular Albums. Though he’d always have a soft spot for reissues, Avakian was now focused on recording fresh material as Columbia’s jazz roster would eventually expand to include Eddie Condon, Turk Murphy, Buck Clayton, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and many more.
But Avakian’s dream was to record something new with Armstrong. He had grown dismayed with Armstrong’s Decca output, which consisted mainly of Armstrong’s interpretations of pop tunes and love songs like “La Vie En Rose” and “Blueberry Hill”–hit recordings for sure, but ones that were far removed from the Hot Five aesthetic Avakian worshipped. Armstrong was under contract to Decca until the spring of 1954, so Avakian was stuck–but the moment that contract expired, Avakian sprung into action, setting up a meeting with Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser. It was at this meeting that Avakian made Glaser an offer he couldn’t refuse: for the opportunity to record a single new album with Armstrong’s All Stars, Columbia would agree to start paying royalties on Armstrong’s 1920s recordings at the heart of The Louis Armstrong Story LPs. Glaser agreed.
We now know that that deal resulted in classics like Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy, Satch Plays Fats, “Mack the Knife,” and Ambassador Satch (70th anniversary post coming in 2026!). By the spring of 1956, Columbia Records was prepared to offer Glaser a 10-year contract. But by this point, Armstrong’s popularity had skyrocketed (in large part due to his relationship with Columbia) and Glaser was hesitant to tie his star client to any exclusive contracts. Glaser played hard-to-get, leading Avakian to get Columbia’s accounting department to run the numbers of how much Armstrong had earned since joining them in 1954. This document was saved by the late Chris Albertson, who donated it (and a ton of other Columbia-related paperwork) to our Archives in 2016:
Armstrong’s Columbia output earned him a total of $22,089.74 as of January 1956–that’s $267,155.62 in 2025 dollars, which seems pretty healthy. Again, that includes his new albums made for the label, as well as the Louis Armstrong Story reissues (interesting that volume 4, Louis Armstrong Favorites, made the most money). Avakian, also requested a Profit-and-Loss statement on January 17, 1956:
So there you have the official sales numbers as of November 1955: 14,913 copies of Volume 1 (Hot Five), 14,017 of Volume 2 (Hot Seven), 14,619 of Volume 3 (Louis and Earl Hines), and 19,138 copies of Volume 4 (Favorites). And according to the profit-and-loss sheet, Armstrong’s Columbia recordings earned the label $287,600 total and once expenses were paid (now including royalties), they still made a gross profit of $110,015.
One can see why Avakian wanted Columbia to retain Armstrong’s services for a very long time. Perhaps to sweeten the deal, Avakian spearheaded a reissue of the original Louis Armstrong Story reissues in June 1956, outfitting each one with a new cover design featuring photos of the trumpeter. The liner notes and tracklists were the same, but here are the new covers, which might be very familiar to some readers out there as they stayed in print for a very long time (we have multiple copies in our Archives with different labels from the 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s):
These new editions were released just in time for Armstrong to feature several tracks on a five-hour broadcast he hosted for the Voice of America the following month. We will have audio from that broadcast next time!