Hot Five Centennial Celebration Part 9: Louis Armstrong House Museum Concert

Hello folks and welcome to our final post of 2025! It’s been an exciting year as we’ve covered a lot of different stories here on the Louis Armstrong’s “That’s My Home” site, including on sharing hundreds of photos from Louis’s appearances on the Timex All Star Jazz Shows of the 1950s, more looks into the scrapbooks Louis made between 1969-1971, a deep dive on Louis’s lost film, Ex-Flame, newly discovered coverage of Louis and Little Rock, 70th anniversary celebrations of Satch Plays Fats and “Mack the Knife,” and a whole lot more. (It was also an historic year for the Louis Armstrong House Museum as we officially became a member of New York’s Cultural Institutions Group!)

But since November, we’ve been really living with the music of the Hot Five, as the group that changed the world celebrated the centennial of its first recording session, November 12, 1925. Since then, we have published eight posts covering the music, the reception, the reissues, and the rediscovery of the Hot Five, all of which can be viewed at this link. We still have one more post that’s slowly coming together to tell the story of the post-George Avakian Columbia reissues, but we wanted to jump in with a bit of year-end treat: a video of a special concert that took place on November 22, 2025 featuring the Louis Armstrong House Museum Hot Eight!

First, a little backstory: earlier this year, trumpet great Bruce Harris–who also serves as the Programs Director for the Louis Armstrong House Museum–was asked to put together an Armstrong tribute for a concert to be held at the United Theatre in Westerly, Rhode Island. Bruce reached out to me for ideas and I told him about the impending Hot Five Centennial. We came up with a plan for a part-concert/part-lecture event where I would talk about Louis’s life and then we’d have a live band play the music of the Hot Five in between my stories. An all-star aggregation was soon assembled with Bruce on trumpet, Evan Arntzen on clarinet, Jeffery Miller on trombone, Emeline O’Rourke on banjo and guitar, Jen Hodge on bass, and Charles Goold on drums, while I did double-duty by holding down the piano chair when I was in preaching mode.

The concert, which took place on July 18, was a hit and Bruce and I made immediate plans to bring the show to the Louis Armstrong Center. We chose November 22 as the date, 10 days after the actual centennial anniversary of that first session. Alas, Jeffery Miller and Charles Gould were already booked on that date, but we managed to secure two fantastic substitute musicians in trombonist Ron Wilkins and drummer Joe Saylor. As a bonus, Bruce wanted to bring along one of his (and all of our) trumpet-playing heroes, Jon-Erik Kellso, to share lead trumpet duties. Kellso agreed and the show was on! (It also sold out almost instanteously as the cozy “Jerry’s Place” room in the Louis Armstrong Center only holds about 75 people.)

So yes, there would be eight of us paying tribute to the Hot Five, which seemed appropriate given the monumental impact that band had. From a repertoire standpoint, we mostly chose from the original group’s book, balancing early hits “Gut Bucket Blues,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Cornet Chop Suey,” and “Big Butter and Egg Man” with 1927 sides “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” “Savoy Blues,” “Hotter Than That,” and “I’m Not Rough” (the latter used to pay tribute to Joe Oliver). We also gave the Hot Seven some love on a hot “Weary Blues” and included two selections made famous by the 1928 edition of the band with Earl Hines, “West End Blues” and “Tight Like This.” Some solos had to be replicated–if you don’t play the cadenza on “West End Blues” or the stop-time solo on “Cornet Chop Suey,” are you really playing those songs?–but we also chose to go for ourselves on many others. The beautiful part is this particular octet had never performed together as a unit and we had one single rehearsal the morning of the show, fueled by Ob-Co’s Donuts (a Toms River, NJ institution) and lots of coffee. By showtime, it felt like we had been working together for years.

Sam Martinelli was thankfully on hand to film in 4K and the results were so satisfying, we put the complete 90-minute show up on the Armstrong House YouTube channel just before Christmas. Without further ado, here ’tis!

The song titles are listed in the original YouTube description, along with time stamps if you want to skip my lecture portions. All I can say is it was quite an honor to share the stage with such an assemblage of talent–hell, even the audience was loaded with talent! Vocalist Kat Edmonson, Dexter Gordon’s widow Maxine Gordon, New Orleans trumpet great Kevin Louis, it seemed like everyone who was anyone was in attendance. Here’s a photo of Kevin greeting Jon-Erik and Bruce afterwards, as I watched on–chops flying everywhere!

Roger Bow, whose family ran the Dragon Seed, Louis and Lucille Armstrong’s favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurant in Queens, took some beautiful photos from his vantage point, capturing the holiday vibe in Jerry’s Place:

Here’s the band (and guests Andrew Stephens and Rafael Castillo-Halvorssen on trumpet and Devan Kortan on banjo) in full flight during the closing “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” as the Hot Five looks on:

And these next photos, including the glorious one featured at the top of this page, were taken by friend of the band–and friend of the Armstrong House–Neal Siegal. Again, if you need a scorecard, that’s Jon-Erik Kellso and Bruce Harris on trumpets, Ron Wilkins on trombone, Evan Arntzen on clarinet, Emeline O’Rourke on banjo and guitar, Jen Hodge on bass, Joe Saylor on drums, and I, Ricky Riccardi, on piano and proselytizing. Thanks, Neal!

We sincerely hope you enjoyed this special concert video (which we are sharing as part of our end-of-year giving campaign–if you’d like to make a donation so we can keep such programming going into the future, click here!). And if you’re still looking for things to watch, don’t forget that this was technically the second part of our Hot Five Centennial Celebration as just two weeks earlier, we celebrated the group’s first session and the role Lil Hardin Armstrong played in a special program that was also filmed by Sam Martinelli–here ’tis!

And that’s that for 2025 and I suppose the official Centennial year for the Hot Five–but we have more posts and events planned for 2026 and sincerely hope we can find more work for this band, too, because we want to keep playing this music.

Here’s to 2026–and here’s to the Hot Five!