Hot Five Centennial Celebration Part 10: Later Reissues in the LP and CD Eras

Happy New Year and welcome to the first “That’s My Home” post of 2026….and the tenth (and final!) in this ongoing series inspired by the centennial of the first Louis Armstrong Hot Five session of November 1925. Our previous two installments were bonuses of sorts, with Part 8 devoted to sharing audio of Louis listening to the Hot Five records during a 1956 Voice of America broadcast and Part 9 including video of a recent concert/lecture that took place at the Louis Armstrong House Museum. (Links to each part of the series can be found here.)

We also realized that we spent a lot of time sharing Louis’s reactions to this music in print and on air, but we inadvertently skipped two major articles by two major components of the Hot Five, Kid Ory and Johnny St. Cyr. Before we get back to the chronological survey of Hot Five reissues, it’s only right to begin by throwing it over to Ory and St. Cyr. The Ory article comes from a special July-August 1950 issue of The Record Changer that was devoted to Armstrong’s 50th birthday. Here’s “The Hot Five Sessions” by Kid Ory (as told to Lester Koenig):

And the conclusion:

Then in 1954, The Second Line, the periodical of the New Orleans Jazz Club, did a special “Hot Five Issue”; here’s the cover:

The main article that made it a “Hot Five Issue” was contributed by Johnny St. Cyr–enjoy!

The little mention of Lil at the end actually goes along with a photo spread that appears on the next page:

And just for completeness, the end of the little blurb on Lil:

Thank you, Mr. Ory and Mr. St. Cyr! But with that entertaining and informative preamble out of the way, the rest of today’s post actually follows the events of Part 7, when we discussed the four influential long-playing reissue albums George Avakian produced for Columbia Records in 1951 and re-released in 1956. By that point, Avakian had convinced the label to start paying Armstrong royalties on these sides, the first time Armstrong had gotten any such payments for the music that changed his history (the original label, OKeh, paid him a flat fee at the time of the dates and nothing else). Avakian was trying very hard to woo Armstrong’s manager into signing a long-term, ten-year contract to stay with Columbia and figured this extra money would sweeten the deal.

Alas, Glaser refused to sign any such contract and turned Armstrong into a free agent instead. Avakian threw in the towel and stopped making new recordings of the trumpeter after July 1956; by 1957, he left the label entirely. Though there were still some major accomplishments to come, Avakian would always be most associated with Columbia Records and especially, with Armstrong. Without his reissue albums, beginning back in 1940, the Hot Five’s reputation might have remained underground, the property of record collectors and dedicated historians. When Avakian left Columbia, the four volumes of The Louis Armstrong Story remained in print, and would continue to remain in print for decades to come.

But as previously discussed, those four volumes contained 48 selections Armstrong recorded between 1925 and 1931–a period when he recorded well over 100 sides that Columbia owned the rights to. Avakian was not a completist and after carefully sequencing the four volumes of The Louis Armstrong Story for the best listening experience, he was satisfied and apparently, so was the label. There’d be no attempts to do a “complete” Hot Five set anytime soon–at least not in the United States.

It was a different story overseas, where numerous compilations and eventually complete editions were released in the 1950s and 1960s. A caveat right up front–this isn’t everything or close to it. A search for Hot Five LPs in our database turns up over 300 results! Thus, this won’t be complete, but we do at least hope it’s an interesting selection that helps tell the story of how this music was repackaged and reissued around the world.

Back in 1953, the Odeon label, which put Armstrong on the cover of its Italian supplement back in September 1926, put out a Hot Five and Seven compilation in France that was comprised of sides already appearing on Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Story series:

In England, Parlophone records put out a pair of 7-inch Extended Play records in 1959 devoted to the Hot Five. The first volume featured two selections, “Once in a While” and “Savoy Blues,” that were not on the Columbia LPs:

They followed up with Hot Five Again in 1959, this time including four sides from June 1926 that had eluded all of Avakian’s producing endeavors dating back to 1940:

That same year, Odeon put out Armstrong For Ever in France a two-LP set comprised of many 1926-1931 selections left off of The Louis Armstrong Story series on Columbia. Here’s the cover:

Here’s an appreciation by Hugues Panassie (in French):

And finally, the tracklist:

Armstrong For Ever won the “Fats Waller Award” for Best Reissue of 1959 from the Academie du Jazz in France. Armstrong and Duke Ellington were together in Paris when the awards were given out and took the following photo with French pianist René Urtregger at the ceremony. Notice Ellington is holding Armstrong For Ever and Armstrong is holding an Ellington LP:

That wasn’t the only album Armstrong took him from Paris in December 1960. That year, Odeon also released a special series of EPs to commemorate Armstrong’s 60th birthday. Armstrong himself ended up with almost a complete set, given to him in Paris, all of which made it safely back home to Queens. Here are the relevant releases from Louis’s personal collection (I love the cover photos by J. P. Leloir):

The back of this set is autographed by Armstrong; perhaps he misunderstood and thought he was giving it to a fan, but it was actually a gift for him:

This volume has a note on the back to Louis, reminding him “this is without royalties”; I guess Odeon didn’t make the same deal that Columbia did:

This volume has a handwritten note on the back from producer Kurt Mohr–more on him in a bit–personalizing some song titles in tribute to Louis, while the same handwriting that appeared above appears in the notes to once again stress these are “without royalties”:

The back of this volume has another note from Kurt Mohr before an “IMPORTANT NOTICE”: “The Pepe in front is a gass.” This answer to this riddle follows below: “(Diahann Carroll).” This means that these records were most likely given to Louis on the set of the film Paris Blues, which was shot in December 1960 and co-starred Diahann Carroll. Also, note the little arrow after “Pepe”; if you scroll to the bottom of the sleeve, you’ll see a similar arrow, followed by the translation, clearly written in Armstrong’s hand: “CHICK (as the French say).”

More handwritten inscriptions appear on the back of the next volume from Kurt and Serge; we’re now in Earl Hines territory:

One more volume, with more heartfelt notes from Kurt and Serge (Serge’s running commentary on his bad grasp of English is endearing):

All of these EPs and compilations are nice, but something shifted in 1961 as, for the first time, a complete edition of the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions was finally issued in England on the Parlophone label. The title of the four-volume series was His Greatest Years and each LP featured liner notes by discographer/historian Brian Rust. Here they are from our Jack Bradley Collection:

So finally, the complete Hot Five and Seven sessions were available–in England. The following year, Kurt Mohr, who produced the aforementioned 1960 Odeon EPs, began a new eight-volume series for CBS Records, Columbia’s international division. This time, Mohr would reissue everything Armstrong did for OKeh between 1925 and 1932, including the rare early 1930s big band sides. Mohr began releasing these LPs in 1962 under the name V.S.O.P.–“Very Special Old Phonography.” Even though the later volumes are outside the Hot Five theme of this series, they’re all worth sharing for the striking cover photos by J. P. Leloir alone:

Here’s Volume 8, which was finally released in 1967 and finished the story up to Armstrong leaving OKeh in 1932 (short liner notes–still in French–by Henri Renaud instead of Mohr, too):

Next up was Australia, where the Swaggie label put out the exact same four volumes of the His Greatest Years series (right down to the same liner notes by Brian Rust) in 1967. Because the notes are the same, here are the covers of the four Swaggie LPs:

That same year, 1967, Columbia Records reissued the original four volumes of The Louis Armstrong Story, but added nothing new to the output. During this time, musicologist Gunther Schuller was working on his influential chapter on Armstrong, “The First Great Soloist,” which would appear in the seminal volume Early Jazz in 1968. Schuller wrote in great detail about dozens of sides, including Hot Five selections like “Big Butter and Egg Man” and “King of the Zulus,” but those two (and many more) had never been reissued by Columbia Records; you needed the original 78s or one of the foreign LPs to even hear them.

1968 was also the year that Kurt Mohr’s V.S.O.P. series was reissued as a pair of boxed sets, but once again, only overseas. However, this brings Louis back into the conversation because his personal collection contains both V.S.O.P. volumes, as issued in Italy. Armstrong did perform at the San Remo Jazz Festival in February 1968, but he also seemed to stay in touch with Mohr (we have his business card in the Archives) so it’s possible Mohr sent him the sets as a gift. Either way, here are Louis’s copies of the 1968 Italian issues, beginning with Volume 1:

And here’s Volume 2:

Now for something fun: in late 1968, Armstrong ended up in intensive care for heart and kidney trouble and took most of the next two years off (that’s not the fun part). It was during this period of convalescing that Armstrong rediscovered his reel-to-reel taping hobby, making over 200 tapes before his passing in July 1971 (we’ve analyzed each of those tapes here). When Armstrong got to Reel 64, he pulled out his copies of the Parlophone His Greatest Years series and when he finished with those, he followed by immediately dubbing many of the same sides from the V.S.O.P. set. Thanks to these foreign issues, Armstrong was able to dub many of his 1920s classics to tape for the first time–here are the catalog pages in Louis’s own hand (volume one of His Greatest Years starts towards the end of the first page, line 13, and interestingly, Armstrong lets us know that these Parlophone issues were “sold in Russia”):

On this next page, Louis lets us know that he plays the “sliding whistle” on “Who’sit”:

The V.S.O.P. set begins towards the botton of this page:

Armstrong had a major heart attack in March 1971 and spent two more months in intensive care before returning home to Corona, Queens in May. He spent the last two months of his life making new reel-to-reel mixtapes of his own music, which he called “Armstrong’s Personal Recordings” (we analyzed all of these tapes here). He once again dubbed the V.S.O.P. and His Greatest Years sets, meaning some of the last music he listened to before he passed away on July 6 was the music of the Hot Five. We won’t share all of the catalog pages, but here’s one (where Louis humorously got confused by the title and translated V.S.O.P. as “Very Special Old Photography”):

CBS issued the V.S.O.P. volumes in France, Germany, Italy, and other foreign countries, but back in the the United States, when Columbia Records finally put out a new Armstrong reissue in 1969 on its Epic label, they used the V.S.O.P. title–and only issued titles from 1931 and 1932! (Excellent liner notes by Dan Morgenstern on that set, by the way.) That same year, Columbia’s budget label, Harmony did put out a new Armstrong compilation that included one Hot Five, one Hot Seven, and two Savoy Ballroom Five selections along with tracks from 1930s and 1950s–all of it “Electronically Re-Recorded to Stimulate Stereo.” Not even Armstrong owned this compilation; here’s the cover:

Thus, at the time of Armstrong’s passing, Columbia still offered The Louis Armstrong Story series, this budget compilation, and not much else.

After Armstrong died, they quickly rushed out a retrospective, “Satchmo” Louis Armstrong (1900-1971), which spanned 1923 to 1966 and finally got “Big Butter and Egg Man” back in print:

Other than that release (and another cheap Harmony compilation in 1972, The Louis Armstrong Saga), the 1970s and early 1980s were a time for big history-spanning retrospectives. There was the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz in 1973, which included six of Armstrong’s 1926-1928 sides; Armstrong’s 1920s work was at the heart of his volume of Time-Life’s Giants of Jazz series in 1978; in 1982, Book-of-the-Month put out a set of Rare and Unreleased Armstrong that spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s and included “rare” Hot Five sides like “Big Butter and Egg Man” and “Jazz Lips”; then in 1983, the Franklin Mint teamed up with the Institute of Jazz Studies for a series of Greatest Jazz Recordings of All Time sets, with Armstrong leading off the first volume, with a handful of 1920s classics (including the no-longer quite elusive “Big Butter and Egg Man”).

Thus, the great discovery–or rediscovery–of the music of the Hot Five was in full swing by the 1980s, but it was still not possible to buy a complete edition of their sides unless you had the various imports from the 1960s. That all changed–for better or worse–in 1986, when Columbia kicked off its new “Columbia Jazz Masterpieces” series, overseen by industry veteran Michael Brooks. 60 years after the release of “Gut Bucket Blues” in 1926, Columbia finally made all of the Hot Five and Seven sides available on 4 LPs–and for the first time, compact disc. We have three of these one vinyl and all of them on CD, so here they are if you don’t know what I’m referring to, with excellent notes by John Chilton:

Here is volume 2, which we only have on CD without the notes scanned:

The reason for my “for better or worse” jab above should be apparent if you know this series; producer Brooks, who made many wonderful contributions in the jazz reissue field, was wooed by a brand new piece of technology: CEDAR noise reduction software. With the ability to remove crackles and pops from old records, Brooks and Digital Restoration Engineer Larry Keyes applied so much CEDAR processing to the recordings, they removed not only the noise, but they also sucked the life out of them. Not only that, but Brooks hadn’t learned the unfortunate lesson of George Avakian and didn’t pitch correct anything; because of this, all the sides on Volume 1 and most on Volume 2 played a half-step flat.

To those in the know, the 1986 reissues were a disaster. Copies still exist at WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station, with handwritten notes on the cover scrawled by the late Phil Schaap, warning fellow disc jockeys, “DO NOT PLAY” (there are also more colorful descriptors that can’t be shared on a family website). However, on a personal note, this is all my generation had in the 1990s; I was bitten by the Armstrong bug in 1995 and I wanted to hear this music I was reading so much about. I could go to the mall and come home with these CDs with the blue borders. Trumpeter Bruce Harris, who starred in the Hot Five tribute concert we shared in our last post, was born one year earlier than me and shared that he had the same experience, especially wearing Volumes 3 and 4 out while learning to play.

But still, enough folks called Columbia out on the imperfections of this series that they should have fixed the issues or removed them entirely from their catalogue. Instead, they’re still available on all streaming services–in dead sound, playing back at the wrong key! Not only that, but in 2012, Columbia–now owned by Sony–repackaged them in a 10-CD budget-priced boxed set that advertised new remastering (full disclosure: I wrote a short set of liner notes for that box without knowing that they were using the 1986 masters–notice how I’m not providing any links to anything mentioned in this paragraph!).

Meanwhile, as had happened in the 1960s, Europe became the place to find complete editions of the Hot Five and Seven recordings in good sound and on CD. With more lenient copyright laws in effect, multiple labels took a crack at the vaunted series with many listeners and historians still feeling that John R. T. Davies’s work for the JSP label is the gold standard.

Sony did improve matters a bit with its better mastering on the 1994 boxed set Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but they would turn their attention to Phil Schaap to help finally put together the definitive complete set of Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings for Armstrong’s centennial in 2000. Schaap truly gave the project everything he had in him, spending countless hours (and countless dollars) working with the original metal parts and pitch correcting everything for really the first time. Here’s how it looked:

The resulting 4-CD set won the 2001 GRAMMY for “Best Historical Album” and was one of the most discussed releases of the early 2000s, but not all of the publicity was of a positive nature. Schaap’s mastering techniques trended towards a brighter, at times shrill sound with a heavy amount of surface noise audible on the earlier sides. The result was polarizing to say the least, with some listeners loving and others hating this set.

I’ll let you, our dear readers, decide, but here is a Spotify link to Schaap’s set, which is still probably the best way to hear these sides if streaming is your preference:

https://open.spotify.com/album/1fw3JJvlzlyRGDNVRQOzOK?si=QcpLe9WKS-KlD_8LFj11-g

I will admit that I did not like Schaap’s set when it first came out and returned to my JSPs, but it has grown on me, especially as the set wears on (the acoustic sides can be rough going; I’ve assigned them to my students at Queens College and they really have a hard time listening to them). The fact that the JSP CDs–which were originally released between 1989 and 1991!–are still seen by many as the go-to reissue is just another chapter to the saga of how these records which, for all of their historical merit, have never quite been given the proper treatment, at least here in the United States, on 78s, LPs, EPs, CDs, or streaming.

But perhaps that will change now. Sony hasn’t done anything with these sides since 2000 and I don’t think they’ll revisit Schaap’s work anytime soon, but the calendar just hit January 2026, meaning the first three Hot Five sides of November 1925 are now in the public domain. With each passing year, more selections will become free and clear for use. Will a definitive, expertly restored, lovingly assembled, complete package come to fruition in the years to come? If I was a betting man, I’d say yes, but time will tell.

For now, though, it is time to close the door on this ten-part series, which started as a celebration of a single session and somehow turned into an examination of jazz historiography, reissues, tributes, and everything in between. We’re not quite done with the Hot Five as we’ll be having more public Listening Sessions and archival presentations at the Louis Armstrong Center throughout 2026 (and beyond) so as videos of such gatherings surface, we’ll continue to post them here. We also shared the exciting news about our recent Lil Hardin Armstrong Collection and hope to be able to share more of Lil’s story here throughout 2026 (and beyond).

So thanks for reading, thank you to the Hot Five, and here’s to 2026–and beyond!