Welcome back to the third, and final, installment in our series about the creation of Louis Armstrong’s beloved album Ambassador Satch, which was released 70 years ago last month.
For those needing a refresher, in Part One, we discussed the genesis of the idea for the album and did a deep, deep dive into the All Stars’s October 30, 1955 concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, sharing rare photos and audio from that evening. Columbia Records Producer George Avakian was a bit underwhelmed when he received the Amsterdam tapes as, to his ears, the All Stars were only in average form and they performed many numbers already issued on Decca’s various live Armstrong LPs.
Avakian needed to take control so he set up an after hours recording session in an empty theater in Milan on December 20, 1955, the story of which was told in Part Two. Even though the All Stars had already played two shows, they still arrived at the Teatro Leonardo da Vinci ready to blow, recording multiple takes of 11 different numbers in front of a small, but rowdy crowd of revelers from the Hot Club of Milano. Avakian was able to treat it as a hyrbrid half-studio/half-live recording session and steer the band into different territory such as “West End Blues,” “Tiger Rag,” and “The Faithful Hussar.”
When Avakian flew back to the United States, he must have felt that he had more than enough material in the can to put together an excellent album. But there was an issue: Decca’s pesky five-year restriction. According to Decca, no other label could release a Louis Armstrong performance of a song Decca had released in the previous five years. Decca was holding Satchmo at Symphony Hall to a release date of January 15, 1951–which meant that the “Muskrat Ramble” recorded in Amsterdam on October 30, 1955 and the “Royal Garden Blues” recorded in Milan on December 20, were both out since they were technically recorded just under the five-year window. It also meant that “You Can Depend on Me,” “Indiana,” and “That’s a Plenty” were all no-gos (they appeared on Satchmo at Pasadena, released in 1952), as was “Someday You’ll Be Sorry,” recorded for Decca in the studio in 1953 and live in 1955. Most of the other Amsterdam tracks were also covered on Satchmo at Symphony Hall, Satchmo at Pasadena, and the two recently released volumes of At the Crescendo from 1955.
What to do? Avakian concluded that Ambassador Satch was not quite finished after all. He had already recorded an actual live concert and he recorded a studio session with a live audience meant to sound like a live concert–all that was left was an actual studio session. Time was of the essence as Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now special was gathering a lot of buzz and Avakian wanted this Ambassador Satch album to be out in the spring.
Columbia also still didn’t have an official signed contract from Joe Glaser. On Janaury 19, 1956, Avakian wrote to Columbia President Jim Conkling and told him how important it was to finalize the contract for Ambassador Satch “before anything happens like Decca casting our relationship with Armstrong into some sort of turmoil.” Glaser had made some last-minute financial demands and Avakian wanted to satiate him. However, Conkling was wary, writing back, “George, I am against this (because of the Economics) but am sending it along as you requested—to get the Album—and to keep Decca away for the moment.”
The All Stars kicked off 1956 with a month in California, rehearsing, recording, and filming High Society. However, Armstrong had off on Tuesday, January 24, 1956 and that was enough for Avakian to spring into action, booking studio time in Los Angeles. The date of the session proved fortuitious, though that might have been the plan all along; January 24, 1956 was nine days after the January 15, 1951 five-year restriction date for Satchmo at Symphony Hall ended. Avakian slyly notated that “Muskrat Ramble” and “Royal Garden Blues” were recorded on January 24, even assigning them Los Angeles-based matrix numbers in the official studio logs. Now Decca couldn’t touch them because Columbia’s files said they were recorded after the restriction date. Of course, this threw discographical research into disarray for decades; as late as 2007, Avakian was still confused, telling me that those two numbers must have been done in Los Angeles because of the matrix numbers. It wasn’t until I had the time to study the Armstrong file Chris Albertson rescued from the trash at Columbia in the 1970s that it all made sense to me, with Avakian writing “Via 1-24-56 date” after “Royal Garden” and “Muskrat” on a list of “free and clear” tunes for the Ambassador Satch album.
For the Los Angeles session, Avakian decided to record two songs Decca could not claim, “Twelfth Street Rag” and “All of Me” (he couldn’t have known it but Decca actually had a live version of “Twelfth Street Rag” from 1955 in the can, but it was unissued at this time so Avakian was safe).
“Twelfth Street Rag” was a longtime staple of the All Stars’s repertoire and one that was a highlight of the See It Now piece. Avakian might have also felt a connection to the piece since it was one of the “lost” Hot Seven recordings that he discovered and issued for the first time back in 1940. In live settings, the song served as Armstrong’s good-natured satire on the more corny strain of traditional jazz. On it, he always encouraged his sidemen to ham it up; onstage, Edmond Hall would break into a dance during his solo, Trummy Young would play hunched over, his slide almost hitting the floor, Barrett Deems would stand up and crash two hi-hat cymbals together bombastically with his hands and Arvell Shaw would take a bop-inspired “Oo-Shoo-Be-Do-Be” scat break. Everyone always had a good time though oddly enough Armstrong, for all the cries about his clowning, usually played quite seriously on “Twelfth Street Rag,” leading the ensembles with great strength and taking two riveting breaks in the first chorus.
On the Los Angeles date, Avakian first let the band perform its full arrangement as if they were on stage before suggesting they shorten it by having everyone split choruses. The sixth take was marked as the “Master,” but in actuality, the final master was made up of bits of takes three, five and the bulk of six, each heard below completely undoctored. Armstrong’s trumpet playing sounds a little strained by the sixth go-around but that’s when Hall and Young hit their groove. Young attempted to play smoother than usual on the first five takes but when he let loose a bit on the sixth take the way he normally he did on stage, Avakian grabbed that one for the master. Choices like this caused critics to complain that Young had become nothing but a “tasteless battering ram” (in the words of Jack Tracy in Down Beat) but the unissued takes showed he still possessed a smooth touch.
Thus, without further ado, here’s three complete, unedited takes of “Twelfth Street Rag” (I have no idea why YouTube dubbed the take 6 master as “Live from Carnegie Hall”–it’s not):
If you’re not sick of it, here’s the final, edited version from Ambassador Satch, with an introduction recorded in Los Angeles and some fake crowd noises:
On the issued version, Armstrong could be heard speaking occasionally in the background, cheering on the soloists, but all of that was done in Los Angeles. Avakian simply recorded Armstrong in the studio shouting brief bits of encouragement (“Yeah yeah!”) and the names of his sidemen (“Edmond Hall!” “Yeah, Trummy!”). He chopped them up and peppered them throughout the album in postproduction; you can also hear it on “Royal Garden Blues” and “The Faithful Hussar.” He really did think of everything!
The next—and final Ambassador Satch—track would be “All of Me,” a brilliant choice. Armstrong first recorded it in 1932 and had a sizeable hit with it, but with the All Stars, it was a feature for Velma Middleton. Avakian recorded Middleton’s version in Amsterdam but wasn’t too thrilled by it so in Los Angeles, he suggested they do it as an Armstrong feature. It wasn’t easy; it would require nine takes to complete it, many early takes breaking down because of unfamiliarity with how they were going to approach it (on one early take, Armstrong angrily shouts, “Break, dammit!” when the rhythm section forgets to stop during his vocal). The previously unissued third take was the first complete one finished, but one can hear the band still piecing it together, Armstrong verbally calling out in the background, “Next chorus, play the same thing we play for Velma,” a reference to the triplet phrases in the middle of the rideout, as well as the break and short tag at the end. Armstrong ends on a fat high note causing everyone to say, “Yeah,” upon its conclusion but Armstrong’s internal clock knows something is wrong, as he immediately says, “Too long.”
Indeed, on ensuing takes, Hall and Young would split a chorus but there’s still some bumps along the way as even on take seven, there’s a misplaced break in the rhythm section during the vocal.
But Armstrong and the All Stars eventually overcame the challenges to turn in one of the highlights of the album. Hearing the unissued takes, Armstrong, in particular, was feeling creative, singing a completely different vocal on each take. The ninth and final take was the best from start to finish except for a trumpet clam in the opening chorus. Avakian spliced in the first chorus from the sixth take (which broke down early in the vocal) and then bathed the result in fake applause, with a dramatic introduction in Italian by vocalist Ray Martino, recorded in Milan. For the Mosaic Records 9-CD set I helped co-produce in 2014, instead of issuing partial takes, engineer Andreas Meyer replicated Avakian’s original splice between the sixth and ninth takes to offer an unfiltered listen to a track that has delighted Armstrong fans for nearly 60 years.
Of course, for the completists, if you’d like to hear the complete take nine, with the trumpet clam, it came out on an old Sony compilation, The Essence of Louis Armstrong:
And if you’d like to hear the finished Ambassador Satch version, which opened side 2, complete with Ray Martino introduction from Milan (the “yeah, yeah, yeah” from Louis in the intro was recorded in the Los Angeles studio), here ’tis:
To cover all possible bases, the Los Angeles session even featured a 16-minute conversation between Avakian and Armstrong, to be used as part of the promotion. Once again, Avakian tried maintaining the European feel of the album by pretending they were in Milan onstage after the session in December. It’s a wonderful snapshot of a long-standing friendship between two giants of jazz, Armstrong more relaxed around his friend than he was with Murrow:
With that, Avakian had enough to finish off Ambassador Satch, but the session wasn’t over yet. Armstrong was riding high from the success of the single “Mack the Knife,” so Avakian wanted to record two more tracks for single purposes. He really liked the way “The Faithful Hussar” came out in Milan and thought it had potential as a single, so he wrote some lyrics (under the pseduonym “Dots Morrow”) and had Louis record it as “Six Foot Four.” Also, the old standby “When the Red, Red Robin (Goes Bob, Bob Bobbin’ Along)” was having a moment, being featured in the film I’ll Cry Tomorrow, so Avakian had Armstrong record that one, too. We’re not sharing the audio here, but they’re easy to find on YouTube.
[And not to get sidetracked, but “Six Foot Four” inadvertently led to the end of Armstrong’s mid-1950s association with Columbia. Since he wrote the lyrics, Avakian wanted to publish it through his own company but Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, wanted Louis listed as co-composer and for the song to be published through Glaser’s firm. Avakian dug in his heels, many furious emails were traded and though Avakian eventually relented and let Glaser have his way, by the summer, an enraged Glaser let Armstrong record for Verve and RCA and had him back on Decca by the end of 1956, ending his hall-of-fame run with Avakian.]
With the Los Angeles session over, Decca was still paying close attention to what Columbia was up to and sent around a new letter on January 27, 1956 with an updated list of Armstrong songs covered by the five-year restriction:
Here’s the list; the handwritten notes are Avakian’s:
Avakian then sent off some inter-office communication on February 6, 1956, noting that Decca was saying that everything Louis recorded for the label was restricted, but Joe Glaser felt that the restriction only covered the years Decca had an exclusive contract with Armstrong, 1949-1954, meaning the 1955 Crescendo Club recordings were not covered. It also turns out that Decca had already violated a Columbia restriction clause as they recorded the soundtrack to The Benny Goodman Story, releasing some performances Columbia had already put out earlier in the 1950s. “This is an important question to us, as it affects very strongly my decision as to which 3 tunes I will claim from the Armstrong European tapes for the 3 restricted tunes permitted to us by Decca in the terms of our settlement involving the Benny Goodman album,” Avakian writes.
One day later, Avakian reports that Glaser changed his tune and even though Armstrong never signed the paperwork, Decca was claiming that everything was restricted, including the 1955 Crescendo Club performances:
Now it was time for Avakian to program Ambassador Satch, making a list of the best possible tracks and taking notes on any possible restrictions. On the following list, Avakian comes out of the gate with “Tiger Rag,” “West End Blues,” “The Faithful Hussar,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “Muskrat Ramble,” “All of Me,” and “Tin Roof Bluss,” all of which ended up on the album. He then lists “Indiana” and “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which were left off for now, but added to Satchmo the Great in 1957. “You Can Depend on Me,” “Some Day,” and “That’s a Plenty” were left off entirely and finally issued on the 2014 Mosaic set. Notice all the dates in the middle are related to Decca’s versions, while the asterisks to denote material Armstrong recorded for At the Crescendo. On the right column, Avakaian wanted to include two sideman features; he seems to have settled on “Undecided” for Trummy Young but was still choosing between “Clarinet Marmalade” and “Dardanella” for Edmond Hall.
Getting a little closer, here is Avakian’s “Free and Clear” list, now listing “Royal Garden Blues” and “Muskrat Ramble” as “Via 1-24-56 date” and crossing out “Clarinet Marmalade.” There’s also Avakian’s notes about fluffs, fixes, and even grabbing a “Thank you, folks” Armstrong announcement from the Concertgebouw tapes. Under “Restricted,” Avakian lists “Indiana,” “Some Day,” “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “That’s a Plenty,” and “Tin Roof Blues,” the latter of which was part of At the Crescendo:
There’s still a question mark next to “Some Day,” but Decca came through on February 27, granting Columbia permission to include it, but only on an album and not as a single:
But even with the permission, Avakian chose to leave “Some Day” off of Ambassador Satch; my guess is it’s because Decca did have two versions of it already on the market and it made more sense to devote real estate on the album to something different. Instead, Avakian seemed to have traded this permission for “Some Day” to instead include “Tin Roof Blues,” even though it also appeared on At the Crescendo.
In the end, Avakian chose four selections from Amsterdam (“Tin Roof Blues,” “Muskrat Ramble,” “Undecided,” and “Dardanella”), four from Milan (“Royal Garden Blues,” “The Faithful Hussar,” “West End Blues,” and “Tiger Rag”) and two from Los Angeles (“Twelfth Street Rag” and “All of Me”). Avakian did his postproduction edits and sequencing and began working on the liner notes; we have an early draft of the first part in our Columbia file:
You might need a magnifying glass, but here’s Avakian’s original liner notes from the back cover of the LP:
The last piece of the puzzle was the cover photo, which, as addressed last time, became a stone cold classic. “That picture really said the whole thing,” Avakian said in 2014. “You look at it and there he is, smiling away happily, representing the greatest democracy on the face of the earth and the most democratic music of all.” In the August 11, 1956 issue of Billboard, a panel of “experts in the field of industrial design and graphic arts” named it the “winner of first place in the Pop category.” Here’s Louis Armstrong’s copy:
With that, Ambassador Satch was a wrap. Using Newspapers.com, the first mention of the album in an American newspaper was on April 26, 1956. On April 25, Avakian wrote to his bosses at Columbia, “I don’t think any album in record history has ever had such a send-off by any organization.” He wasn’t kidding. Columbia put its full weight behind Ambassador Satch and the album received incredible publicity in the months ahead, generating strong sales (it made it to number 3 for multiple weeks on Down Beat‘s chart of Best Selling Jazz Albums).
From a critic’s standpoint, though it received plenty of good reviews, Ambassador Satch did not bring home the types of raves Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats inspired. Many reviews actually seemed to spend more time on the cover design. “The numbers are familiar and all of them have been performed better by Armstrong in the past, but this set is marked by a sock photo of Satchmo in tails and striped pants, verily America’s best goodwill envoy,” Variety wrote. “Look at the get-up on Louis on the package cover,” Cash Box added. “It’s a gasser.”
Over in the jazz press, the summer of 1956 was the time when many writers really began to turn on Armstrong as his popularity reached new heights. They especially turned on the All Stars; John S. Wilson wrote multiple negative reviews of the band in the New York Times and wasn’t much more welcoming in the pages of High Fidelity. “Louis Armstrong apparently gives Europeans the same well-worn concerts that he provides for American audiences,” he wrote. “Ambassador Satch consists of recordings made at concerts in Amsterdam and Milan–polished, professional, and by now, practically automatic.”
In Down Beat, Nat Hentoff, who gave Handy five stars and Fats four, continued the trend of diminishing returns, giving Ambassador Satch three-and-a-half stars, writing, “Of Louis’ three albums for Columbia in the last two years, this is the least satisfying. A large part of the reason is his band, whose weaknesses are more open-ended on stage raw than in a more controlled studio context.” Hentoff then knocked Trummy Young, and the entire rhythm section, before even hitting Velma Middleton with a stray, noting that her “annoying presence” was “happily absent from this LP.” Hentoff did praise Louis, though, calling his vocals “sandpaper joy” and writing of his trumpet playing, “When he does solo, the magnificent exuberance and authority of his horn remain exciting and sometimes exhilarating.” After one more knock of the band–“The unit never sustains one whole number in irresistible collective flight”–Hentoff did close by admitting, “The cover is a smart one.”
Over in England, Sinclair Traill wrote in Jazz Journal, “If not perhaps quite as good as Crescendo,’ or ‘Satch Plays Fats,’ this still has plenty of fine music hidden away in its twelve inches. It will also serve as a pleasant reminder of those happy days when Louis and the All Stars were entertaining us in Britain.” However, Traill was also the first to looming hand of Avakian’s postproduction efforts, writing, “Reading between the lines of the sleeve notes and listening carefully, I gather that not all these tracks were actually recorded in Amsterdam and Milan, as they would have us believe. It is probable that some of these tracks were re-recorded when the band returned to America, and that Mr. Avakian has been busy again with those internal scissors and that glue of his—-one never knows what one is really listening to these days; more’s the pity!”
Avakian was used to those criticisms and addressed them in the December 12 1956 issue of Down Beat. “The more you work with splicing,” Avakian told Hentoff, “the more solutions you discover. No one in the industry can do as many things with tape as we can do.” Avakian was asked if any of his artists ever protested his methods. “On the contrary,” he replied. “Artists welcome it. Many’s the time an artist will come to it at the end of the take and say, ‘You’ll get rid of that clam, won’t you?'”
Asked specifically about Ambassador Satch, Avakian said, “Test Ambassador Satch for realism; I’m sure you get a feeling of continutiy from tune to tune, and the feeling of a unified live performance, instead of being jerked from your mood by abrupt changes of quality and actual breaks between tunes. I think we succeeded in making it virtually impossible to detect which performances were made in which city.” Indeed, on an unissued “Twelfth Street Rag” from Los Angeles, Edmond Hall hit a wrong note and called an end to the take, causing Armstrong to tell him not to do that again, to just keep playing, safe in the knowledge that wrong notes would be “fixed” by Avakian.
Ambassador Satch did have one passionate fan: Louis Armstrong. Armstrong loved it, telling one interviewer in June 1956 that it was better than At the Crescendo, specifically praised his band, and bragged about playing better than at any other time (we’ll do a separate post about this interview for its anniversary on June 16 as it’s a good one). Armstrong immediately added some Ambassador Satch repertoire into his live concerts, performing “Tiger Rag,” “West End Blues,” and “The Faithful Hussar” at a big show in Chicago on June 1 (Avakian also recorded this concert, which celebrated its 70th anniversary this week; here’s a link to our post from its 65th anniversary in 2021).
That concludes this three-part, in-depth look at the recording, production, and release of Ambassador Satch, but we do want to close with a little laginappe, as they say in New Orleans. While working on the Mosaic Records set in 2013, the good folks at Satchmo Summerfest Orleans invited David Ostwald and myself to do a public interview with George Avakian, playing him some of the materials we had discovered while making the set. George was 94 at this point and it would sadly be his last trip to New Orleans (he hadn’t missed a Satchmo Summerfest since its inception in 2001). For the first 27 minutes, George reminisced about his friendship with Louis, we listened to some of the rehearsal tapes from Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy, and George lamented about the Armstrong-Duke Ellington collaboration Joe Glaser prevented from happening later in 1956.
It’s all great, but for our purposes, the conversation turns to Ambassador Satch at 27:02. I got to play some stuff for George that he hadn’t heard since 1955 or 1956, including some things that didn’t make it onto the final Mosaic set (some breakdowns, the aformentioned “Break, Dammit” exhultation from Louis, and some hilarious aborted introductions to “Twelfth Street Rag”). But the emotional highlight is when we played the entire conversation between Louis and George that was recorded at the Los Angeles session (the one marked “Milan Interview”). George didn’t remember it and grew very emotional as he listened. Props to the Satchmo Summerfest crew for cutting away from the slideshow of images to get some priceless footage of George listening deeply. The whole segment ends with a well-deserved standing ovation for George–and if you love Ambassador Satch as much as I do, you should be standing, too! We miss you, George!