One of my duties as Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum is handling the historic “on this day” type of posts on our social media pages. On the morning of July 14, I realized it was the 70th anniversary of Louis Armstrong’s performance of the “Concerto Grosso” arrangement of “St. Louis Blues” at Lewisohn Stadium, filmed by Edward R. Murrow’s crew for the film Satchmo the Great. I grabbed the video from our Archives, edited it, cropped it, and put it up on Instagram and Facebook.
Sitting here one week later, it has over 175,000 views on Instagram, 159,000 on Facebook, has been shared nearly 2,000 times, and has inspired hundreds of comments –many of which expressed some form of “I never knew this existed before!” That was all I needed to read–this post is the result!
The backstory of how it all happened is baked into our three-part series on Ambassador Satch (here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 for those who missed it). The short version is while George Avakian was recording that album in the fall of 1955, Edward R. Murrow was following Armstrong around Europe with a camera crew for an episode of his CBS show See It Now, which aired December 13, 1955. The show was received warmly and Murrow and producer Fred W. Friendly decided to expand it into a feature film in 1956, filming Armstrong’s return to England and his first visit to the Gold Coast of Africa (soon to become the independent nation of Ghana) in May 1956. The filming was going well, but Murrow and Friendly needed a climax. That climax would be the Lewisohn Stadium concert.
Lewisohn Stadium was located in Harlem on the campus of City College, between Amsterdam and Convent Avenues, spanning 136th to 138th Streets. Though City College used it as a football stadium, its amphitheater became known for its classical music concerts, held each summer beginning in 1918. Those concerts were supervised by another major character in the story, Minnie Guggenheimer; here’s a 1961 newspaper profile saved by Jack Bradley with more of her life story, and a photo of her with Louis Armstrong as a bonus:
Minnie Guggenheimer began booking the concerts in 1918 but kept it a strictly classical affair until 1956 when she decided to host the venue’s very first “Jazz Night.” This was the era when the Newport Jazz Festival was making waves, to the point that it became the setting for the film High Society, filmed and released in 1956. Guggenheimer must have had connections with Columbia Records as, when it came to booking “Jazz Night,” she turned to George Avakian, Armstrong’s producer at Columbia. Guggenheimer wanted to book Armstrong and Dave Brubeck–both Columbia artists and both clients of Joe Glaser–on July 14 for $5,000, but she wanted Glaser to hold July 15 open as a rain date.
Avakian relayed his conversation with Guggenheimer in a February 2, 1956 letter to Glaser:
Avakian’s letter slipped through the cracks, but when Glaser finally got around to answering it on February 22, he wasn’t pleased about Guggenheimer’s demands, noting that he booked Armstrong at Medina Temple in Chicago on June 1 at $5,000 and got him a one-nighter in Denver for $6,000 so to book both artists for $5,000 total and hold an extra date open for no extra money would be a loss. After airing his gripes, Glaser did agree to the terms, adding, “I hope Mrs. Guggenheimer realizes we are giving her a special concession in price.” (The shrewd Glaser did find a use for July 15, which we’ll address at the end of this post.) Here’s his letter to Avakian:
“Jazz Night” was a go and was first mentioned in the New York Daily News on May 16, 1956:
The opportunity for Armstrong to play such a prestigious classical music series even received a blurb in The Pittsburgh Courier on May 26:
One name is missing from these early press reports: Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein was riding high in 1956, working on two Broadway shows, Candide and West Side Story, while being just one year away from being appointed Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Columbia Records was already wooing him and would sign him to an exclusive contract in August 1956, shortly after the Lewisohn Stadium concert. The correspondence sadly does not survive for this chapter in the saga, but at a certain point, it was decided that Armstrong should conclude his evening at Lewisohn by playing a “Concerto Grosso” arrangement by Alfredo Antonini of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” with the “Stadium Symphony Orchestra,” basically the summer edition of the New York York Philharmonic. On top of that, Bernstein would conduct the orchestra and Murrow and Friendly would film the whole thing. And if that wasn’t enough, 82-year-old Handy, blind and confined to a wheelchair, would be invited to attend the performance.
One letter does survive that offers some clues on how this all came about. On June 6, Avakian wrote to Fred Friendly with an issue: because of “Jazz Night,” Lewisohn Stadium assumed the Stadium Symphony Orchestra wouldn’t be needed on July 14 so they gave them the night off and were working on booking something for them to do on July 13. Friendly would have to tell them that no, the orchestra would be needed on July 14 after all for the filming and for a rehearsal earlier in the day:
Notice Bernstein’s name still wasn’t mentioned; one would think that as as soon as he committed, his presence would have been used to generate ticket sales, but from what I can tell, his contribution wasn’t listed in newspapers until July 14, the day of the concert. Here’s Leonard Lyons’s syndicated column:
And here’s a great ad that ran in the July 14 New York Daily News, also mentioning that “St. Louis Blues” would be filmed:
Armstrong’s schedule in this period was relentless–he’d be playing the American Music Festival in Washington D. C. on Friday the 13th–so the only time to rehearse would be before the show on the afternoon of the 14th.
George Avakian would be present as it was decided to have Columbia record the audio of “St. Louis Blues” for use in either the film or a possible soundtrack album. Glaser agreed, as seen in this letter from July 6, acknowledging amended contracts were signed to allow Columbia to record Louis in Chicago on June 1, at the Newport Jazz Festival later on July 6, and at Lewisohn Stadium:
On the morning of July 14, 1956, Avakian had Columbia pack up its equipment and head out to Lewisohn Stadium. Avakian’s engineers had everything in place to record part of the rehearsal. Armstrong’s All Stars were present, as was Bernstein and the Stadium Symphony. The arrangement of “St. Louis Blues” was not a simple one: the symphony would start it off, Armstrong’s All Stars would take over, Armstrong and the symphony would join forces, there’d be a tempo change, solos, a drum break, and a dramatic ending.
Armstrong remembered an apprehensive Bernstein saying to him, “Now when you get to this cadenza, and you get a little nervous, well, just shorten it.” Armstrong had no idea what Bernstein meant by “nervous.” “I said, ‘Okay, daddy.’ Well, I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I’m ready. From the first rehearsal on, we wailed. Well, from then on, he got confidence; it don’t take long for a person to relax once they hear me go down with the arrangement.”
Here are two great photo of Armstrong and Bernstein at the rehearsal, starting with Louis greeting Lenny:
And here’s one more of the two geniuses deep in discussion:
In 2014, I served as co-producer of a 9-CD boxed set for Mosaic Records, Columbia and RCA Victor Live Recordings of Louis Armstrong and the All Stars. One of the biggest thrills was ordering the original tapes from Sony and listening to them with master transfer engineer Andreas Meyer. Some of the rehearsal portions survived–and were a mess. They never did do a complete run-through, at least on the surviving reels, instead focusing on one section at a time. There were lots of mistakes–even from the symphony members–and not much action. I’m the type who likes to reissue every scrap–as will be demonstrated momentarily–but this wasn’t exactly something that was fit for public consumption. The easy decision was made to leave it off the set.
Here’s one more photo from the rehearsal, used as a lobby card for Murrow and Friendly’s eventual feature film, Satchmo the Great:
However, once the rehearsal ended, Avakian sprung into action. He had been griping about the All Stars’s live shows ever since recording them at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on October 30, 1955. Because Decca had already released three sets of live Armstrong recordings and because they had a five-year restriction against other labels recording other versions of the songs on those albums, Avakian was consistently stymied by Armstrong performing the same restricted songs night after night. He solved the issue on Ambassador Satch by faking a live session in Milan and following it with a studio recording a month later, but he had given up any hopes of recording anything fresh…
…but now at Lewisohn Stadium, the recording equipment was set up and the All Stars were standing right in front of him. Would they mind maybe recording a few selections? The All Stars agreed and an impromptu recording session broke out! This material was part of the 2014 Mosaic set, which is fortunately available on all the streaming services. Here are my liner notes and YouTube links to the audio of each selection, beginning with “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans”:
In front of smattering of friends, associates and Philharmonic musicians, Avakian started an impromptu recording session to record some different repertoire. He knew he had limited time so he couldn’t ask the band to whip up something new. But he did ask them to reach deep into their book for a couple of rarely played instrumentals: WAY DOWN YONDER IN NEW ORLEANS and MAHOGANY HALL STOMP. By this point, it should come as no surprise that the All Stars swung the hell out of both numbers.
Armstrong almost always improvised the bulk of his solo on WAY DOWN YONDER IN NEW ORLEANS, though he always began by quoting Lester Young’s solo on YOU CAN DEPEND ON ME with Count Basie (something pointed out to me by Loren Schoenberg). He’s in total command of the horn on this one, even showing off some fast-fingering at times. [Dale] Jones’s bass solo was edited out by Avakian when this was originally released years later (no surprise there) but it has been restored for this set.
Then it was time for MAHOGANY HALL STOMP in two tries:
Armstrong nails the three-chorus solo both times (still sounding fresh though it was of 1929 vintage) but the other All Stars change their solos from take to take, with varied results. Kyle especially sounds less sure-footed on the first version, which didn’t have a take number, so he might have been assumed this to have been a rehearsal by the musicians (Young also forgets the riff behind Hall’s solo). Deems seems to speed up a bit each time during Trummy’s solos, but it all adds to the excitement; Kyle can be heard asking Armstrong if it was too fast immediately after and Armstrong answers, “No, it’s good!” Both closing ensembles work up quite a head of steam, but Trummy gets a little too carried away the second time, botching the ending. Once again, in an effort to “save their asses,” Avakian used the complete introduction and the clean final ending from the first try for the SATCHMO THE GREAT master, but the entire middle was made up of the second take. Avakian’s final edit (including adding a copious amount of fake applause) is a strong one, but once again, his postproduction work has been stripped to present these two differing performances exactly as they sounded at Lewisohn Stadium.
Next, Avakian realized he didn’t have a good version of Armstrong’s old Decca hit, BLUEBERRY HILL.
The All Stars tossed it off without any problem on this first, previously unissued take at a unique faster-than-usual tempo (Armstrong can be heard telling Kyle to “swing it like we used to do it,” perhaps an allusion to how this tune had fallen out of the band’s regular rotation in recent months).
Then the producer had a suggestion: could Armstrong open with a chorus of trumpet? Armstrong had never picked up the trumpet in the seven years he had been performing this number but that didn’t stop him.
After needing a couple of takes to work it out, he eventually turned in a lovely muted reading of the melody. Though he sounds great, Armstrong resumed his vocals-only version immediately after, making this the only known version of BLUEBERRY HILL to feature a full chorus of trumpet.
As can be heard, the sound of the crowd grows more authoritative by the end of BLUEBERRY HILL; people were starting to notice that Armstrong was putting on an unplanned show and they wanted to take it in. This was a man who lived for his audience, so he wasn’t about to quit, honoring a request for MACK THE KNIFE and dedicating it “for the audience.”
After giving credit to “our boy” George Avakian in his introduction, the All Stars swung old MACK down again. Unfortunately, it’s not a complete performance. Someone—perhaps Avakian himself—must have thought, “Well, we don’t need MACK again” and switched off the recorder midway through Louis’s vocal. However, after a quick change of heart, the machine was flipped back on a few seconds later. Examining the original reels, there’s no signs of splicing so the only explanation was the machine was turned off and back on. Nevertheless, the performance is worth reissuing because it captures the loose spirit of the rehearsal session (and also because the opening and closing choruses ended up on the released version from AT NEWPORT).
Avakian was satisfied with four numbers in the can and he didn’t want to overburden Armstrong so the rehearsal session ended right there. Later that night, the Stadium’s first “Jazz Jamboree” took place in front of an outdoor crowd of over 21,000 fans. The Dave Brubeck Quartet led things off with a full set, which Avakian recorded (it remains unissued).
But then he did an interesting thing: as Armstrong led off the second half of the evening, Avakian turned off the recording equipment. After so many battles over repertoire, he probably felt sure that, between Amsterdam, Milan, Chicago, Newport and now the Lewisohn rehearsal recordings, he had recorded everything he’d ever need. It’s entirely possible (and even probable) that Armstrong performed his standard rundown of tunes with the All Stars that evening but we’ll never know because there’s no record of what he featured during his set. (Armstrong’s set did get another high-profile negative review, this time courtesy of John S. Wilson in the New York Times, lamenting, “Except for occasional instances it would be misleading if the antics of Mr. Armstrong and his colleagues were to be accepted as representative of well-played jazz.”)
Avakian was ready, though, to get the climactic ST. LOUIS BLUES (CONCERTO GROSSO) performance. So was Edward R. Murrow, who had his cameras in place. The resulting ten-minute performance would be a highlight of both the Satchmo the Great film and soundtrack album.
Okay, back to 2026! Now is the moment you’ve probably all been waiting for: the complete video of “St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso)” from Satchmo the Great, not the social media edit, transferred from a beautiful 16mm print owned by the late Jack Bradley. Enjoy–but come back, because there’s still a lot more story and music to share!
Isn’t that marvelous? The footage of W. C. Handy, 82-years-old, blind, sitting in a wheelchair, and obviously so emotionally overwhelmed gets me every time. But now, for the full story, let me return to my 2014 liner notes to the Mosaic Records set:
However, Armstrong fans with discerning ears have always claimed that the album performance differed from the film. It was assumed that Avakian being Avakian, perhaps he spliced in some better solos from that day’s rehearsal. But that wasn’t the case.
It wasn’t until the preparation of this set that the entire story of ST. LOUIS BLUES became clear. And because the story is so riveting—and the music is so good—we’re issuing the entire sequence of events, only eliminating some quieter passages when the stage was being set up. Taken as a whole, it makes up one of the most thrilling moments of Armstrong’s career and another near-riotous moment to rival what Ellington had done at Newport one week earlier (though to considerably less publicity…this is only going public for the first time in 2014!).
The concerto arrangement for ST. LOUIS BLUES was done by Alfredo Antonini, who had just conducted “Italian Night” at Lewisohn Stadium the previous week. The classical sections are pretty ponderous, but nobody gets harmed (except for a bad clarinet clam on the first try). Armstrong, feeling the long-haired spirit, enters with a dramatic cadenza that makes reference to Stravinsky’s PETROUCHKA SUITE a work the trumpeter owned in his personal collection (thanks to trumpet master Brian Shaw for hipping me to this similarity). From there, the All Stars take over for an entire 52-bar chorus of the tune—the trumpet positively soaring—before Armstrong finally joins in with the strings, playing a lovely obbligato. A tempo change brings on hot solos by Young and Hall before Armstrong leads the way out, his tone still rising above the closing crescendo.
With the audience going crazy, Armstrong feels the need to play one of his patented encores. Of course, that’s not an easy thing for an 88-person Symphony Orchestra to do, so after a brief discussion—Armstrong can be heard imploring everyone to hurry up because the audience is waiting—they decide to come back from the tempo change. Everyone is feeling their oats, with Young almost blowing his trombone to pieces and Armstrong working a repeated Db blue note over and over with great results. Again, the result is bedlam.
But then Leonard Bernstein speaks and in this previously unissued segment, reminds the audience that this is a recording session in addition to the scene of a film shoot and asks for them to remain quiet throughout the next take. Next take? Okay, so it was performed twice. Mystery solved…partially.
Avakian’s reel ran out while the cameras set up for take 2, unfortunately missing the first few words of Bernstein’s impromptu, heartfelt tribute to Armstrong, which had to be redone in the studio sometime after the concert [as mentioned, Columbia signed Bernstein in August 1956 and he was in the studio with Avakian on September 10 to record What is Jazz? so perhaps it was done then].
In the final edit of the album and the film, Bernstein’s speech comes after the performance and is followed immediately by Armstrong’s. But here, as soon as Bernstein finishes, they do it all over again.
After it concludes, Armstrong delivers his own very personal speech (“It gassed me, man, it gassed me!”) paying tribute to W. C. Handy, in attendance that evening.
With everything in the can, Armstrong calls WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN as a finale of his own.
The whole performance emits a kind of valedictory joy; this was a long day, but Armstrong wanted to go out with a bang. This version is looser and even more exciting than the one from Chicago, though Trummy sounds like he’s hurting. Armstrong empties the tank by calling an encore that features a faster tempo and the trumpet taking the melody an octave higher than expected. An unbeatable finale.
Only there was a problem: when the SAINTS concluded, word spread that the cameras malfunctioned during the second take! They would have to be fixed, reloaded and they would have to do “St. Louis Blues” again. On the session reel, you can hear much discussion, Armstrong repeatedly mentioning “the audience, the audience.” He asked how much longer it would take to fix the problem. With 21,000 fans still in their seats—many chanting, “We want Louie!”—Armstrong decided to perform for them. After a quick discussion with the band (Deems, feeling fresh, asks for MOP MOP), they decide to go with BASIN STREET BLUES.
The crowd cheers wildly at the introduction and the All Stars swing mightily for six minutes, Armstrong somehow still sounding mighty fresh himself and Young sounding rejuvenated after the respite.
Murrow himself then came out to explain to the crowd about the camera, but promised them one more chance to enjoy the ST. LOUIS BLUES. After getting the 88-members of the Symphony Orchestra in place and tuned up, they did it one more time.
For those who have seen Satchmo the Great, you’ll recognize the uptempo portion as being from this take (Young, perhaps commenting on the evening’s unexpected course of events, opens with a quote from SOME ENCHANTED EVENING). After one final high note ending, Murrow emerged again to thank the audience and say good night.
It was definitely a night to remember. During a 1973 tribute to Armstrong on his WOR radio show, host John Wingate fielded a phone call from a woman who was at the Stadium that night (unfortunately, she didn’t give her name). “There we were sitting on these little wooden chairs, but we didn’t mind a bit,” she told Wingate. “And the audience applauded. And he kept saying he’s not leaving. And whoever had arranged it kept coming up to him after every number and say, ‘Well, come on, let’s go,’ and he’d say, ‘No, I’m going to play for the people because I love them.’ He was so sincere with the love and the pleasure that he brought. I’ll never get over that night.”
Armstrong himself was pleased. “After the performance, [Bernstein] liked to shake my hand off. Then, while I’m on stage, he would get the lowdown from my wife, Lucille, on how I stay up like I do and keep myself up. She told him about Swiss Kriss, too [Armstrong’s laxative of choice]. And when I came out the wings from taking my bow, he says, ‘Man, I’m going to take some Swiss Kriss tomorrow.’”
Back to 2026: Aside from the aforementioned pan in the New York Times–par for the course for Armstrong in this period–the Lewisohn Stadium concert received some positive coverage in the press. Here’s a short article that appeared in many Black newspapers; this one in particular is from the Kansas City Call on July 27, 1956:
Armstrong’s official audience tally ended up at 22,500, just short of Harry Belafonte’s 25,000 from the pervious month. However, as the New York Daily News pointed out on August 1, there were safety restrictions in place for Armstrong’s show and 10,000 people had to be turned away!
Finally, syndicated columnist Alice Hughes attended Armstrong’s show and a classical concert by the Boston Symphony at the Berkshire Music Festival in the same month. She compared both shows–and both audiences–in the following column, which ran in newspapers across the country:
I love the detail that “When…W. C. Handy, the blind author of that topmost piece of jazz music, ‘St. Louis Blues,’ appeared, the noise at the Stadium must have reached outer space.” What a time to be alive!
Avakian had another set of strong recordings but, he was also sick of dealing with Glaser. On July 3, Glaser had written another nasty letter, unwilling to accept the contracts Avakian presented him with to record Armstrong at Chicago and Newport. Avakian made the changes to satisfy Glaser and sent them back. However, when Glaser returned them, he forgot to have Armstrong initial the changes. Avakian didn’t care. On July 17, three days after Lewisohn Stadium, Avakian wrote to Walter Dean, Columbia’s head of business affairs, “If my assumptions are correct, I suggest that you hold on to what you’ve got in the form of one of the carbons and ask Glaser to have the other two initialed, because the situation with Armstrong and Glaser is very touchy and once we have everything nailed down, I think we are through, in capital letters and underlined thickly, with Mr. Glaser.”
Indeed, he was; by August, Glaser was writing to Avakian and bragging about Armstrong’s success at a Hollywood Bowl concert produced by Norman Granz. The whirlwind two-year relationship between Armstrong and Columbia was over. There would be no long-term contract.
Avakian still had to put together the Satchmo the Great album, though he’d have to resort to a little more trickery to pull it off, not telling Lewisohn Stadium about the rehearsal session and assigning those tracks different dates and locations, leaving discographers scratching their heads for almost 60 years about where some of those mid-50s live performances emanated from. Now, thanks to Mosaic Records, it is all straightened out.
Indeed, in September 1956, Avakian started making notes on a possible soundtrack album for Satchmo the Great and admitted that they’d have to clear the recording of “St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso)” with Bernstein and pay Mrs. Guggenheimer for recording it, but added, “She knows nothing of the rehearsal recordings and it would be possible to claim – even to Joe Glaser and Armstrong himself – that the rehearsal recordings were made elsewhere. This would leave us with only the ‘St. Louis Blues’ to discuss with Mrs. Guggenheimer.” Here’s the entire two page memo, written to Columbia President Goddard Lieberson:
Satchmo the Great, the album and the film, were both released in 1957, featuring Avakian’s final edits of things like “St. Louis Blues (Concerto Grosso)” and “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” as well as other material he recorded along the way in Amsterdam and Chicago and one track Murrow’s team got in Ghana.
But as a postscript, remember Glaser’s reluctance to hold the July 15 date for Mrs. Guggenheimer? With the July 14 event a success, Armstrong and the All Stars were now free on July 15….a Sunday….the night Ed Sullivan taped his CBS variety show! All it took was one phone call and just like that, the exhausted All Stars–rehearsal, impromptu recording session, full set, the whole “St. Louis Blues” filming–would be performing on live TV. They’re a bit tired–Barrett Deems’s snare drum keeps falling off its stand at the end–but it’s still priceless footage of a tired band still managing to somehow get it done even when on fumes (and tying it back to Ambassador Satch, Armstrong does “Muskrat Ramble” and “The Faithful Hussar” from that recently-released album):
Well, that concludes this 70th anniversary look at one memorable evening at Lewisohn Stadium, having covered it from every conceivable angle, except one: photos. The Sony Music Archives has some wonderful photos of Armstrong’s evening set at Lewisohn and we were able to license a few for the Mosaic Records booklet, but we don’t have any copies in the Armstrong Archives. However, we have recently been in touch with the family of famed photographer Lawrence Fried and Fried was there that evening on behalf of Collier’s magazine and captured some truly wonderful images, onstage and off. A sampling can be found on the Fried family’s website, but we hope to be able to collaborate on a post with them in the near future–stay tuned!