Nobody gave more to jazz than Armstrong during his earlier years. Several traditions met in the music from which he sprang and it must be uncertain what influences on him were strongest. He said he modelled himself on King Oliver and his recordings with that leader are, in any case, our first evidence. Oliver’s Creole Band was uncommonly disciplined and the demands of his second cornettist’s role would have improved Armstrong’s musicianship. Already his tone and phrasing are personal and recognisable amid the ensembles. Passages by Oliver and Johnny Dodds on those records prove that a flexible solo style had already been established and it was towards individual, not collective, playing that Armstrong steadily moved. Fletcher Henderson’s larger band imposed different challenges and hearing Armstrong in the four performances on which he is included in Volume 1 of this collection gives an excellent idea of what New Orleans men like him could add to such music in terms of emotional depth, melodic richness and rhythmic variety. To this, in Armstrong’s case, was added an already exceptional technique, allowing every phrase to be perfectly shaped, each note to be full; his playing sounded unhurried, no matter what the tempo, and such relaxation led to a deep, consistent swing. The vehicle of all this was a vein of melodic invention so rich that it was many years before it faltered. Armstrong’s many perceptive accompaniments to blues singers reveal how firmly based on the idiom his music was – this being confirmed by several of the Bessie Smith tracks in Volume 1. In these performances, Armstrong was responding to a talent on his own scale and he did so again in those pieces in Volume 1 that find him in partnership with Sidney Bechet, the first instrumentalist to match him in terms of invention, technique and emotion. After these encounters, Armstrong was ready to make the Hot Fives and Sevens which, however uneven, are one of the greatest series of jazz recordings. Although apparently atypical of the way he was playing daily in public, they portray his development clearly. Given his accelerating powers as a soloist, it is surprising that he respected New Orleans ensemble conventions for so long; yet in fact, many of the early Hot Fives offer little more than Armstrong solos with subdued counter-melodies from Dodds or Kid Ory. Cornet Chop Suey is his first display piece, but his solo and his lead of the final ensemble in Drop That Sack, from a date recorded under his wife’s name, is still more daring; the phrases have a new kind of inner tension and greater improvisatory freedom. Such playing must have suggested all kinds of exciting possibilities to young jazzmen, just as Charlie Parker’s did a generation later and Ornette Coleman’s a generation after that. The Hot Sevens benefit from a complete rhythm section and a Dodds who, though still basically a blues player, came nearer to matching Armstrong, as he did in Drop That Sack and again on Willie The Weeper, Alligator Crawl and, especially, Potato Head Blues. Meanwhile the trumpeter’s imagination had become unfailingly vivid, his rhythmic flexibility without precedent and his execution forceful enough to meet his often extravagant yet always expressive ideas, as in Wild Man Blues. Armstrong’s next great partnership, and it remained his most creative, was with Earl Hines and this shapes the next eight performances. There is no longer any pretence of New Orleans equality and the trumpeter is at his most modernistic, the music being characterised by a hard, clear virtuosity and full of complex ensembles, furious spurts of double time, unpredictable harmonic alterations and rhythmic jugglery. Hines and Armstrong repeatedly lead one another into greater risks and greater triumphs of inventive and technical skill. Their Weatherbird duet is typical in its wild adventure and the almost sublime trumpet and piano exchanges of Skip The Gutter form one of the greatest passages in recorded jazz. West End Blues (an Oliver theme, like Weatherbird ) is deeply moving and is spoken of as this period’s classic, although the dramatic freedom of Basin Street Blues or the sustained tension of Tight Like This are parallel achievements. Since leaving Oliver, Armstrong had operated as a vaudevillian – he had little professional choice – and it did not matter. Powers of critical reflection would have cut him off from most of his material, and his genius lay in taking almost any material and, often with disconcertingly slight rhythmic and melodic alterations, transforming it into beautiful music. So he became indifferent to what he played and eventually, it seemed, to whom he played with. Soloistic status had become necessary for his further development but in due course there was a disturbing relationship between his own majestic playing and its sometimes abysmal accompaniments. Examples of these latter are scarcely included here and in the immediate post-Hines period there was a time when he was backed by Luis Russell’s band, with admirable results, as Mahogany Hall Stomp and St Louis Blues show. Against the current of Armstrong’s often compromised output, a process of simplification was going on – the kind of simplifying that is a distillation of complex and matured craft and experience. In place of virtuoso exuberance, every note was made to count, and I’ve Got A Right To Sing The Blues is an early instance of this. Several of his best records in the 1930s were remakes of past successes. In some cases, like Strutting With Some Barbecue and Savoy Blues, they are actually improvements on the originals – that is, so far as Armstrong’s part is concerned, not for the accompaniments. 2.19 Blues and Coal Cart Blues, made in 1940, find him with Bechet again and with a sympathetic small band. There was a reunion with Hines, too, in the 1950s but this had none of the adventure of their duellings in the late 1920s and it is better to end with When It’s Sleepy Time Down South as an epitome of certain aspects of Armstrong’s art.