There's a lot of wacko's out there! I don't get off the Island much. I used to commute to what I call the Other Side. Other's, here on the Island, refer to it as the United States of America. Yesterday, we (Katie and Robby) drove through Seattle all the way to Tacoma, went to two malls, and shopped at Archie McPhee. Archie McPhee was an oasis of sanity.

You must understand that heavy traffic on Whidbey Island is when the ferry lands and disgorges it's 130 cars. It becomes a 130 car parade moving up the Island with cars peeling off a Clinton, Ken's Korner, Bayview, Freeland, and points in between. There's not much left by the time the parade gets to Freeland.

I-5 during rush hour just before Christmas is somewhat different. But we survived.

On the way back through Seattle I stopped at Magnolia Hi-Fi and bought a new stereo receiver. My old one has been on it's last legs and finally died. I had to listen to music with head phones and a boom box.

There was an overload for the 9 o'clock boat and I ended up on the ten o'clock ferry. It was almost midnight by the time I got the receiver all hooked up and had a serious listen. Hoo boy! It was all worth it. I was up until 3:30 in the morning listening to vinyl, CDs, MP3s, .wav files, and tapes. It was like listening to the music for the first time.

I feel much better now.

Louis Armstrong
Hot Fives And Sevens

EMusic.com just made Louis Armstong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens available on their site. I have wanted this 4 CD set for years.

NPR Jazz CD Review
Louis Armstrong
The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recording

Trying to say something fresh about these recordings, arguably (though not very arguably) the most important set of recordings in the history of jazz, is a little like trying to make a new comment about the Mona Lisa or Bach's B Minor Mass. Miles Davis once famously said, "You can't play anything on the horn that Louis hasn't played...even modern," and these recordings bear out that statement.

Listening to these four CD's, one after another, one hears nothing less than Louis Armstrong creating the very vocabulary of all the jazz improvisation that followed and making the soloist the dominant role in jazz rather than the ensemble. For anyone who loves jazz, hearing Armstrong in the process of doing this is an astonishing experience.

As most jazz fans know, the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens were not working groups. They were, in a fashion, the first "all- star" groups assembled for recording purposes only. Among Armstrong's colleagues on these dates were clarinetist Johnny Dodds and trombonist Kid Ory, two of the greatest New Orleans players on their respective instruments; but Armstrong's rhythmic conception (he virtually invented "swing" in these sides), his endless series of melodic ideas, the golden vibrancy of his tone put him into a whole different league.
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The NPR Basic Jazz Record Library
Louis Armstrong
The Complete Hot Five's and Hot Seven's Recordings

Hot Fives and Sevens [BOX SET]
(Amazon.com.uk)

Amazon.co.uk Review
Fact: Some 70-plus years ago, Louis Armstrong was bigger than the Beatles. Fact: Louis' record sales provided the seed money for some of today's great communications empires. Fact: Pops' startling trumpet prowess and ingratiating vocals transformed the phrasing of every instrumentalist and vocalist on earth--and these are the sessions that started it all. Having performed as the second cornet with spiritual father Joe "King" Oliver's legendary New Orleans band, he turned everybody's head in New York during his stint with Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra in 1924. Then, at wife Lil Hardin's insistence, he returned to Chicago in 1925, which led to the first of his super sessions for the Okeh label--fronting an all-star band assembled just for the studio. Even amid the traditional New Orleans polyphony and ensemble work of "Gut Bucket Blues", the sheer power of Armstrong's cornet pulls along the rest of the band like a locomotive (and in setting the infectious closing riff, he not only anticipates the swing era but Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts"). By the time we get to the 1926 sessions, featuring his innovative "scat singing" on "Heebie Jeebies" and his dynamic stop-time phrases on "Cornet Chop Suey", Louis Armstrong is well on his way to transforming jazz into a soloist's art, and himself into the most influential musician of the 20th century. --Chip Stern

This is the same set of CDs as on EMusic.com.

Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings

Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are jazz’s Holy Grail, a venerable guide for anyone with the desire to explore the roots of this now century old art. These recordings made between 1925 and 1929 ushered out the era of acoustic recording where the soloist played into a huge cone and ushered in the electric method utilizing microphones. But these weren’t Armstrong’s first recordings. He had begun recording in 1923 as a sideman in King Oliver’s Creole Band, with Fletcher Henderson and also with the blues singer Bessy Smith.

It’s peculiar that Armstrong’s first recordings as a leader; assembled here may be the height of his revolutionary esthetic. It’s not that the next forty years were one farewell tour, it’s just that Satchmo never stood the music world on its head like he did here. For instance soloing, something we take for granted, just wasn’t done in Armstrong’s Joe Oliver days. A typical band embellished a song, but Armstrong took long solos, causing near riots of excitement. Obviously because of recording lengths at the time, no extended solos are heard here. There are plenty trumpet licks rendered to keep scholars and student busy for years. Armstrong, true to his American heritage, made himself into a cult hero. Like Babe Ruth’s Yankees, it wasn’t the Hot Fives, but Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives. He also cultivated the art of jazz singing, introducing wordless ‘scatting’ to record listeners. When he opens “West End Blues” with a trumpet solo followed by the klop-klop of cymbals and his “waa-waa-waa” scat in response to Johnny Dodds’ clarinet one can imagine listeners falling-out with excitement. Sure it’s now the 21st century, and next to nothing shocks and /or excites you, but Satchmo’s wordless scatting is as fresh as yesterday’s software start-up.
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Louis Armstrong Centennial: Riverdalian George Avakian Recalls the Great Jazzman

George Avakian produced some of Satchmo's most highly regarded recordings in the 1950s. But Avakian played another key role in the career of Armstrong and many other legendary performers. It was the young George Avakian who, as a student at Riverdale's Horace Mann School, came up with what was then a revolutionary idea the reissue of collections of the great music of the past.
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Louis Armstrong