The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings by Louis Armstrong

With his life falling apart around him, Jon Wilde had all but given up on music. Then he heard the sounds of Louis Armstrong and was pulled back from the brink …

Even though Louis Armstrong ultimately changed my life, I came to jazz late and not without a fight. As a teenager in the late 70s, I had my work cut out keeping up with the weekly welter of “catchy” post-punk releases, not to mention determining the artists between Little Richard and the Clash who were worth my time and pocket money. Jazz, meanwhile, seemed like a vast ocean swarming with thousands of esoteric riddles I could never hope to solve. Down the years I accumulated the jazz albums (Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme etc) that eventually find their way into most self-respecting record collections, but I can’t say I played them often. In any meaningful way, the door leading to jazz enlightenment remained firmly shut to me.

In 1992, somewhat jaded with meat-and-two-spuds rock music, I stumbled across a budget-priced box set of Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens in a New York record store. Listening to it upon my return to the UK, I was instantly transfixed – yet it would be a good while before I discovered just how profoundly the music of Louis Armstrong could affect and shape me.

Recorded between 1925 and 1928, the tracks that make up the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens are rightly considered among the most important and influential in 20th-century American music. They mark the point when Armstrong jettisoned the traditional collective improvisation of New Orleans-style jazz and almost single-handedly transformed the music from a group art into a medium for the pioneering soloist.

The most famous song of these sessions is Satchmo’s version of King Oliver’s West End Blues. But there’s an argument to be made for Potato Head Blues being the great man’s most groundbreaking work. Recorded in May 1927 with his peerless Hot Seven ensemble, it’s significant mainly for Armstrong’s cornet solo following the banjo break. A feat of thrilling, high-wire improvisation, this is the moment when Louis first swings, really swings, elevates jazz to a true art form, and holds the world in thrall. The seeds of everything truly revolutionary that followed in rhythm & blues, rock’n’roll and soul music is embodied in this 44-second solo. You don’t need to read around the subject. You only need to listen to draw a straight line from Armstrong to Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five to Fats Domino, Elvis and everything beyond. Such is the crazed purity of Satch’s trumpet sound that it’s easy to forget just how wide-ranging was the influence of his untrained vocal style. Once compared to “a piece of sandpaper calling to its mate”, it made for unconventional beauty but still served as a model for Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra and countless other masters of the craft. One listen to the imperishable Heebie Jeebies pretty much nails that argument.

In 2004 I found out just how much The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens meant to me. My life was following an untidy, downward curve. An excruciating divorce was just the start. Balancing full-time single-parenthood, the insecurities of freelance writing and a series of disastrous relationships damn near sapped my soul. Inch by torpid inch, I edged ever closer to financial and emotional bankruptcy, Churchill’s black dog in hot pursuit all the while. To quote pop’s laureate, Smokey Robinson, “misery had surely found me.” Worse, far worse, was about to come calling. First, the death of my mother after a long battle with cancer. Then, with fate quickly darkening, my elder brother’s decision to end his life by securing a large can of paint to his body and jumping off a pier into the Pembrokeshire sea.

For months, subsumed by grief, I moped around, unable to bring myself to listen to music at all. The more beautiful the music, the more pain it caused me. At times I wondered whether I would ever listen to music again, or indeed, how long I was prepared to soldier on for.

Then, one sallow October morning, I took a deep breath and lifted my Armstrong box set off the shelf and played Potato Head Blues. As the needle dropped and the music swung and steered, I remembered that, in the film Manhattan, Woody Allen lists it as one of the things that make life worth living. For once, Woody was right. So I played the song again, and again. For almost a year following, The Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions were just about all I played, compulsively, obsessively, as needs must. Even in my darkest hours, Louis’s daring trumpet and unimpeachable vocal shone the light in. Listening to Alligator Crawl, Mahogany Hall Stomp and Twelfth Street Rag, the world tantalisingly danced before me and drew me back from the brink. In my ears, angel choirs sang their hallelujahs. Gradually I learned all over again how to face myself and live my life forwards, improvising all the way with Louis’s gloriously unrestrained trumpet fantasies as a guide. Now, I’m not certain whether the music of Louis Armstrong actually saved my life. What I do know for sure is that his joyous music taught me how to live again.