Monday, August 15, 2005

Spotted part of this in the liner notes of The Best of Ken Burns Jazz. On Louis Armstrong:
"He's the most important person in music in the 20th century," Burns maintains. "He single-handedly transformed jazz into a soloist's art. He is the embodiment of the modernity that jazz represents at the turn of the 20th century. He changed the way every singer sang. He invented modern time, swing, a new relationship to time that was jazz's theory of relativity. Armstrong is to jazz what Einstein is to physics and what the Wright brothers are to air travel."


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Stardust
Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra
Recorded November 4, 1931
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To describe the sublime nature of this song? A swinging, moaning orchestra perform as if they were one single immense organism of sound and texture... An introduction of this and then Louis... the liner notes say he was "playing and singing ahead of and behind the notes". His vocalization and expression of the lyrics is unreal... "Oh memory Oh memory" His trumpet leaps out of the orchestra in sharp blasts. 3 minutes and 33 seconds of perfection. November 4, 1931. How many takes before he nailed it? I bet this was the first take.

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