Satchmo Swings Broadway
It's a Playlist! It's a Radio Show! (Also RIP to Tony)
So for years, I’ve been pitching the idea of a Louis Armstrong “Broadway” Compilation to Universal Music, who controls the bulk of the Armstrong catalog. And guess what? They finally took me up on it! Not as a physical CD compilation, but as a playlist. Which means it will be heard on Apple Music, Spotify and lots of other streaming music services.
To get everything right as it can be, I consulted Ricky Riccardi, the Supreme Satchmologist, author of the only books on Armstrong that you really want to read (other than Gary Giddins’s brief biography) and the keeper of the keys to the kingdom at the Armstrong archive. Together we came up with a fascinating program of Satchmo Swinging Show Tunes.
In fact, I liked it so much, that I developed it into an episode of my radio series, Sing! Sing! Sing!, which is heard Saturdays at 10AM Pacific Time (1:00PM Eastern Time) over KSDS San Diego - and also streamed internationally via the world famous internet over jazz88.us. You can also listen - as you can to every episode of Sing! Sing! Sing! - over podbean.com.
Ricky took time out from his busy schedule of permanent Popsicology to tells us the whole story of Armstrong’s career in show music, and gave us all the pertinent details of Satchmo’s complicated relationship with that darned exasperating woman, Dolly Gallagher Levi. How the song came to Pops, how seven record labels turned it down, how it re-ignited Armstrong’s later career and also helped make Jerry Herman’s show into one of the longest running hits in the history of the Great White Way.
On the program - and to a degree on the playlist you will also hear:
Louis Armstrong’s truly amazing versions of two of the great show tunes of 1950, “Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat” from Guys and Dolls and “You’re Just in Love” from Call Me Madam.
Armstrong’s first ever-recorded show tunes, recorded as a member of Clarence Williams’s Blue Five in 1924, from the all-Black revue, Dixie to Broadway. These well-known, classic recordings from 1924 costar the blues singer Eva Taylor and the great Sidney Bechet.
Louis duetting with Billie Holiday on two songs by James P. Johnson from Sugar Hill, the proposed revival of an all-black show that closed out of town before it could reach Broadway.
The succession of Satchmofied show tunes that the mighty man recorded in the wake of “Dolly,” including classic songs from such hits as Bye Bye Birdie, Cabaret, Funny Girl, Mame, Fiddler on the Roof (I still want to see Pops as Tevya!) and High Button Shoes. (The latter is not to be confused with the more famous Max Bialystock - Leo Bloom production, High Button Jews.) (Note: a lot of these were from his 1968 album, I Will Wait For You, pictured below in two different covers, from the USA and Germany. Yes!)
Even more remarkably, Ricky talks about how Pops also recorded singles of songs from such infamous flopperoos as I Had a Ball (a single produced by Quincy Jones, no less) and Here’s Where I Belong.
The songs from Hot Chocolates (1929), Armstrong’s notable appearance in the cast of a Broadway music and the show that, in his own account, made him a star.
Satchmo swinging Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a selection from his classic collaboration with Ella Fitzgerald on the score of the Gershwins’ and Dubose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess.
Oh yes! Bobba-do-zets!
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I woke up this morning to the terrible news that Tony has left us - about two weeks before what would have been his 97th birthday. As it happens, I was already planning that next week’s KSDS Sing! Sing! Sing! show. Last year on his birthday, we did a whole three program of “Tony Bennett sings Johnny Mercer” (you can listen to it at podbean.com - look for “SSS 5 2022-07-30 Tony Bennett @ 96: The Johnny Mercer Songbook”) and this year I am putting together “Tony Bennett sings George and Ira Gershwin.” Obviously, I am devastated, even though I haven’t seen Tony in person in a few years - our last extended moment together was in 2017. (Why did I not think to take a picture of the two of us? Argh!) Anyhow, that meeting resulted in this interview / profile for Emmy Magazine, which is accessible here. So, next week, you can expect the Tony / Gershwins Sing! Sing! Sing! episode and I’ll also post some stories about “T”. (I actually never called him that; the late Bobby Tucker, who was Tony’s friend for many years and occasional pianist, always called him “T” the same way he called Billy Eckstine “B.”) I’ll probably also do a program of vintage Tony video for Clip Joint as part of the encore session on Wednesday evening. More details to follow.
“God Bless The Child That’s Got His Own”
Hey, Louis Armstrong identifies himself as "Lewis" on the opening of "Hello, Dolly." That was the way he wanted it. Ricky Riccardi, who knows more than you or I ever will about Armstrong, says that Pops actually preferred "Lewis" to "Louie" but it really didn't bother him either way. I can't speak for the French monarch, but Ricky is absolutely definitive when it comes to Pops. Thank you for reading!
King Louis XIV and Louis Armstrong were called "lewee" their whole lives. Neither was ever, or should ever, be called Lewis. Who started this ignorant nonsense and why?