Pops Is Still Tops. Oh Yeah!

By Daniel Okrent

Give music companies an excuse to reissue something from the catalog, and they leap forward like umbrella salesmen in a rainstorm. The industry has gone two decades without a new technology to replace the CD (which replaced the cassette, which replaced the LP, which replaced the 78--each successive format presenting an opportunity to sell the public something it already owned), and now it's under threat from a bunch of 22-year-old hackers. These days, if the companies are going to make an opportunistic buck, they've got to reach a little further than they did in the past.

Take Columbia's Legacy division, which this week sends into the stores a boxed set of yet another remastering of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of Louis Armstrong. The excuse? To help celebrate Louis Armstrong's 100th birthday, July 4, 2000, say the press materials. This is rather odd, since jazz scholars all agree that Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901. Odder still, the vaunted remastering is only slightly better than mediocre. So what is the fair-minded critic's response to all this?

Sheer exultation, of course--because any opportunity to draw attention to this hallowed music requires celebration. Originally recorded primarily in Chicago between 1925 and 1929 as what was then called race music, Armstrong's sessions with his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands quickly elevated him to national renown. They are to jazz (to American popular music in all forms, really) what Shakespeare's plays are to English literature: both the never fading banner of pure genius and the foundation for everything that came later.

Begin with Armstrong's sound, the pure, clarion tone of a horn that sounded reveille for the 20th century. Then there's his rhythmic invention. On cuts like Muggles, Potato Head Blues and the epochal West End Blues, he breaks breathtakingly free from his sidemen, swooping and soaring over the ensemble like some brilliantly feathered bird. Such flights enable him to accomplish what every pop or jazz performer worth noting has tried ever since, personalizing the music, taking it away from the written score, making it his own.

Then there's the singing. It's not just that Armstrong invented scat; that's merely creativity. What Louis wrought was a revolution. Before Armstrong, popular singers inhaled deeply, puffed out their chests and projected. After him, most have tried to do what he did so magnificently: find elation or sadness or humor in the song and let it issue forth as a purely human statement. Dizzy Gillespie, speaking of Armstrong's role in the development of jazz trumpet, said, "No him, no me." They're words that could be spoken just as appropriately by singers as disparate as Tony Bennett and Mick Jagger.

Does it matter that the sonic quality of the Columbia set leaves something to be desired? A little, sure. When the company last reissued these cuts in 1988 and '89, the engineers got rid of the hiss but in the process lost much of the music. Some tunes sounded as if they had been recorded in an aquarium. Now you can hear the instruments--and the hiss, alas, too. But the irresistible force that is Louis Armstrong rockets through it, as he does through all of American music.

--By Daniel Okrent