Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five

The Hot Five was Louis Armstrong's rst jazz recording Hardin sounding distinctly pedestrian in comparison with
band led under his own name.
Armstrongs. However, the ensemble passages are frequently eective, and the genius of Armstrongs cornet
It was a typical New Orleans jazz band in instrumentation, consisting of trumpet, clarinet, and trombone or trumpet playing touch virtually every recording. Some
of the more important examples are Cornet Chop Suey,
backed by a rhythm section. The original New Orleans
jazz style leaned heavily on collective improvisation, "Muskrat Ramble", Hotter Than That and Struttin'
where the three horns together played the lead: the trum- With Some Barbecue.
pet played the main melody, and the clarinet and trombone played improvised accompaniments to the melody.
This tradition was continued in the Hot Five, but because
of Armstrongs creative gifts as a trumpet player, solo
passages where the trumpet played alone began to appear
more frequently. In these solos, Armstrong laid down
the basic vocabulary of jazz improvising, and became its
founding and most inuential exponent.

2 The 1928 Hot Five

In 1928, Armstrong revamped the recording band, replacing everyone but himself with his band-members in
the Carrol Dickerson Orchestra which Armstrong was
playing with Fred Robinson, trombone, Jimmy Strong,
The Hot Five was organized at the suggestion of Richard clarinet and tenor saxophone, Earl Hines, piano, Mancy
M. Jones for Okeh Records. All their records were Carr (not Cara as has often been misprinted) on banjo,
made in Okehs Chicago, Illinois recording studio. The and Zutty Singleton on drums.
exact same personnel recorded a session made under This second Hot Five played music that was specically
the pseudonym Lils Hotshots for Vocalion/Brunswick. arranged as opposed to the more free-wheeling improWhile the musicians in the Hot Five played together in vised passages in the earlier Hot Five structures. A tenother contexts, as the Hot Five they were a recording stu- tative movement toward the kind of fully arranged horn
dio band that performed live only for two parties orga- sections that would dominate swing music a decade later
nized by Okeh Records.
was starting to become fashionable, and this second ArmThere were two dierent groups called Louis Armstrong strong group embraced a rudimentary version of it, with
and his Hot Five, the rst recording from 1925 through Don Redmon as arranger providing some written-out sec1927 and the second in 1928; Armstrong was the only tion parts. Jimmy Strong on clarinet and Fred Robinson
on trombone were not as strong soloists as Dodds and
musician in both groups.
Ory had been with the earlier band, but with pianist Earl
Hines, Armstrong here met a musician who was more
nearly his equal technically and creatively than any other
1 The rst Hot Five
in either band.
Thus, these sessions resulted in some of the most important masterpieces of early jazz, of which "West End
Blues" is arguably the best known. Other important
recordings include "Basin Street Blues", Tight Like
This, "Saint James Inrmary", and Weather Bird. In
the last named, only Armstrong and Hines are present,
For some or all of the Louis Armstrong and his Hot turning an old rag number into a tour-de-force duet.
Seven sides, Ory was in New York City working with
King Oliver's band, and was replaced, probably by John
Thomas.
3 See also
The original Hot Five were, other than Armstrongs wife
Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, all New Orleans musicians who Armstrong had worked with in that city in the
1910s: Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet,
and Johnny St. Cyr on guitar and banjo.

On one session in December 1927, Lonnie Johnson was

added on guitar.

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven

The recordings of this group are considered by many to

be uneven, with some of the blunders (e.g. the mis-timed
hokum at the end of "Heebie Jeebies") becoming notorious in jazz circles, and the solos of Dodds, Ory and

Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven Sessions

Hot Fives & Sevens, a 2000 compilation album of
music by the group
1

4 NOTES

Notes

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

5.1

Text

Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong_and_His_Hot_Five?oldid=667856912 Contributors: Infrogmation, LouI, Hyacinth, Optim, Dimadick, Bearcat, Jmabel, Quinwound, Gyrofrog, DRE, TronTonian, Cavebear42, Oleg
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5.2

Images

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Contributors:
Created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. Based on Image:Question book.png created by User:Equazcion Original artist:
Tkgd2007

5.3

Content license

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