Louis Armstrong: Potato Head Blues
Track
Potato Head Blues
Artist
Louis Armstrong (trumpet)
CD
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 1923-1934 (Sony/Legacy 57175)
Musicians:
Louis Armstrong (trumpet), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Lil Hardin (piano), Johnny St. Cyr (banjo), Baby Dodds (drums),
John Thomas (trombone), Pete Briggs (tuba)
.Composed by Louis Armstrong
.Recorded: Chicago, May 10, 1927
Rating: 100/100 (learn more)
In the 1890s, architect Louis Sullivan perceived that switching from masonry to steel-frame construction required an equally transformative aesthetic. The new methods and materials of modern high-rise skylines rendered historical design styles obsolete. In the 1920s, also in Chicago, another Louis similarly redrew America's musical landscape. Whereas Sullivan's triumph was the skyscraper, Armstrong's was the solo. This track finds him in mid-revolution, before his less visionary accompanists could adjust. With strumming banjo, oompah tuba, and strident, herky-jerky clarinet as flimsy foundation, Armstrong's trumpet rises as prodigiously as a gleaming girder amidst the crumbling masonry. Jazz would never be the same.
Reviewer: Alan Kurtz
Tags: 1920s jazz · new orleans jazz · trumpet
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