Louis Armstrong - 'I Cover The Waterfront/Dinah/Tiger Rag'

The older I get, the more I've come to appreciate the genius of old Satchel Mouth. There was a time, I guess when I was discovering some of the hip jazz of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties – and I'm probably not alone here – when Louis Armstrong seemed a bit old hat, a bit too synonymous with clunky old 78rpm records of New Orleans jazz, all banjos and tooting horns and chugging rhythm, and a bit too close to entertainers like Bing Crosby et al. Even Frank Sinatra seemed hipper and Cab Calloway's jazz credentials more serious. To be fair, that old gravelly voice had become such a cliché, such a staple of amateur impressionists, that I forgot to pay attention to his trumpet playing.

How I was wrong! The many great musicians who followed in his wake and who quoted him as a prime influence knew a lot more than I did. When I found going for a song the two volumes of standards he made with Ella Fitzgerald in the Fifties for Norman Granz's Verve label, I snaffled them up – to find that they are two of the most delightful albums of that – or any – era. Unfortunately, there's little or no video evidence of the partnership. I certainly wanted to avoid 'What A Wonderful World' and 'When The Saints Go Marching In', and although there's a rare treat to behold in the form of Louis Armstrong playing with Duke Ellington and a small band on the Ed Sullivan Show (was the compeer related to Richard Nixon? I've wondered more than once), it's fairly insubstantial stuff.

So it's back to the Thirties for 'one of the good old good ones', as Satchmo puts it, a musical triptych of the great entertainer in his prime. If it seems like a little bit of post-production cleaning has taken part – the words almost but don't quite synch with the lip movements – it has been very well done and one has to remember that the year of this concert footage in Copenhagen is 1933 (or 1934 according to the on-screen legend), so you have to cut them a little slack. It's after the great Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings he made once he left his mentor King Oliver and well before his All Stars of the 1950s, but he numbered among his band of the time the likes of Teddy Wilson on piano, Chick Webb on drums and Edgar Sampson (a distant cousin from down the line?) on alto sax, although none of the three is readily identifiable in the video.

In any case, one doesn't watch the band; all eyes are on its leader. Not only does his trumpet ring out as bright and brassy as a bell, but his vocals would defy any would-be impersonator: memorable enough on 'I Cover The Waterfront', but quite astonishing on 'Dinah'. You realise that this was the man who invented not just scat-singing, but effectively jazz-singing: the way he slurs and elides the words, dices the rhythm, shifts the melody and always emerges from his pyrotechnic passages right on the beat. It's a remarkable performance, which can't be topped – so rightly he finishes on an instrumental showcase in the form of that old chestnut of the UK's 1950s Trad revival, 'Tiger Rag'. And don't the crowd just love it?

There's not much more to say about Louis Armstrong that hasn't already been said. From his early days on the streets of New Orleans, where he learnt to play the trumpet in the home for 'Colored Waifs' to his death in 1971 (in bed and supposedly still smiling), a global superstar and musical ambassador, his story is so well known that it's virtually the stuff of legend. He was the Father of Jazz and one of the greatest trumpet players and vocalists to be captured on shellac, vinyl and magnetic tape. Because he was, perhaps first and foremost, a great entertainer – someone who would never have countenanced turning his back on an audience as Miles Davis did – he has been occasionally branded as an Uncle Tom or accused of being more than met the eye. Best to let his fellow musicians counter such accusations and testify to his sincerity and his influence. Clarinettist Barney Bigard, who occupied a chair in Duke Ellington's orchestra for many years, states 'There never was any side to him. He came "as is".' Wynton Marsalis, whose trumpet playing must have been partly modelled on Armstrong's, suggested in his customarily academic fashion that 'he left an undying testimony to the human condition in the America of his time.'

Or, as Duke Ellington put it so simply and concisely: ' He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way.'