The Best of the Hot 5 & Hot 7 Recordings

When I was young, the only historical "jazz" I ever heard was from the Big Band 40s. There's some nice stuff from that era, but it rarely truly swings, and it never rocks. I had to go listening on my own to discover the jazz of the 1910s and 1920s, when it was young and it rocked, swung, burned red hot and weeped blue and laughed and got all jiggy. Boy did that open a whole new universe to me, and I'm still wandering around there years later. Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke -- wow. Even the big tuxedoed chart-reading 1920s orchestras like Paul Whiteman's swing with more sass than the 40s ones usually did. This has happened over and over to popular American music movements -- they start out wild and free, then get co-opted and toned down and made commercial. Anyway, there are some great tracks here -- not just the big hits but the more obscure novelties like the funny "King of the Zulus." Yeah man. If you can't deal with the pre-digital recording quality, that's a shame and your loss.

He's both a trumpeter and a singer! He's one of the icons of jazz music history. His songs are classic!

Mr Kimpton, thank you for introducing me to Satchmo. Rest in Peace.

Louis armstrong is a genius. in every sense of the word. I'm glad they did not take one iota of his genius out of these recordings. If you make something sound modern, you take away from the whole gritty feeling of the time. If you don't dig the down, dirty, tinny sound of the recording, maybe you don't appreciate the whole atmosphere of the music. Excellent CD.

If you brush up the audio too much you loose some of the midrange and ends. You don't want to miss a lick of the sound. Back in the 1920's recordings were tinny, so this recording isn tinny. The music is what matters, and what you get with this is a primer in the birth of the only true American musical art form: jazz. Astoundingly, you also get some of the best jazz ever recorded as well. Not many styles of music were birthed so whole at the outset that the earliest recordings were the greatest. Everything you hear to day, just about, can be traced back to these ground-breaking recordings. They hit and influneced the music industry in a way that can't be described.

Very nice, if you like his genre of music. A bit... "old-sounding", though, they really should have done some work for the iTunes release.

Hey, Satchmo is great. Got this album for my horn toting wife. She likes his sound, but the recordings are OLD and it shows. It's cool to be digital, but the old 78s still sound like 78s here.