Search - Louis Armstrong :: The Complete (Intégrale) Louis Armstrong, Vol. 3: "Cornet Shop Suey" (1925-1926)

Superb music, not complete nor integrale

martin emiliano arias | Spain | 02/16/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I'm a longtime Satchmo fan and I have every available CD edition that was needed until now to have all of his early work. Also, I have Fremeaux superb Django Reinhardt series, so I now they work hard. However, I'm a bit dissapointed with this series.



First of all, all of this music has been available before in a variety of ways, so the merit here was precisely to put it all in one sack and make a COMPLETE series at last. That's the only reason why someone will buy these not precisely cheap sets of not precisely high fidelity music, not precisely containing "What a Wonderful World" and "Hello Dolly".



So, if this was aimed to collectors and music lovers, some of the decisions made here are very hard to accept, and some ommisions are hard to believe. For instance, if you call a set complete, you don't begin by excluding the items you dislike. Whoever buys a COMPLETE multi-disc series WANTS TO HAVE EVERYTHING and judge for himself/herself. And many things are unexplainable missing from here. These are the ones I noticed:



1) Many of Louis' recordings with Fletcher Henderson. All of the master takes, including those on which Louis soloes and those on which he didn't, are already in the also French "Classics" series. All of the tunes on which he soloed along with their correspondent alternate takes were on the two-volume King Jazz series. So, here the real deal was putting al those together and add the alternates for the titles on which Louis wasn't really featured. But the producers of the Fremeaux series decided to exclude many alternate takes on which Louis soloed, exclude all of those on which he played but didn't solo and even, on some cases, the absurdity of issuing a mixture of "half takes" putting only Louis' parts on some tunes. To extract 1:37 from a 2:50 tune recorded in 1924 is not precisely a way to preserve history. And even if you'd aprove these criteria, which maybe you would, I still wouldn't call this sets INTEGRALE or COMPLETE, even if they discharge themselves in the little words saying they do not intend to issue ALL of Louis' recordings.



Other ommisions are less easy to understand:



2) "Rockin' Chair" from December 13, 1929 (alternate take also with Hoagy Carmichael's vocals) -issued on the Neatwork CD of Louis' alternates and also on a King Jazz CD of Louis rare works.



3) "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" from March 5, 1929 -the longer test pressing that so far appeared on many places, including the Sony complete Hot Fives series.



4) "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams" from November 4, 1931 (alternate take). Present on the Neatwork CD.



These are the mistakes I noticed, but there may be more. I didn't check every track of Louis backing vocalists. So beware, music is marvelous, but this is FAR FROM COMPLETE. And concerning the first volume, mucho of which contains Louis' recordings with King Oliver, those should be heard from the OFF THE RECORD 2CD set, which has the best sound ever so far.



M.



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