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    ‘A Wonderful World’ Review: Blowing Louis Armstrong’s Horn Isn’t Enough

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    The great jazz trumpeter and sandpaper vocalist gets the old jukebox treatment in a new Broadway musical starring James Monroe Iglehart.Who, having lived through 20th-century pop culture, could fail to recognize that voice like a truck without a muffler? That piercing trumpet and embracing spirit?Who could fail to recognize Louis Armstrong?Yet he is something of a blur in “A Wonderful World,” the Armstrong jukebox musical that opened Monday at Studio 54. Not for lack of a precise embodiment. In the leading role, James Monroe Iglehart has every Satchmo detail perfectly tuned: the rumble, the chortle, the hankie, the beam, the satchel-like cheeks that inspired the nickname. If drama were merely a tribute concert, there would be nothing to complain of.But with such a major figure we want something deeper. And though subtitled “The Louis Armstrong Musical,” the show, with a book by Aurin Squire, spends too little time exploring its subject’s interior life while plumping for his greatness as if the point were in doubt. The score, drawn from songs he performed but (with two exceptions) did not write, makes the case irrefutably already, encompassing the astonishing range of a man who grew up with the blues, changed the course of jazz, excelled at swing, perfected scat and won a Grammy for “Hello, Dolly!”To balance such a rich and varied artistic life, let alone a chaotic personal one, Armstrong deserves more than the standard jukebox bullet-point biography he gets here. Offering little you would not learn from a good obituary, or from a visit to the terrific museum at his home in Queens, “A Wonderful World” compresses 60 years, from youth to death and even beyond, into four discrete chapters defined cleverly but overneatly by decade, locale and wife.The 1910s segment, set in Armstrong’s native New Orleans, introduces wife No. 1, Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), a prostitute with a “Kiss of Fire.” After leaving her to join the jazz scene of Chicago in the 1920s, he falls for the pianist and arranger Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), who polishes his musicianship along with his wardrobe. Nevertheless, he leaves her too; she and Daisy bring down the first act with a furious medley of “Some of These Days” and “After You’ve Gone.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Broadway Is Singing Louis Armstrong’s Songs. Here Are 6 Classics.

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      When Christopher Renshaw was growing up in England in the 1950s and ’60s, everybody knew about Louis Armstrong. “He was an icon for me as a child,” he said. “He was just there — he’s smiling, he’s funny.”But when Renshaw — whose directing credits include the 1996 Broadway production of “The King and I” and “Taboo,” which he conceived with Boy George — was approached about creating an Armstrong musical, he quickly learned that the musician was far more than just the affable, popular entertainer he saw on television.Armstrong’s story sprawls across five decades, numerous musical and social upheavals, and his own creative breakthroughs from the revolutionary 1920s recordings with his Hot Five band to worldwide celebrity with the ’60s pop smashes “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World.”That story is now being told on Broadway in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” which is in previews at Studio 54, following a 2021 premiere in Miami and runs in New Orleans and Chicago. For the show’s creative team, exploring the offstage struggles and tensions of this cultural and musical titan was as important as illustrating his pioneering, radical work as a trumpeter and singer.“Louis Armstrong was a real Black man,” James Monroe Iglehart, who is portraying Armstrong and is one of the directors, said, noting the ways Armstrong’s image was cleaned up and deracinated for Hollywood and television. “We worked really hard to show that side of him, the good and the bad.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Jazz Musicians Like Louis Armstrong Paid Homage to Trains With Music

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      Jazz lovers worldwide know well the passion that Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong had for trains, especially for the elegant Pullman cars that toted them to gigs across the country. Within the velvet-appointed sleeping carriages, African American porters shined the musicians’ shoes, nursed their hangovers, clipped their hair and served them mint juleps and Welsh rarebit — the same service afforded wealthy white passengers.In return, the maestros composed their now famous songs of homage to trains. There’s Duke’s throbbing “Happy Go Lucky Local,” the Count’s bow to the “Super Chief” and Satchmo’s romantic rendering of “Mail Train Blues.” But few fans appreciated the real reason these jazz legends worshiped not just the railroad generally, but George Pullman’s sleeper car: It saved them from the threat of terrifying violence.In that Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Just getting out of an automobile or bus to look for a meal and a bed could prove perilous in unfamiliar cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Wrong choices sometimes led to berating, beating or worse, with racial violence reaching new peaks in the early 1900s. Even the music makers’ fame couldn’t fully protect them. Only on the Pullman cars, where they were served by fellow African Americans, could they truly relax while on the road.“To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car,” Ellington wrote in his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them.”Duke Ellington’s band members on a train in 1941. In the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Otto F. Hess Collection / New York Public LibraryThe Count Basie Orchestra did, too. Traveling in stylish Pullmans “was my piece of cake,” Basie recalled in his 1985 autobiography, “Good Morning Blues.” “Lots of times, instead of me getting into my bed, I used to sit and look out the window most of the night as we rambled from one place to another. That was music to me.” More

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      Louis Armstrong Musical ‘A Wonderful World’ Set for Broadway

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      “A Wonderful World,” featuring Armstrong’s songs, is set to begin previews at Studio 54 in October after previous runs in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago.“A Wonderful World,” a new musical about Louis Armstrong, will have a run on Broadway starting in the fall.The musical, which has previously been staged in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago, will star James Monroe Iglehart, who a decade ago won a Tony Award for originating the role of the Genie in “Aladdin,” and who is now starring as King Arthur in a Broadway revival of “Spamalot.”The show is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 16 and to open Nov. 11 at Studio 54, where the musical “Days of Wine and Roses” is now playing a limited run.When Armstrong died in 1971, the trumpeter and singer left a legacy as one of the most important figures in the history of jazz. The show examines his life through the eyes of his four wives.The score is made up of Armstrong songs including the classic that gives the show its title, along with “When You’re Smiling,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and others. The book is by Aurin Squire, and Christopher Renshaw is directing; Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine are credited with conceiving the musical.“A Wonderful World” is being produced by Thomas E. Rodgers Jr., Renee Rodgers, Martian Entertainment (Carl D. White and Gregory Rae), Vanessa Williams and Elizabeth Curtis. More

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      Satchmo’s Wonderful World: Louis Armstrong Center Amplifies An Artist’s Vision

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      New jazz and exhibition spaces, and an inaugural show curated by Jason Moran, feature the trumpeter’s history, collaged onto the walls.You can find anything in Queens. And yet for decades, the Louis Armstrong House Museum has been a well-kept secret on a quiet street in Corona. The longtime residence of the famed jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader, it is a midcentury interior design treasure hidden behind a modest brick exterior.The museum’s new extension, the 14,000 square foot Louis Armstrong Center, blends in a little less. It looks, in fact, a bit like a 1960s spaceship landed in the middle of a residential block. By design, it doesn’t tower over its neighboring vinyl-sided houses but, with its curvilinear roof, it does seem to want to envelop them. And behind its rippling brass facade lie some ambitious goals: to connect Armstrong as a cultural figure to fans, artists, historians and his beloved Queens community; to extend his civic and creative values to generations that don’t know how much his vision, and his very being, changed things. It wants, above all, to invite more people in.“The house is relatively small,” said Regina Bain, executive director of the House Museum and Center, speaking of the two-story dwelling where Armstrong lived with his wife, Lucille, from 1943 until his death in 1971. “But his legacy is humongous. And this is the building that will help us to launch that.”The Center, 25 years in development, includes exhibition, research and education areas, and, for events, a 75-seat performance space whose blond wood and intimacy recall Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue.“I think that this will do something that we haven’t quite seen in a jazz space,” said Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer, who was the Center’s inaugural exhibition curator. “That’s also something that my community needs to witness, too. It needs to watch, how can we take care of an artist’s history? And what else can it unleash in a community that might not even care about the art, but might care about something else related to it? Armstrong gives us all those opportunities to do that.”The new Louis Armstrong Center in Corona, Queens, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, whose roof recalls a grand piano. The architects wanted to give their blueprint the sense of joy that Armstrong brings in his voice and music.Albert Vercerka/EstoThe longtime residence of the jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader Louis Armstrong is a midcentury interior design treasure hidden behind a modest brick exterior.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor the architects, Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson, the project was a puzzle in how to link two structures — the Center is across the street from the Armstrong House Museum — with the spirit of a musical legend. Their inspiration came by going back to the music, and to Armstrong’s street-level roots. “That kind of neighborhood that jazz actually emerged from — that wasn’t an elite creation, it was a popular creation,” Caples said. “And yet it was the music that revolutionized how we think, how we listen, how we think about nonmusical things, even.” They rounded the front of the Center to nod to the Armstrong house; its brass curtain echoes the color of his horn, and — the musically fluent may notice — the staggered hoop-shapes and columns in the entryway map out the notes of his most celebrated songs, like “What a Wonderful World” and “Dinah.”They also wanted to give their blueprint the sense of joy that Armstrong brings, the smile that you can feel in his singing voice. When they started the project, Jefferson called an uncle who’s a jazz saxophonist to ask — really, what made Armstrong so special? “And he said, you know, when you hear his music, you feel like dancing down the street,” Jefferson said.At the ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this summer, trumpeters performed on the Armstrong house balcony and, across the road, on the upper deck of the Center, a fanfare that started with the opening bars of “West End Blues” and ended with “It’s a Wonderful World.” “It was an incredible moment — the building participated as a reflector of sound back to the street,” Caples said. Afterward, schoolchildren were invited in to plonk around on a Steinway.Visitors in the interior of the Louis Armstrong Center, 25 years in development, includes exhibition, research and education areas and a performance space.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesOn display is Armstrong’s Selmer Trumpet, engraved mouthpiece and monogrammed handkerchief. The gold-plated trumpet was a gift from King George V.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesIke Edeani for The New York TimesBuilt on the site of a former parking lot, with $26 million in mostly state and local funding, the new Center encompasses Armstrong’s 60,000-piece archive, including 700 tapes that were once housed miles away at Queens College. From that collection, Moran has curated the first permanent exhibition, “Here to Stay,” with a multimedia, interactive centerpiece of audio, video, interviews and songs. There’s Armstrong’s gold-plated trumpet — a gift from King George V — complete with his favorite imported German lip balm and the mouthpiece inscribed “Satchmo,” his nickname — and his collage art. (He made hundreds of pieces, paper cutouts on tape cases.) His first and last passports, among the ephemera, show his evolution from New Orleans-born youth player to a global icon in a tuxedo and an irrepressible grin.Armstrong was himself a documentarian, traveling with cameras and recording equipment and turning the mic on himself, his friends and loved ones in private moments — telling jokes backstage, opining at home. As a Black artist with an elementary school education, who was born into segregation, he went on to hobnob with presidents and royalty and to meet the pope. “He really marks a way of being a public figure,” Moran said. “And he has to weigh how he does that. If he’s getting a chance not only to tell his story with his trumpet in his mouth but through these microphones, then what are the stories he wants to tell, not in public? Those become important.”Jason Moran, the jazz musician, curated the opening exhibition, “Here to Stay” at the new Louis Armstrong Center in Corona.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesOne place his vision is most evident is in his reel-to-reel tape box collages, rarely displayed publicly until now. Armstrong used them as an outlet for years.“If he has a press clipping, maybe it wasn’t favorable, he could cut it up and make a collage,” Moran said. A photo in the exhibition shows him, after a trip to Italy, pasting his art work on the ceiling of his den, fresco-style. (Lucille Armstrong, a former Cotton Club dancer who was his fourth wife, put a stop to that.)Moran recalled that when Armstrong talked about his process and why he liked making collages, he explained that with just the push-pull of material on a small canvas, you can change “the story that you were given.” It echoed his expertise as a musician, Moran said, learning how to play background, on the cornet, with King Oliver, his early mentor, or foreground as he redefined what it meant to be a soloist, upending his destiny along the way.The exhibition also has the artist Lorna Simpson in a video reflecting on Armstrong’s collages and how they compartmentalized an enormous and complex life into the manageable and portable square of a tape case. “Armstrong archives and recontextualizes his public life by hand, to be layered and collaged onto the walls of his private life,” she said.Most of Armstrong’s collages were made in the den of his Corona, Queens home, from reel-to-reel tape boxes. In the 1950s, his love of collage spilled onto the walls of his den, which he adorned with photographs, newspaper clippings, and anything else he had at hand, eventually covering portions of his ceiling.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesLouis Armstrong created over 500 collages as covers of his tape collection, generating a priceless art and music catalog. Left: The box for Reel 27 features a German publicity photo of the musician, a snapshot of an unidentified man and “Gems from Buenos Aires.” Center: Reel 18, a photograph of Armstrong preparing to dine and Bing Crosby’s Musical Autobiography album on Decca. Right: Reel 68, with a reproduction of a photo of him with his mother and sister in New Orleans.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe gallery display (by C & G Partners) is full of circular motifs, reminiscent of musical notes or records. In determining the palette for the Center, Jefferson and Caples, the architects, looked at Armstrong’s art and his wardrobe; his home, with rooms in shades of electric blue or creamy peach, was mostly styled by Lucille. But he loved it — especially the spaces with gilded or reflective surfaces. “So it gave us the cue that we should not be too mousy,” Caples said, “and that this was a public building where there could be some expansiveness.” The club space at the Center, which recently hosted a rehearsal of trumpeters for the Newport Jazz Festival’s Armstrong tribute — taking place this weekend in Rhode Island — is a vibrant red.Moran made sure there was a book from the Armstrongs’ vast collection in every vitrine. “They had that kind of political library that was investigating their role in society,” he said. (They also were creatures of their era: The full archives include Playboy anthologies and vintage diet recipes; a guide called “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way” — heavy on the lamb chops — is displayed in the exhibition.)Lucille and Louis Armstrong traveled the world with customized luggage. Left: Armstrong’s passport for his first tour of England in 1932. Under occupation, Armstrong listed himself as an “Actor and Musician.” Right: Armstrong’s final passport in 1967, after years of being “America’s Ambassador of Goodwill.”Ike Edeani for The New York TimesEven a longtime Armstrong devotee like Marquis Hill, one of the Newport trumpeters, was moved by these personal mementos. (He snapped a picture of the handwritten recipe for Armstrong’s favorite dish, red beans and rice.) A half-century-old recording of Armstrong discussing how important it was to listen to all kinds of music inspired a Hill composition for Newport, commissioned by the Center. Its jazz club, he said, is “going to be a new space for what Louis Armstrong wanted, to keep pushing the music forward.”As part of an artist in residence program this fall, the Grammy winning bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding will present her project with the choreographer Antonio Brown that explores the era when people danced to jazz. Rooting herself in Armstrong’s history, and expanding his vision, Spalding said in an email, would “develop ways to re-merge and re-awaken the dialogue between these essential modalities of human expression — the improvising body and the improvising musician.”Under Bain, the executive director,the Center is also hosting new programming, including dance and yoga classes, trumpet lessons and events that engage the mostly Spanish-speaking community, whether through music or social activism.“Louis and Lucille were two Black artists who owned their own home in the ’40s,” Bain said. “Why can’t we have a workshop here about homeownership for our neighbors? If it’s in the legacy of Louis and Lucille — that’s what this space can also be.”Since it opened on July 6, the Center has exceeded visitor estimates and is adding more hours and drawing fans from across the country. “He was one of the heroes I was taught about,” said Jenne Dumay, 32, a social worker from Atlanta who plans music-oriented trips with friends, focusing on Black history. “This museum gives me insight that I didn’t learn in my textbooks.”Among the final work Armstrong created, after a lengthy hospital stay in 1971, was a six-page handwritten ode to Corona, and his happy, quotidian life there. In looping script, he extols the virtues of his Schnauzers as watch dogs (“When the two start barking together — oh boy, what a duet”), and his favoriteChinese restaurant.It is one of the treasures that Moran — who said Armstrong’s spirit-lifting music helped him through the pandemic — cherishes most. Armstrong’s handwriting, he noted, slants upward on every page. “The text is just so inherently aspirational,” Moran said. “It’s in line with how he holds his trumpet” — pointing up to the sky — “how his eyes look when he plays. It’s a slight thing, but it tells us: this is how he thinks about life.”Additional reporting by Chris Kuo.The Louis Armstrong Center34-56 107th Street, Queens, N.Y.; 718-478-8271; louisarmstronghouse.org. More

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      15 New Christmas Albums for 2022

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      New releases from Alicia Keys, Lindsey Stirling, Regina Belle and others revisit songs already entrenched in the Christmas canon and hope to introduce some future contenders.Holiday albums are more than background music played in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. They offer artists a chance to recontextualize themselves, play around in a nostalgic format, reinvent traditions and even strike gold in what’s become a lucrative season for the music business. Here’s a spin through 15 of the latest releases.Louis Armstrong, ‘Louis Wishes You a Cool Yule’Of all the music Louis Armstrong made in his lifetime, none of it was recorded for a Christmas album (despite Armstrong having put out a bunch of Christmas songs). But on “Louis Wishes You a Cool Yule,” we hear his unmistakable voice in all its remastered glory on standards like “Winter Wonderland” and “White Christmas,” and originals like “Christmas Night in Harlem” and “Christmas in New Orleans.” “What a Wonderful World,” Armstrong’s most recognized song, isn’t quite a holiday tune but shows up on this compilation anyway alongside “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” a reading he recorded at home shortly before his death in 1971. What wound up being his last recording ends this album on a wistful note. MARCUS J. MOOREBackstreet Boys, ‘A Very Backstreet Christmas’Backstreet Boys offer up the expected blend of poppy R&B, tight harmonizing and soft-focus romanticism on their first holiday album, “A Very Backstreet Christmas.” The group fares best with competently sung, lightly modernized renditions of classics like “O Holy Night” and “White Christmas”; it sounds out of its depth grappling with the singer-songwriter poeticism of Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” The album closes out on an upbeat note, though, with the peppy, self-referential (“We’re gonna party like it’s 1999”) new song “Happy Days,” which its members said was partially inspired by “Can’t Stop the Feeling!,” the 2016 hit from — of all people! — Justin Timberlake. Happy Xmas, boy-band war is over (if you want it). LINDSAY ZOLADZRegina Belle, ‘My Colorful Christmas’Christmas has long been associated with snow and warm cider. But Regina Belle’s reggae-centered version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” evokes hot sand and rum punch. She follows this thread throughout her first Christmas album, flipping gospel standards like “The First Noel” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” into bouncy modern soul with cross-generational appeal. MOOREKadhja Bonet, ‘California Holiday’The first holiday EP by the pensive soul singer Kadhja Bonet consists mostly of supple covers of connoisseur Christmas classics — “Keep Christmas With You” from “Sesame Street”; the Jackson 5’s “Little Christmas Tree.” But the title track, an original, is something different: a lightly exhausted digest of a relationship that never seems to break free of cyclical fatigue. “Another holiday,” Bonet sighs. “Another holiday.” JON CARAMANICARay Charles, ‘The Spirit of Christmas’Be it country, R&B or gospel, Ray Charles knew how to put his own spin on well-worn classics, turning them into bluesy ballads with soulful piano at the center. That was evident on “The Spirit of Christmas” from 1985, reissued this year as a set that includes tried-and-true favorites like “Winter Wonderland,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” as well as the cult classic “That Spirit of Christmas,” which was featured in the holiday film “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” But Charles’s brilliance comes barreling through on the down-tempo “The Little Drummer Boy”: Mixing the twang of country and the melodic stomp of gospel-soul, he lands on something that isn’t quite either, but is glorious all the same. MOOREDavis Causey and Jay Smith, ‘Pickin’ on Christmas’In 1998, two guitarists from Georgia, Jay Smith and Davis Causey (who, among many credits, was a member of jazz-tinged Southern rock bands led by Randall Bramblett and Chuck Leavell) gathered a studio band, recorded an instrumental Christmas album and pressed 100 CDs for family and friends. Smith died soon after the album was made. It wasn’t a casual jam session; the tracks are thoughtfully arranged, often with multiple layers of lead and rhythm guitars. Now released publicly, the album radiates companionship, with the guitars — acoustic and electric, picking and sliding — entwined in amiable colloquies. “Silver Bells/Silent Night” turns into a chugging, countryish boogie; “We Three Kings/God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” eases toward modal jazz and psychedelia, and “What Child Is This?” moves from a tentative duet to a swinging jazz waltz. The familiar songs become shared confidences. JON PARELESGloria Estefan, Emily Estefan and Sasha Estefan-Coppola, ‘The Estefan Family Christmas’One of Latin pop’s queens shares top billing with her 28-year-old daughter, Emily, and 10-year-old grandson, Sasha, on her second Christmas album (the first came out in 1992). A solo Emily shines — and sounds remarkably like her mother — on a poignant ballad she wrote herself, “When I Miss You Most,” though much of the record relies a bit too much on Sasha’s precocity. Delightfully, the LP finds the family sharing the spotlight and the occasional laugh, and even a surprise: A Spanish-language rendition of the Paul Williams tune “I Wish I Could Be Santa Claus” features the sweetly assured singing debut of Gloria’s husband, Emilio. ZOLADZClockwise from top left: holiday albums by Chris Isaak, Thomas Rhett, Lindsey Stirling and Regina Belle.Debbie Gibson, ‘Winterlicious’Debbie Gibson has been a fixture on Broadway far longer than she was atop the pop charts in the late ’80s, which explains why the songs on “Winterlicious,” her first holiday album, skew toward the sorts of tunes that connect plot points in a musical — fiercely restrained singing with heavy syllabic emphasis, a curious abundance of detail, a saccharine quality that feels like a Christmas cookie overdose. CARAMANICAVivian Green, ‘Spread the Love’Vivian Green and her co-producer, Kwame Holland, wrote four of the five songs on her EP “Spread the Love.” Togetherness (and absence) is on her mind in all of them. She’s eagerly anticipating it in the Motown-meets-reggae “Spread the Love (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza)” and in the hand-clapping, pointillistic “Everybody’s Gathered.” And she bemoans being separated — even by her own choices — in the torchy “Around the Tree” and in the tinkling march “No Holiday.” Whether she’s convivial or lonely, she’s always got eager backing vocals for company. PARELESChris Isaak, ‘Everybody Knows It’s Christmas’The holidays arrive with plenty of twang and reverb on Chris Isaak’s suavely retro “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas.” Isaak wrote most of the songs, offering a little comedy (“Almost Christmas,” about last-minute shopping, and “Help Me Baby Jesus,” about a plastic yard display) and some convincing lonely-guy melancholy (“Holiday Blues,” “Wrapping Presents for Myself” and “Christmas Comes But Once a Year”). The sound harks back to 1950s country and rockabilly, with Isaak’s voice echoing Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and, in a big-finish “O Holy Night,” Elvis Presley, completing a slyly poised period piece of an album. PARELESAlicia Keys, ‘Santa Baby’Alicia Keys brings her coziest voice to the largely secular songs on “Santa Baby.” Her delivery is high, breathy and playful, and she allows herself to show scratches and imperfections. The productions often tuck elaborate arrangements under a low-fi veneer, like her version of “The Christmas Song,” which begins as a piano-and-voice, mistakes-and-all version and suddenly sprouts strings and voices. The album touches on old-school soul — her gospelly, tear-spattered versions of “Please Be Home for Christmas” — as well as the willful eccentricity of “My Favorite Things,” which has modal-jazz piano chords, a wordless version of the Rodgers melody and spoken words about favorite things like “feeling so good, we drama-free.” Four songs of her own — including a reprise of “Not Even the King” from “Girl on Fire” — are about longing and affection, and she radiates fondness in “December Back 2 June” and “You Don’t Have to Be Alone.” Throughout the album, she invites loved ones closer. PARELESNelson, ‘A Nelson Family Christmas’The brothers Nelson approach “O Come All Ye Faithful” with a pair of billy clubs, beating upon each syllable as if playing a mirthless game of Whac-a-Mole. Not all of this holiday collection is so violent — it includes a handful of shimmery tracks from their elders, father Ricky and grandfather Ozzie; and also a soothing “This Christmas,” sung with Carnie and Wendy Wilson, Brian’s daughters. The Nelson brothers’ take on “Blue Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” are lightly comforting, but Lord, please protect “Away in a Manger” and “Mele Kelikimaka.” CARAMANICAThomas Rhett, ‘Merry Christmas, Y’all’The gentleman country kingpin Thomas Rhett is Nashville’s MVP of singing within the lines. And he might have gotten away with it on this EP, his first Christmas collection in a decade-plus career. But on “Winter Wonderland,” he’s nudged along by a horn section that’s more curious than he is. And if you detect a touch of ambition on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” maybe it’s because the band simply will not stop rejoicing, so what’s he got to lose? CARAMANICALindsey Stirling, ‘Snow Waltz’A millennial violinist with spirited energy and a large YouTube following, the 36-year-old Lindsey Stirling builds on the strengths of her 2017 holiday record, “Warmer in the Winter,” with this lively new collection. The thumping electronic beats that accompany her arrangements of classics like “Sleigh Ride” and “Joy to the World” are tasteful enough to resist gimmickry, and originals that feature pop vocalists like Bonnie McKee and the “American Idol” alum David Archuleta are effectively cheery. The title track is also a new composition that turns Stirling’s instrument into an expressive vessel for wintry melodrama and childlike wonder. ZOLADZJoss Stone, ‘Merry Christmas, Love’Joss Stone reaches for old-school Hollywood luster and unblinking sincerity on “Merry Christmas, Love.” She deploys sleigh bell-topped orchestras and choirs in holiday standards (“Winter Wonderland,” “The Christmas Song,” “Away in a Manger”) along with the Motown perennial “What Christmas Means to Me” and a less familiar Irving Berlin Christmas song, “Snow.” Stone sings with clarity and earnest humility. When she does let loose her cutting high register on a new song of her own, “If You Believe,” it’s clear how carefully she was holding herself back. PARELES More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Jazz Vocals

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      Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong were A-list celebrities at the top of their art form. Today’s jazz singers are finding new paths. Listen to these 11 favorites.Lately The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane, bebop and Ornette Coleman.Now we’re putting the spotlight on jazz vocals. If you’re a listener to the latest jazz, you’ve probably noticed that vocalists are some of the beacons guiding this music toward new paths. It’s been decades since jazz singers played such an active and contemporary role, but for most of the mid-20th century it was hard to distinguish many jazz singers from pop stars. Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee — these were all Page 1 celebrities, and jazz musicians. Throughout jazz history, singers have also served the role of breaking up the bandstand’s closed circuit of masculinity: In the Jazz Age, they were often the only women on the bus with the all-male big bands.This list’s aim is not to be comprehensive — if it were, we’d have to explain why there’s no Abbey Lincoln, Sarah Vaughan or Babs Gonzales, at the very least. We put a bigger emphasis on breadth, and encouraged contributors to give us their sincere favorites. Enjoy listening to these excerpts from songs chosen by a range of musicians, scholars and critics. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Luciana Souza, vocalistIf one arrives at this 1938 recording of Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought of You” with fresh ears, the listener will immediately be taken by Billie Holiday’s unique sound and deeply personal phrasing — they embody vocal jazz. Billie sings in a relaxed, almost spoken way, as if she is telling each of us her story. The rhythm section plays quarter notes, laying a clear foundation for the swing feel that permeates this track. The busy piano commentary and the horn solos help create a state of conversation and storytelling, which is also essential to jazz.“The Very Thought of You”Billie Holiday (Columbia/Legacy, Warner Chappell Music)◆ ◆ ◆Cécile McLorin Salvant, vocalistThis 1933 performance of “Dinah” is a perfect example of how free and radical Louis Armstrong was. He grounds the time at the bridge, flies over the A sections, and sings exactly the way he plays: Every choice he makes is undeniable, feels casual, and is extremely attractive. There is so much life and happiness in his singing and his sound. There’s wisdom and playfulness at the same time. He gives us the lyrics and then takes them away as he sees fit; it’s almost like an erasure poem. It’s a party.◆ ◆ ◆Kurt Elling, vocalistIf there is one recording of one song that manifests every element of jazz singing at its highest elevation, it is that of Betty Carter singing “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” from “The Audience With Betty Carter” (1980). Recorded live (with no studio “fixes”), Carter broadcasts her signature and unmistakable sonic identity from a single opening sigh. From there she goes on to spontaneously reinvent the song’s original melody in toto — not to “show off” or exclude the audience, but in service of the composition’s story and of the audience’s emotional experience. Her techniques allow her to be utterly transparent, emotionally, to her audience. She is a philosopher of love, a comedian, a heartbroken waif and an artist beyond her years. In one tour-de-force performance she shows herself to have mastered and metabolized every individual facet of jazz singing in such a way that her work has become seamless and solid-state. The intimate musical interaction with her rhythm section (John Hicks, piano; Curtis Lundy, bass; Kenny Washington, drums) — probably the finest in a career she populated with the best in the business — shows her to be a consummate bandleader. This performance makes a strong case for Betty Carter as the absolute most: the pinnacle virtuoso in a line of definitive musical masters.“Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”Betty Carter (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆Tammy Kernodle, musicologistThis performance captures a side of Ella Fitzgerald’s artistry that isn’t always conveyed through her studio recordings. The complete “Live in Berlin” album is a hallmark of Fitzgerald’s catalog because of its documentation of the energy, creativity and intimacy that links audience and musician in the live setting. I think “How High the Moon” overshadows all of the other performances on this album as it strongly illuminates Ella’s role in shaping the modern vocal jazz idiom, especially her embrace of the harmonic approaches advanced through bebop. The impeccable timing, musical knowledge and vocal dexterity employed in this seven-plus-minute vocal improvisation exemplifies musical genius. Ella doesn’t just cover this standard, she owns it! Deconstructing its melodic identity and seamlessly fusing musical quotations drawn from a litany of sources, she creates an indisputable piece of art.“How High the Moon”Ella Fitzgerald (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆Aaron Diehl, pianistThis song is poignant, as if a mother is consoling her child in the throes of heartbreak and despair. It is the melody which Maxine Sullivan sings in combination with the lyric that makes this message bittersweet — her simple treatment only embellished with an occasional scooped note and the supple feeling of swing. Bob Haggart’s band provides a subtle undercurrent in a performance both haunting and hopeful. It urges the ear (and the heart) to come back for more.“Cry Buttercup Cry”Maxine Sullivan & Her Orchestra (American Popsongs)◆ ◆ ◆Dee Alexander, vocalistWhile on this journey through life and music I have encountered many artists that have influenced me. One such person is Urszula Dudziak, a phenomenal Polish jazz vocalist with a five-octave range that soars effortlessly and leaves me breathless. My introduction to her album “Midnight Rain” and her rendition of “Bluesette” showcased her courageous and creative approach to her music, especially her use of wordless sounds, which I also incorporate in my performance. Thank you, Ms. Dudziak, for sharing your gift with the world. You are one of my greatest inspirations.“Bluesette”Urszula Dudziak (Arista)◆ ◆ ◆Melissa Weber (a.k.a. Soul Sister), D.J. and scholarUnlike today, Black radio in the 1970s lacked silos for R&B and “jazz.” Many wonderful vocal artists fused those boundaries, like Patti Austin, George Benson, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Jean Carn. Angela Bofill’s 1978 debut album, “Angie,” is one of the finest examples of a fusion of Black American music influences and the Nuyorican and Cuban roots that are also part of Bofill’s background. The album’s opening composition, the self-penned “Under the Moon and Over the Sky,” is a searing, ethereal work of beauty. And “Angie,” a Top 5 seller on the Jazz Albums chart, crossed over to R&B and pop, and was filled with more stunning moments.“Under the Moon and Over the Sky”Angela Bofill (Arista/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Will Friedwald, author“Joe Turner’s Blues” climaxes Nat King Cole’s most famous concert album, “At the Sands,” taped in 1960 but not released until 1966, about a year after his tragically early death. Cole was a brilliant blues player as well as singer, and few artists have ever captured the sheer exuberance of the blues — the idea of confronting hard times with a smile — as well as he does here. Cole’s 1958 studio recording of this Dave Cavanaugh arrangement of a W.C. Handy song is exciting enough, but the live performance is positively ecstatic. Here’s the most vivid example imaginable of how hearing the blues makes you feel good.“Joe Turner’s Blues”Nat King Cole (Capitol Records)◆ ◆ ◆Catherine Russell, vocalistNancy Wilson demonstrates everything I look for in excellent jazz singing! “Never Will I Marry” is not an “easy” tune, yet Wilson is in full command of melody and lyric, using her voice as an instrument. Her point of view is clear, honest and playful. She achieves this by where she chooses to use straight tone and vibrato, and the push/pull and swing of her phrasing. Her delivery is strong and vulnerable simultaneously. Then she leaves us with a long, perfectly delivered last note while the band dances around her to bring the tune to a close. Absolutely brilliant!“Never Will I Marry”Cannonball Adderley & Nancy Wilson (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticAndy Bey’s four-octave baritone range and tightly controlled, emotive vocal instrument have covered a lot of ground in 83 years: jazz-pop harmony with his sisters, hard-bop alongside Horace Silver, avant-garde theater with Cecil Taylor. But like a true jazz vocalist, he’s never strayed too far from the blues. It’s there with him on “Experience and Judgment,” his 1974 debut album as a leader, an imperfectly made record that’s nonetheless full of broad-minded Bey compositions touching on love, lust and transcendental philosophy. This is jazz sailing into New Age, but staying grounded; Bey’s is a sound of earned truth. “Tune Up,” maybe the most slyly funky song he ever wrote, displays his gymnastic composure as he doubles with the bass’s two-note vamp then soars up to entreat us: “Get close to all that’s pure and beautiful.”“Tune Up”Andy Bey (Rhino Atlantic)◆ ◆ ◆Roxana Amed, vocalistEsperanza Spalding represents, in my opinion, what a contemporary jazz vocalist is. Her flexible instrument — expressive and light — can follow the challenging requirements of her music, can flow alongside her bass, can tell the delicate stories in her poetry. Over the decades, the profile of a jazz vocalist has changed; we’ve had everything from virtuosic scatters to deep storytellers, from songwriters to vocalists and pianists. In every case, facing this repertoire requires a versatile instrument and mind, knowledge of the tradition and some skills to break it and create a new sound, a new vocal language. Esperanza has been exploring all the corners of this amazing music.“Lest We Forget (blood)”Esperanza Spalding (Concord Records)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Louis Armstrong’s Last Laugh

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      Private recordings, heard in the new documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” add a further dimension to the artist.The tapes are thrilling, revelatory, wrenching: the warm-gravel voice of Louis Armstrong, perhaps the most famous voice of the 20th century, speaking harsh truths about American racism, about the dehumanizing hatred he and millions of others endured in a world he still, to the end, insisted was wonderful. He tells the stories — of a fan declaring “I don’t like Negroes” to his face; of a gofer on a film set treating him with disrespect no white star would face — with fresh outrage and can-you-believe-this? weariness.He also tells them with his full humor and showmanship, his musicality clear in the rhythm of his swearing.The public can hear these stories, privately recorded by Armstrong as part of his own lifelong project of self-documentation, in the Sacha Jenkins documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” (streaming on Apple TV+). Often, Armstrong recalls getting the last laugh on those who disrespected him — he harangues that gofer, and the studio, too, telling both where to stick their movie.It’s no revelation that a Black man born less than 40 years after the abolition of slavery endured harrowing racism, or that stardom on par with Bing Crosby’s and Frank Sinatra’s offered him no exemption. Armstrong faced blowback in 1957 for speaking against discrimination, and donated to the Civil Rights movement. Usually, though, he avoided controversy.By the 1960s, Armstrong’s reticence — as well as that wide-grinning, eye-rolling performance style that echoes minstrelsy — inspired backlash, most painfully among younger jazz musicians who revered his recordings of the 1920s, the very headwaters of jazz.That backlash has been exhaustively hashed over ever since, with critics often dividing the Armstrong legacy in two. On the one hand: the young genius-artist-virtuoso, who perfected the arts of swing, scat singing, and improvisational solos, hitting trumpet notes so high they tickled God’s toes. On the other: the global entertainer with hits in six decades and a penchant for sentimental pop and discomfiting tunes like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”Well into this millennium, defenses of Armstrong’s later years have been, well, defensive. But Jenkins’s film, following the lead of Ricky Riccardi’s 2012 biography “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years,” draws deeply on the Armstrong archives to make an assertive argument, often in Armstrong’s own words, that the man called Pops was deeply committed to the cause of racial justice.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” Jenkins said in a Zoom interview. “America’s going through something. In many ways, things haven’t changed, and in many ways things have gone backward.”Armstrong at home. Apple TV+At the same time of the film’s release, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is preparing for its 20th anniversary and the opening this spring of its new Louis Armstrong Center. The museum’s executive director, Regina Bain, said that the center will exponentially increase the museum’s educational outreach, a core mission with roots in Armstrong’s own development — he was given his first formal musical training as an adolescent at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans. The center also will host concerts, exhibit the Armstrong archives and showcase its Armstrong Now program, which puts artists in dialogue with Armstrong’s legacy.Bain acknowledged that legacy’s complexity. “When you look at him,” she said by phone, “you should see what most people see: an icon and a musical genius with a gorgeous smile and an effusive personality full of joy. And you should also see the racial terror that he and the people around him went through, and affected his life and body, and that he was still able to move through.”“It’s extremely important to tell your story in a way that doesn’t have any tainting or tampering,” said Jeremy Pelt, one of today’s top trumpeters, composers and bandleaders, in a phone interview. He’s published two books of interviews with Black jazz musicians (“Griot” volumes 1 and 2) for just this reason. “To be able to expose yourself, and deal with what you’ve gone through — it’s essential and freeing, even in the last chorus of your life.”For 23 years, David Ostwald has led the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, playing weekly gigs at Birdland. Ostwald has long championed Armstrong as a pioneer of civil rights, making the case in a 1991 New York Times guest essay that Armstrong, as early as 1929, actually did address race in his music. His example: “Black & Blue,” the song on which Jenkins’s film title riffs. On it, Armstrong sings, “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case / ’cause I can’t hide what is in my face.”Asked how he feels to see that argument going mainstream, Ostwald released a whoop. “Finally,” he said.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” said the documentary’s director, Sacha Jenkins.Apple TV+Ostwald credited Wynton Marsalis with having made Armstrong “OK again” in the jazz world. In the film, Marsalis describes growing up hating “with an unbelievable passion” the “Uncle Tomming” that Armstrong has often been accused of. But listening closely to Armstrong’s trumpet jolted Marsalis, the future artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has since championed Armstrong. In the documentary, he says that Armstrong “was trying to use his music to transform and reform and lead the country closer to his ideals.”Armstrong’s musical legacy has likewise been contested. His solos, especially from the 1920s, have long been celebrated — in one of Pelt’s “Griot” interviews, the saxophonist J.D. Allen says that for jazz players, “all roads lead back to Pops.” But Ostwald recalled being regarded as “weird” for playing traditional and old-time jazz in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. “People were saying the music’s going to die, but I always felt that Armstrong was too powerful a force to ever go away, even if some people did misunderstand him.”Today, young musicians feel increasingly free to find inspiration throughout Armstrong’s career. Like most Juilliard jazz graduates, the up-and-coming trombonist, composer and bandleader Kalia Vandever studied Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings of the 1920s. But she also prizes his 1950s duets with Ella Fitzgerald: “I love the way that he transitions from singing into playing,” she said. “It’s seamless and sounds like one voice.” Listen to Vandever’s playing on her “Regrowth” album, and you may feel the connection, though the music sounds nothing like “Heebie Jeebies.”With each fresh look at Armstrong’s life and influence, perhaps the old artist/entertainer distinction is fading. In a video introduction shown before the deeply moving tour at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Bain offers, with welcome precision, a third way to think about Armstrong: as “one of the founding figures of jazz and America’s first Black popular music icon.” The message: He’s both. And both matter. More

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      ‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ Review: In His Own Words

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      Personal tapes and letters bring fresh insights into the jazz great as a musician and a Black man.In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”By foregrounding the gravel, grace and salty frankness of Armstrong’s voice, and mining an archival mother lode of audio and video interviews and clips, Jenkins delivers a bountiful portrait of one of the 20th century’s superstars — on Armstrong’s own terms.As welcome as this is, the documentary’s most affecting attribute may be a reckoning by several Black male artists with what Armstrong means to them. After all, his broad smile, his cameo roles in Hollywood films, his seeming muteness on racial issues had some critics, many of them younger, discounting him for his complicity, his “Uncle Tomming,” as fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis put it early in the film, confessing to how he once felt about Armstrong. With the aid of Marsalis, Miles Davis, the poet Amiri Baraka (via audio clips) and the actor Ossie Davis, Jenkins recontextualizes the man.In a tribute from the “With Ossie & Ruby” television show, Davis shares an epiphany he had when he and Armstrong were on set for ‌the 1966 movie “A Man Called Adam.” During a break, he happened on Armstrong lost in a moment of somber repose, one that quickly gave way to his trademark grin. In that swing, Davis discovered a new kinship: “What I saw in that look shook me. It was my father, my uncle, myself down through the generations.”There is no paucity of expert witnesses who never had doubts about Armstrong’s depth, starting with Lucille Armstrong (whose story about their first house is a keeper). They also include the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the introduction to the centennial edition of Armstrong’s memoir “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” and the composer Leonard Bernstein, who describes the melodies Armstrong plied as “looking for a lost note.” The poetry in that phrase seems to underscore Armstrong’s lineage as a descendant of the African Diaspora.Among the film’s ample pleasures is the only known footage of Armstrong in the recording studio. His head tilted back while scatting, he holds a handkerchief to mop his forehead. The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.Louis Armstrong’s Black & BluesRated R for Satchmo’s salty language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available on Apple TV+. More