"Swing That Music: Louis Armstrong In The Big Band Era" w/Ricky Riccardi

[ghost of miles]

From 1929 to 1947 trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, who had already made a series of seminal small-group recordings that would become a cornerstone of jazz history, rose to popular culture stardom, appearing in movies, becoming the first African-American to host a weekly radio program, and waxing a wealth of material for Decca and other labels that brought him greater commercial success, as well as critical controversy.  I’ll be featuring music from those years on this edition of Night Lights, and we’ll also hear from Armstrong biographer Ricky Riccardi, whose recent book Heart Full Of Rhythm chronicles this key but often overlooked stretch of Armstrong’s career: 

Swing That Music: Louis Armstrong In The Big Band Era