Talk:Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five

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Some good additions to this article, but I have to question the assertion that the second version of the Hot 5 "found Armstrong playing with musicians more nearly his equal". Certainly Hines was much a more sophisticated musician than Lil Hardin Armstrong, and seems to have helped inspire Armstrong to stretch his limits more than anyone Armstrong shared the recording studio with since Bechet. The rest of the second Hot 5, however, seem IMO more like supporting sidemen rather than artistic collaborators. Dodds and Ory are still regarded as influential innovators and continue to be emulated today; by contrast I'm unaware of there being any such things as a Fred Robinson influenced school of trombone style, or contemporary clarinetists who long to sound like Jimmy Strong. -- Infrogmation (talk) 04:55, 19 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for the input - I understand the importance of Dodds and Ory, and appreciate the influence they had. Still, I'm talking about them as they appear on these particular recordings - Ory in particular is hesitant, occasionally incompetent, whilst Dodds is stilted in comparison to his much better work with Oliver, Jimmy Blythe and his own bands. (It's also interesting just how much more confident the ensemble appears to be without Armstrong when they recorded as the Bootblacks and Wanderers). I think it's fair to say that Robinson and Strong, in contrast, were not struggling to keep up.

Perhaps the sentence can be more precisely phrased to reflect all this.. Kisch (talk) 03:59, 20 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Terry Teachout in "Pops" describes the hot fives as "a scrappy combo dominated by two titans" (p126) and argues quite convincingly IMHO the case. Goldstarsteve (talk) 22:21, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]