More from the Armstrong folder: 1955-56

Here is more from the Armstrong file folder. George Avakian sees Louis's career getting ready to bloom again and wants Columbia to get a piece of the action. With talk of a film based on Louis's life (Hollywood actually never got around to it—which is probably a good thing), he wants to secure him contractually and quickly, thus prevent his working with Bing Crosby in another movie, High Society. The second memo is about contract changes. Notice that item 2 refers to "78 rpm sides"—and this is 1956. Click on the letters to make them readable.

Next comes a letter from Joe Glaser, who returns a note Avakian sent him, It is from a German fan and one wonders what was so special about it; Louis received a lot of fan mail from all over the world, but George thought this one worthy to be forwarded. Am I missing something? Was Ingie Dagmar Fuelle someone whose name I should recognize? No Google results. The February 6, 1956 memo from Avakian shows ongoing concern over Decca's rights.

Finally, there is a hand-written note on economic feasability and the Decca situation, addressed to Avakian from Jim Conkling, the President of Columbia Records. Must not have had a typewriter—and what is that "L" signature?

As we move on, you will probably find this correspondence more interesting.

More 1955 correspondence from the Armstrong file

Here is a continuation of the Armstrong file correspondence, which is mainly between his producer, George Avakian, and his manager, Joe Glaser. In subsequent posts, Goddard Lieberson will also figure. He was the head of CBS Records. Click on the letters to make them readable.

I will let the letters speak for themselves...

In retrospect, we have to wonder if the good Reverend was given the answers beforehand.

From the October 26, 1955 edition of the NY Times.

The Armstrong File: Correspondence - Part I

This is another in a series of posts in which we dip into the remarkable Armstrong file folder that popped up in my mail forty years ago. You will find details of that postal miracle at the other end of this link.

Letters and interoffice memos make up the bulk of the file folder’s contents. They offer an interesting peek into behind-the-scenes activity in the mid-Fifties, a time when new audiences were discovering Armstrong and his playing could still be quite extraordinary. The letters show how fragile the relationship between Columbia and Joe Glaser was, and give an occasional glimpse of flavor of the times. They also reflect business diplomacy, which become especially apparent when we get to the inter-office memos.

There are too many letters and memos to post them all, so I have decided to select the more interesting ones and group them in a way that makes sense, while maintaining the chronology.

Here we get a good idea of why so many musicians were not able to retire to a house with swimming pool and room for a pony.

This was at the time when the Columbia Record Club was launched. The 98¢ record mentioned may have been a part of that.

I should point out that Ed Sullivan's weekly offering of music, juggling and standup was a CBS show, so it was all in the family. The This Is Jazz show George refers to in the second letter was a late-Forties jam session kind of thing conducted by Rudi Blesh. Does anybody recall what the "celebrated wisecrack" George Brunies made was? UPDATE: Jeff Crompton posted the answer here. Thank you, Jeff

Finally, there is this from Glaser. I wonder if he ever learned how to spell Ahmet Ertegun's name, and why his offer was turned down. The NY Times clippings are just fillers, a couple of 1947 photos from Rudi's aforementioned This Is Jazz show, and a sad dog story.

The chronology continues here.

WBAI: What the hell happened to it?

In 1960, when I moved to New York from Philadelphia, I remembered the station André Westendorp had spoken about and it quickly won me over as a regular listener, but I went a step further and became a WBAI volunteer. Organizations like Pacifica rely heavily on volunteers and WBAI served as a great square one for anyone wanting to get into broadcasting. Of course, I had already been there, done that, so the attraction for me was Lew Hill’s open microphone concept. It was, indeed, working and offering a great intellectual alternative to the pap that commercial stations filled the air with.

I was still a WBAI volunteer in 1964, when my day job was at WNEW and I arrived home one day to find a letter from the NYC unemployment office informing me of a job opening. I had registered there during a between-jobs period and it surprised me to find that my file was still active. When I called and told the man that I was employed at WNEW, he said, “Great, you probably would not have been interested in this position, anyway.” I asked him why not and he said it was a low-paying announcer’s job at “a small leftist station.”

“WBAI?,” I asked.

“Yes, so you know about it, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to work there, but we have to ask.”

I told the man that I was already working there as a volunteer, and that ended our conversation. I guess he branded me as a Communist, for that was still the temper of the times. Senator McCarthy had died three years earlier and been publicly disgraced some three years before that, but the wake of his hateful witch hunt was still being felt and Pacifica was high on HUAC’s list of “subversive” organizations. HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) had been established by Congress in 1934, to monitor “unpatriotic” German-Americans. Twenty years later, it focused mainly on Communists and while it no longer exists as such, its spirit is kept alive by GOP members who aim their venom at anyone who sees through their Norman Rockwell veil.

To get back on track, I left WNEW and took a serious salary cut in order to join WBAI’s staff. I had no idea that I would end up as the station’s manager, but that what happened and I’ll save the details for another post.

What a wonderful place WBAI was in the mid-Sixties. Yes, it could become a bit stuffy and there was the occasional tinge of elitism, but even those aspects were a tad above the norm. It was thought-provoking and super expressive, just as Lew Hill had envisioned it. Did it lean to the left? Sure,but that was mainly due to two factors: Its designated role as an alternative outlet, which, by default, pushed in that direction. And, that being so, it was difficult to convince people from the right that the microphone also was open to their points of view. You might say that we had a catch 22.

To obtain a noticeable balance, I tried hard to win William Buckley over, but he politely and firmly declined the invitation. Interestingly enough, he was a regular listener, as opposed to a monitor. Monitors listened, but only to look for excuses to make complaints to the FCC. Among their number was a vigilante group of outraged Catholic clergymen who did their damnedest to have us closed down and went berserk when Leroi Jones read his poetry without beeps. These chronic complainers could serve a role models for the GOP’s tea party ignoramuses (including those on the Hill). Buckley was not of that low order, but when he told me that WBAI offered much that was to his liking, I knew that it was the cultured side of him referring to that aspect of our programming.

The old WBAI was an amazing place. We occupied three floors of a brownstone on East 39th Street, courtesy of Lou Schweitzer, the teletype machines were in the second floor bathroom and walking sideways became second nature. When artistic and political differences clash in the narrow corridors of such cramped quarters, the result can drive nerves to the edge, but at BAI we somehow always managed to pull back and work things out. Well, there was that one time, but that’s for later.

One could step out of one’s office at BAI and find Ayn Rand dicussing Objectivism with the cleaning man, or bump into James Mason carrying a pile of ethnic recordings that he was about to share with the listeners. Celeste Holm might be climbing the stairs for a studio reading of children’s stories; Gunther Schuller might be there on one of his regular visits, delivering the latest update to Contemporary Music in Evolution, an exhaustive series that underwent an evolution of its own; Bob Dylan might be dashing in to deliver a station break, and if you took a peek at the music department, you might well see Yoko Ono at the file cabinet while her boss, John Corigliano grooved to Cage or Couperin. Upstairs, Charlotte Moorman, an adventuresome musician of eclectic talent could be in the studio stripping for a program of music for cello and balloons. That this was radio never deterred Charlotte from going visual.

In short, WBAI was a tiny speck on the dial, but it attracted many of the very people who shaped the era of the Civil Rights Movement and a far away frivolous war. The government did not care for us and most New Yorkers never heard of us, but this little station was the station that could—and did.

I left WBAI to work for the BBC, commuting between London and New York, but I still listened whenever I had the opportunity. My replacement had been hired under very mysterious circumstances. He had, as it turned out, past ties with the CIA and there were soon subtle signs of a change, one that Lew Hill would not have approved of. I became aware of that change when I returned from a London trip to find rather desperate letters from three WBAI public affairs program producers in my mailbox. They were deeply concerned about a new direction they saw the station take and, because I knew all its members, they asked me to set up a meeting with the local New York board. In spite of the fact that they had made individual approaches and their complaints had a serious common denominator, the board chairman, Harold Taylor, did not see a red flag—three startling reports of censorship were ignored. Something was happening to Lew Hill’s open microphone.

There was a local board meeting coming up and Harold reluctantly agreed to let me be there to present these grievances, but the actual complainants were barred from attending. I have seen faces drop, but this was the first time I saw them actually go beyond the floor—that happened about ten minutes into the meeting when the doorbell rang and a small, orderly group demanded a hearing. In the group were the three program producers, a delegation from SDS at Columbia University, members of the newly formed Friends of WBAI listener group, and Alex Munsell, a man in his seventies who was a devout WBAI fan, a generous contributor, and a Christian Marxist. That should tell you something about one of most fascinating acquaintances I made through my WBAI experience. More on Alex in a future post wherein I will also talk about Lou Schweitzer, another one-of-a-kind person who stays strong in my memory.

Fast-forwarding again, the censorship situation was never resolved, instead, it took nasty turns and I turned my attention to other things. I also stopped listening to WBAI. My WBAI hiatus ended last month when my dial ran across 99.5 just long enough for me to catch a late night commentator voicing his disgust with the station's management. Well, I thought, so it hasn’t changed that much. I stayed and listened as the man, obviously aware of and devoted to the station’s original principles, expressed his displeasure with current management and its “snake oil” obsession. What was he talking about? I began tuning in often and, sure enough, there was a preponderance of airtime devoted to chatty morning-TV-type programs with people whose main purpose in life seemed to be hawking alternative medicine. They were selling a book and DVDs that could cure just about anything, and they were doing so in true infomercial fashion. I wondered how far beyond China Lew Hill had spun.

I should mention that they were selling these products as “premiums” for donations to WBAI, but someone other than the station had to be making money on this. It is normal for people to offer goods and services as incentives, but not in unlimited quantities—that takes it into a different realm. I know about these fund-raising marathon broadcasts and have, in fact, been told that I invented them in 1965 (more about that to come, in due time).

I also heard a post-midnight broadcast that seemed designed to put the listener to sleep. It was a man rambling on and on, slowly and with many long pauses, sometimes mumbling to himself and never uttering a useful word. The purpose of the broadcast appears to have been to recite the names of every soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't know for what purpose, but it really struck me as a pointless waste of precious air time, for it was neither informative nor entertaining. The delivery was that of someone who faced a microphone for the first time and was intimidated by it. I could not believe that this was WBAI, but it was. Perhaps the time had come for a revision of Hill's open microphone concept—it was clearly being abused.

I should mention that I had flashes of déjà vu as I listened to Ron Daniels’ program, Night Talk. His political observations and interviews reflect experience and foresight, but he is only on late at night, once a week. On the plus side, there is also David Rothenberg, a true renaissance man who has been an asset to WBAI for close to fifty years and today has brought his vast knowledge of theater into his social consciousness mix. David founded the Fortune Society and brought to the station its first regular examination of prison conditions and the need for after care. Then there is Earl Caldwell, the veteran columnist, who is heard regularly on WBAI and still has meaningful things to say. And let us not forget Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, which is never to be missed if one wants to keep up with what is really happening out there. If the station offered other programs of this caliber, or even close to it, I did not happen upon them, but it is clear that not all is lost, for there obviously are people on WBAI's air who see what has happened and do their best to stem the tide of mindless blather. Finally, let me mention Bob Fass, who has been on WBAI longer than anybody. I re-hired Bob about 45 years ago—after my predecessor had taken him off the air—and now he comes on Thursday nights, but he is stuck in a timewarp. His show was as enlightening as it was unique back in the Sixties, a hub to which young rebellious thinkers of the day flocked, the place where Arlo Guthrie introduced Alice’s Restaurant and Paul Krassner made outrageous, stinging observations. Flower children often shed their petals and showed their thorns on Bob’s show, and that envelope was steadily being pushed in the faces of our vigilante regulars. But that was then and what once was fresh and provocative has now been reduced to nostalgia. Listening to Bob's current show served me as a reminder that, cherished as many of the memories are, I do not long for the old days as they were, but rather to hear the spirit of those days applied to the present.

Adding to its unfortunate assimilation, WBAI also has the annoying practice of playing—back to back and over and over—Madison Avenue-inspired promos for some of their most brainless shows. On more than one occasion, I heard them urge attendance to an event that had already taken place. These spots are mostly aimed at increasing subscribership, which is good, but they are as ad-world corny as anything AARP or the coal pushers have come up with. In the distant past, John Corigliano would compose classy little promotional songs in every musical style imaginable, and subscription encouragements were inevitably accompanied by a product description—listeners were reminded of WBAI's unique offerings. The programs were the incentives, not snake oils, cure-all booklets or self-serving DVDs.

In short, what I heard during a couple of weeks of listening was alarmingly similar to what the rest of the FM dial has had to offer over the years, the very mixture of hucksterism and hokum that made Lew Hill see the need for alternative ear fare. Commercial stations have, with regularity, traditionally aired obligatory "public service" announcements to show that they are community minded. As I listened to the watered-down WBAI, it struck me that the occasional program of substance is its equivalent of such announcements. I don't know if the station still sends out monthly program guides, but I seriously doubt that it does—there is precious little to list, mainly chatter shows with mindless hosts taking mindless calls.

Granted, I have reintroduced my ears to WBAI randomly and for a relatively short time, but long enough to conclude that the station has lost its status as alternative radio. As I noted previously, there are exceptions, moments when the old spirit returned and I did not long to move to another frequency. For example, I heard a good, well presented rap mix one night, but I might have heard that elsewhere. A couple of nights ago, my attention was caught by an absorbing bio-documentary about The Wailers, narrated by Bunny Wailer, but I don’t know if it originated at WBAI or Pacifica. That brings to mind another major change: original programming used to be Pacifica's strength. Considering the perpetually low budget, Pacifica stations produced an amazing number of important documentaries over the years, but that practice has all but ceased, the airtime filled by mundane call-in shows and pop music, with few exceptions. To be fair, it was easier in its early years for WBAI to separate itself from sponsor-driven broadcasters and speak with a truly distinct voice It was, after all, listener sponsored, beholden only to its subscribers and Pacifica's purposes. Well, WBAI is still listener sponsored and the audience that gave it life and maintained it for so many years has not gone away. Has it tuned out? Yes, but it is still there, listening to the BBC, WNYC, WFUV, perhaps even KPFC. The dumbing down of WBAI and, perhaps, Pacifica itself, could easily lead to it becoming once again a commercial station, not like the one Lou Schweitzer so lovingly ran, more like the ones he so generously sought to balance against. I do not for a minute think that, were he able to hear WBAI today, Lou would not deeply regret having made a gift of it to Pacifica.

To reiterate, many stations—even commercial ones—are today broadcasting the kinds of programs that used to give Pacifica its identity, a sane voice in the media wilderness. That these stations have caught up speaks well for a broadcasting industry that remained silent when WBAI was the subject of a Senate investigation and the issue was free speech. It also speaks well for the pioneering nature of Pacifica—obviously, the industry was tuned in when we thought they weren't, but WBAI should not regressively go bland just because others have caught up.

So, what happened? Why has the station succumbed to innocuous programming, with only token reminders of its important past? What has happened to the Pacifica and local boards, how did they lose control? how did they lose sight of Pacifica's raison d'etre? It is a fact that these boards have always carried dead-weight members, and that most of them simply never listened to the stations, but, in the long run, detrimental suggestions were always overruled and Pacifica maintained its course. In the late Sixties, a couple of West Coast board members suggested that WBAI be sold and the money spent to better the rest of the network, i.e. the two West Coast stations. I went out there when the proposal reached my desk, lobbied the individual board members, and fought hard to recognize the damaging effect such a decision would have on Pacifica's growth and stature. Fortunately, I found sufficient agreement to kill the notion. WBAI was worth fighting for back then and today it is worth restoring. Perhaps the answer lies in getting rid of the current Board. From what I glimpse,it is just the latest in a succession of boards that somehow failed to "get it." It does not take much insight to hear that WBAI is currently a directionless headless chicken. In my days with Pacifica, the board was self-perpetuating, which was not good and would have been pure disaster were it not for term limits. There was a successful attempt to get around that after I left when Frank Millspaugh,who had been an outrageously ineffective WBAI manager, became a board member and somehow succeeded in staying way beyond the term limit. His failure to grasp the principles of Pacifica became abundantly clear a few years back, when the foundation was in a management turmoil, so he was eventually ousted. There have been serious upheavals on both coasts in recent years and it would appear that things are still in a mess, at least in New York. Ironically, WBAI is now advertising itself as “community radio”, a tag that becomes increasingly inappropriate. The fact is that the station should be serving the community, but not by feeding it pap with the occasional nutritional morsel. New York is a rainbow community, the old melting pot nomenclature still applies and it is appropriate for WBAI to program with ethnic diversity in mind, what I do not regard as appropriate is the level of that outreach. Does management somehow see the city's black and hispanic population as being on a lower intellectual level? That's what the current programming indicates to me—what is the point of giving Andrea Clark a couple of hours to play Mancini and make small talk. I listened Friday and it was embarrassing, she never completed most of her sentences and she said absolutely nothing of substance. There was a time when many of WBAI's voices could not be heard on other stations, because their message was too off-script. Today's BAI offerings (with noted exceptions) would also be rejected by most other stations, but for sadly different reasons: they would insult the listener's intelligence.

When I took over WBAI's management, the station was far from perfect, and that can also be said of the WBAI I left behind, but I hope I left some improvements in my wake. For one thing, the station's signal was increased just before I left, and the antenna moved from a relatively low rooftop to the Empire State Building. Also, I inherited a WBAI that was as white as a GOP lobbying group. I quickly changed that, starting with the news director, Joanne Grant, a black woman. It's not that the mid-Sixties WBAI management and board was overtly racist, I think it simply did not occur to them that they were discriminating, and that was a catch-22, because qualified black people often did not apply for jobs that they didn't think they could obtain. I am reminded of a call I received shortly after becoming manager. It was from New York's PBS station, Channel 13.

"We need to borrow one of your Negroes," the voice said.

That, at least, has changed for the better.

From what I gather, the current Pacifica dictate is to have subscribers run for local board positions. I don’t know the details, but ballots are going out and campaign commentary is aired regularly. A good thing, I guess, but listening to the few disgruntled voices that manage to air their opinions, it sounds as if the upcoming election may be based on the Karzai methodology. Let's hope I'm wrong.

Summing up, 99.5 is an ideally located commercial frequency, so it is not surprising to find that there are forces who have their eyes on it, but I hope a new management is aware of the principles that propelled Lew Hill and his partners to build KPFA so many decades ago. That they see how Hill’s vision does not have to be sacrificed for the sake of keeping up with the changing times. The basic principles still stand—what Lewis Hill, Eleanor McKinney and others envisioned in Berkeley in the late Forties meets today’s intellectual needs. It is not necessary to talk down to people—nourish the mind and everybody will get it.

There are, obviously, holes in my knowledge of the current WBAI—or, for that matter, Pacifica—so I welcome corrections as well as opinions. I am also curious to hear if the deterioration I detect applies to Pacifica's other stations, there are now five in all. If you have a comment, you can either post it below or go to the guest book located in the column on the right. I would really like to hear from you.

And I apologize for my repetitive rambling, but you know how it is when one sees a dream crumble, even when it is a shared dream.

Please note that I have added a few updates on 11/13/09.

This link will take you to Part I of this post.

November morning view of Central Park and skyline

Click on photo for a better view

I just thought I would share with you my morning view of Central Park and the NYC skyline, as I saw it from my apartment this Saturday morning. The Plaza Hotel, CitiCorp and Chrysler buildings are easy to pick out.

Is WBAI riding into the sunset?

I hate to go parochial on Stomp Off’s non-New Yorker visitors, but if you live anywhere within listening range of a Pacifica station, you might (although I hope, not) relate to my concern over the current state of WBAI. You can hear the current WBAI streamed at www.WBAI.org, but it is a far cry from that which originally attracted listeners and kept the station going for almost fifty years. An inkling of that past is what you will get from perusing the program guide pages below.

First a bit of history. Lewis Hill came from a well-to-do Kansas City family whose fortune was rooted in the oil industry. No, they didn’t discover the stuff spewing from the back yard, his father was an attorney who was instrumental in J. P. Morgan’s acquisition of an oil company and his uncle was Phillips Petroleum. Lewis Hill would take another route, one that led him to Quakerism and turned him into a staunch pacifist. During WWII, he was a conscientious objector who came to the conclusion that one reason for there being so much strife in the world was that people were not communicating properly. When he listened to radio and heard only inanity, he looked into starting a station of his own, a dream far more readily realized in the immediate post-war years, than it would be today, because FM was new and, basically, untried. Few people had the needed FM tuners, which meant that few people listened, and that, in turn, meant that advertisers were not interested. By 1946, Hill was living in California, where he raised some money and sufficient interest among friends to create the Pacifica Foundation. His idea took tangible form in 1949 when KPFA-FM went on the air. Not surprisingly, the Berkley-based free speech station was embraced by the Bay Area community.

The concept driving Lew Hill and his co-founders was to create an alternative broadcasting outlet, one that would give air time to unpopular as well as accepted ideas and nurture artistic creativity. In other words, an open microphone that welcomed that which commercial stations systematically locked out and was not hampered by strictly adhered to time restrictions—if a program ended at 5:23 PM, the next one started at 5:24. Even more innovative than pliable running time and free speech programming concept was the idea of listener sponsorship: if you liked what you heard and wanted to hear more, it behooved you to chip in.

KPFA got off to a rocky start, but it soon caught the imagination of people in the Bay area. Inevitably, there were internal conflicts within the foundation, leading Hill to resign in 1952, but he returned two years later and helped keep his dream alive, at least until 1957, when failing health and the pressures of Pacifica may have been the underlying causes for his decision to commit suicide. The foundation had taken on a life of its own, so it continued and grew, adding a North Hollywood station, KPFK, in 1959.

Around that time, in New York City, philanthropist Louis Schweitzer was having fun with his new FM station, WBAI. It complemented his keen interests in audio and the arts. A commercial station, it was ideally located in the middle of the dial, between NBC and CBS, and it had its own charm. Schweitzer’s choice of advertising was discriminatory: Steinway pianos were gently peddled in cultured tones while ads for soups and soaps were unacceptable. Perhaps Lou Schweitzer’s interests never came together more satisfactorily than when he decided to feature the Chicago Symphony concerts live and carry them over high frequency telephone lines. It was unheard of to use this costly method for transmission of signal over such a long distance, even more remarkable when the station broadcasting it was a small FM outlet—but Lou, whose family were the world’s largest producers of cigarette and electronics paper, was not in it for the money. Once, when a young man complained that he was not getting good reception of the Chicago broadcasts, Lou sent him two tickets to the concert and airfare to Chicago. At other times, he would spend hours in a Bronx housewife’s kitchen, rigging up an antenna to improve her reception while his Rolls Royce was parked a block away.

When a 1959 newspaper strike suddenly brought WBAI increased commercial traffic, Lou did not like it. He had heard about KPFA and the idea of a listener-sponsored free speech station appealed to him, so he contacted Pacifica and offered to make them a gift of WBAI, not just the frequency, everything—equipment, real estate, the entire package.

I was a disc jockey on WHAT-FM in Philadelphia at that time, and I was told of WBAI by one of my listeners, André Westendorp, a former member of the Dutch Swing College band, who had just returned from a visit to New York. I loved the concept and recall wondering how it could work.

Fifty years later, it’s still working. Or is it? Let’s just say that it’s still on the air and it’s still a Pacifica station. With this post, I have included four pages from 1966 program guides as typical samples of what subscribers could tune into every day. The guides (folios) were sent out each month to listeners who made an annual contribution of $12.50. When I took over the reins, I made sure that jazz was well represented and presented: Dave Lambert and Marian McPartland hosted their own weekly jazz slots, as did, at various times, Martin Williams, A. B. Spellman, Nat Hentoff and Don Heckman. Apropos non-playing hosts, Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler, Don Schlitten and I were on a rotating schedule. On Saturday afternoons, two hours of air time were turned over to musicians, who could use it as they wished. Some brought along guests (George Wettling's was Eddie Condon) others just played music (mostly recorded) and made interesting commentary. The latter included Blue Mitchell, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis (together), Jimmy Rushing, Bobby Timmons, Quentin Jackson, Ted Curson, Toshiko (then Mariano), Zoot Sims, and Bill Dixon. There was much more, including live performances, but I will get into that in part II of this filet mignon to burgers story.

Click on these pages and look at the program listings. I hope the other Pacifica stations (several have been added) have not suffered such adulteration as mars WBAI today. In a follow-up post, I will describe the deterioration, and wonder what the hell happened and how far down the drain the station will go.

This link will take you to Part II of this post.

Ambassador Armstrong's 1955 Milan session

The advent of tape recording opened the door to all kinds of audio manipulations that were not available to 78 rpm record producers. The result of that is sometimes good and sometimes bad, but it can create a nightmare for the dedicated few who laboriously try to put it all into some kind of order: the discographers.

As we continue to delve into the Armstrong file, we take a look at one such nightmare, the Ambassador Satch album. The concept was to reflect the global nature of Armstrong's musical activities and how he showed the world a desirable side of our country. An Armstrong smile and a few well-placed notes probably did more to win us friends than any envoy's handshake could. It goes without saying that this needed to be an album on which the beloved Satchmo performed for a variety of audiences, and that he does, but not always. That is to say, the audience is there and Armstrong is there, but not necessarily at the same time. Manipulation.

You get a good idea of the audio shuffling that takes place in an editing room when you scrutinize the Milan notes posted below and the previously posted notes for the W.C. Handy and Concertgebouw sessions.

Don't forget to click on the images to enlarge them.

I want to move on to other things after this, but when we return to the Armstrong file, we'll take a look at some interesting letters.