The Only Known Footage of Louis Armstrong in a Recording Studio: Watch the Recently-Discovered Film (1959)

1959 was a water­shed for jazz, a form of music that often looks back­ward and for­ward at once. That year, vir­tu­oso com­posers and soloists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Min­gus, Dave Brubeck, and Ornette Cole­man pulled jazz in all sorts of tem­po­ral and spa­tial dimen­sions, giv­ing new shape to bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, and what­ev­er Ornette Cole­man was up to. 1959 also brought us per­haps one of the most tra­di­tion­al records by a jazz great that year, Louis Armstrong’s Satch­mo Plays King Oliv­er, a trib­ute album to his “ear­li­est musi­cal hero,” writes All­mu­sic, “and the man who enabled two of his break­out gigs” in 1918 and 1922.

Arm­strong reached back to those years in his selec­tion of mate­r­i­al, with his All-Stars play­ing such clas­sic Oliv­er com­po­si­tions as “New Orleans stomp” and “Dr. Jazz,” along with a hand­ful of tunes Arm­strong “admit­ted with a sly smile, ‘Joe [Oliv­er] might have played.’” The record­ing ses­sions for that album end­ed up on a “33-minute, 16mm film,” writes The Guardian. “The record pro­duc­er, Sid Frey, had the film pro­fes­sion­al­ly shot but wound up not doing any­thing with it or telling any­one about it.” Just recent­ly, that film was dis­cov­ered in a stor­age facil­i­ty and acquired by the Louis Arm­strong House Muse­um. It’s the only known footage of Arm­strong in the stu­dio.

See Arm­strong and his All-Stars record “I Ain’t Got Nobody” at Audio Fideli­ty in Los Ange­les above. Here, as in the oth­er cuts, Arm­strong revis­its his New Orleans swing and rag­time roots, in stark con­trast to the for­ward-look­ing wave of records from a new gen­er­a­tion. But in doing so, he also cre­at­ed an instant clas­sic trib­ute that “deserves to be placed on the shelf along­side Arm­strong Plays W.C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats,” writes Jaz­zviews, “and in some aspects is supe­ri­or to them both.… ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’ is a tune that could have been writ­ten by Louis and the group, it fits them well. The whole group are in top form and Louis’s vocal is a gem.” It cer­tain­ly puts David Lee Roth’s ham­my ver­sion to shame.

This rep­re­sents one of “two com­plete takes,” The Guardian notes, pre­sum­ably the first. After­ward, at 4:22, watch Louis and the band take five and talk things over. There’s no audio, but it’s cool nonethe­less to see them casu­al­ly lounge around smok­ing cig­a­rettes and crack­ing jokes. “For now, the muse­um will post one com­plete song on its web­site and social media”—it’s cur­rent song being that above. “It plans to show the com­plete film at a future date.” For now, it’s housed at the museum’s Coro­na, Queens loca­tion, “in the mod­est brick build­ing where Arm­strong lived for 28 years and died in 1971.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Louis Arm­strong and His All Stars Live in Bel­gium, 1959: The Full Show

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong Per­form­ing Live in Con­cert (Copen­hagen, 1933)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness