Louis Armstrong

What should be top of the Cop26 pop charts | Letters

Letters: Mike Pender champions Bob Dylan; Peter Higginbotham proposes Cliff Richard; Danny Sullivan supports Tom Paxton; Rob Hodgson suggests John Mayall; and Toby Wood recommends Louis Armstrong

Letters

02, Nov, 2021 @6:06 PM

Louis Armstrong and the spy: how the CIA used him as a ‘trojan horse’ in Congo

Book reveals how the jazz musician unwittingly became party to secret cold war manoeuvres by the US in Africa

Jason Burke Africa correspondent

12, Sep, 2021 @8:45 AM

Jazz on a Summer’s Day review –Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and more shine bright

Powerful musical moments are undercut by exasperating blandness in this rerelease of Bert Stern’s film of the 1958 Newport jazz festival

Peter Bradshaw

29, Aug, 2021 @9:03 PM

A Man Called Adam review – Sammy Davis Jr swings in earnest race-issue drama

Histrionic 1966 picture about a struggling musician has worthy ambitions but is deeply unhip

Peter Bradshaw

10, Aug, 2021 @3:00 PM

Marcel Stellman obituary

Record producer and lyricist known for Tulips from Amsterdam who brought the TV show Countdown to the UK

Spencer Leigh

10, May, 2021 @5:06 PM

Ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop: is scatting having a revival?

Serpentwithfeet’s latest track uses the classic jazz technique. But from Bobby McFerrin to Scatman John and Baby Shark, maybe it never went away

Ammar Kalia

12, Mar, 2021 @1:00 PM

Not a wonderful world: why Louis Armstrong was hated by so many

Casual listeners think of him as a gentle giant of jazz, but critics and African Americans often saw him as a sell out or ‘Uncle Tom’. A new book aims to show how radical ‘Pops’ really was

Ed Prideaux

17, Dec, 2020 @10:08 AM

The week in radio: Moon; The Dying of the Ice; Cold War in Full Swing and more

Radio 4 recreated the moon landing and explored ice instruments, while Radio 3 celebrated Louis Armstrong’s 1965 GDR tour

Sean O’Hagan

21, Jul, 2019 @6:00 AM

Why Earl Scruggs was the Beethoven of the banjo

Emma John: A trip to North Carolina to study bluegrass yielded this lesson: Earl Scruggs was the greatest there ever was

Emma John

11, Jan, 2019 @2:43 PM

When America's hottest jazz stars were sent to cool cold-war tensions

When a US blighted by racial unrest found itself needing to win a global propaganda war, a team of musical ambassadors was assembled. The result was anything but straightforward

Hugo Berkeley

03, May, 2018 @8:57 AM