Afro-American music has had numerous revisionists over recent years, even though, if one takes a closer look, the first critical comments came in the early seventies, with the advent of Free Jazz, for sure a revolutionary vane, at times indeed highly aggressive as regards protagonists of the past. It was generally thought that the great players of what was known as the New Thing, starting with the more committed, from Archie Shepp to Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor to Don Chery, must have hated the more popular jazz players, Louis Armstrong first and foremost. In effect it was a case of critical equivocation and to realise this it would have been sufficient to watch the truly great musicians of this new musical movement who, above all during jam sessions, having divested themselves of the image of “breakaway” musicians, used to show off with pieces played in homage to the great masters. Certainly, Louis Armstrong, with his attitude as well as his style, used to generate doubts, to the point of being held up to be a classical example of a representative of black musicians there to amuse whites. A behavioural rather than a musical criticism, the result of the trumpet player’s ingenuity and his substantially placid character. Louis Armstrong had already been to Italy in 1935 (he played only in Turin with a group of musicians from America and the Antilles), he returned in 1949 (and that time the scenes of fanaticism were to say the least picturesque), and then again in 1952, when he played in Milan, Turin, Prato and Genoa. On 25th October 1952, after the four concerts in Milan, “Satchmo” inaugurated the new radio programme called ‘Varietà Internazionale’, on air on the second channel at 8.35 pm. The programme was transmitted from the Florence studios, where the trumpet player actually only stopped off for a few hours, just the time it took to go on air. The idea behind the ‘International Variety Show’ was that of monographic episodes based on one guest star each time, as was the case for Armstrong himself, moderated by Odoardo Spadaro, a Florentine celebrity. As had been the case in 1949, Louis Armstrong, with his arrival in Italy caused an explosion of enthusiasm among young jazz-lovers, who followed him from city to city. In Rome, in 1949 it was the turn of the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band (a name invented by the trumpet player himself); in 1952 in Milan, he was received by the Original Lambro Jazz Band and the Milan College Jazz Society. Natural it wasn’t that there was just enthusiasm, indeed, illustrious critics did not go wanting, above those concerned with cultured music, that interpreted the triumphal success of the trumpet player as a phenomenon of mass aberration. There were even those who, such as the critic and musicologist Guido Pannain, hazarded that if Armstrong had come back a few years later he wouldn’t have found even one admirer and no cinema hall disposed to host him. Never was a prophecy proved so hasty. “Satchmo’s” radio concert constituted an event of great interest from the point of view of jazz, also in consideration of the enthusiasm and participation shown by those in the auditorium. This was jazz that, as often happened to Armstrong in that period, transformed itself into entertainment, thanks above all to the vocal duets with Velma Middleton, the fat and rather funny singer used in those years. The composition of the band is something out of jazz history: Louis Armstrong (trumpet), Trummy Young (trombone), Bob McCracken (clarinet), Marty Napoleon (piano), Arvell Shaw (double bass), Cozy Cole (drums), as well as Velma Middleton herself. What can one say of such musicians? Always according to purists, the top bands directed by the trumpet players were others, even though, on closer scrutiny, many of these jazzmen stayed with him for many years. The only limitation, perhaps, is that yet again they were selected by Joe Glaser (who also decided their pay), Satchmo’s manager, impresario and boss, who, probably, had he been left to decide for himself, might have done better. The group is not without cases of individuality, such as the trumpet player Trummy Young, who had a bitter sonority and a “dry and sporty energy in his accents”, as was underlined by Giancarlo Testoni, at the time the director of ‘Musica Jazz’, on the pages of this his magazine in November 1952. To be reconsidered is also Marty Napoleon, who in that occasion underlined his Italian origins (his father, Phil Napoleon’s brother, was from Palermo in Sicily), glad to be back ‘home’ for the first time, even going to the extreme of ostentation in speaking with an archaic Palermo accent, pointing out that his father’s true name was Martino Napoli. But the one who most impressed was Cozy Cole, who a few years later was to take up a career as soloist of such success as to make him popular also outside the world of jazz lovers. He was known for the impressive control he had of the three virtues of the drummer: power, lightness and variety of play. “He plays hard and strong, all arms and wrists”, wrote again Testoni, “his head and shoulders have only short sharp movements, due to the earthquake effect of his instruments; a towering figure. Marvellous! His way of playing is not simple inventive, but aristocratic musical fantasy and taste, a perfect equilibrium in proportioning, as in the various logical parts of some discourse, the various elements of rhythm”. The repertoire is anthological and very swing: On the Sunny Side of the Street, Little Coquette, That’s My Desire, St. Louis Blues, On the Alamo, How High the Moon, Bugle Call Rag, When It’s Sleepy Time Down South, Basin Street Blues, Velma’s Blues. At times certain purists have criticised the trumpet player’s approach to jazz, judging it excessive and sustaining that Armstrong the singer was nothing other than a way of overcoming his grave physical handicap: a bent over lip. No small problem and the main reason that made the musician leave the United States for Europe. But his style, his way of feeling for and expressing jazz don’t change and set the trend. Our CD offers, also, a series of classics not to be missed, drawn from the ‘Voice of America’ catalogue, a series of anthologies of record production of the forties that arrived in Italy with the invading American troops and are now kept in the Rai archives in Bari. Among them some pieces that Armstrong never again played in public. The documentation includes and interview released to the Giornale Radio programme on 6th January 1956, and another testimony for the programme Radio Tre: “Il mio solo peccato è la mia pelle” on 21 march 1976: moments of a pleasantly vague Armstrong, ironically autobiographical, prepared to talk about a conventional Italy that nevertheless seems to be in his heart.