Sandy Brown Jazz

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Delfeayo Marsalis

We Take Two versions of this classic Louis Armstrong recording. The first is a beautiful and moving instrumental video featuring trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis. It comes from the closing event at the 2005 International Trombone Festival in New Orleans. With Delfeayo are Jon Batiste (piano), Jason Stewart (bass) and Jason Marsalis (drums):

Before we play our second 'take', let's remember Louis Armstrong's version, but before we play it, here is an extract from Ray Celestin's recent detective novel, Sunset Swing, the fourth in his series City Blues Quartet. If you wonder why the scene is set on Christmas Eve 1967 when the video we include below is earlier in 1967, Ray Celestin says: "The last element I changed was in the genesis of the song 'What A Wonderful World'. All through the series, I've tried to keep Louis Armstrong's history as accurate as possible, but I didn't manage to keep that up here. Bob Thiele actually approached Armstrong with the idea for the song directly, playing him a demo of the composition while Armstrong was on a tour in Washington, D.C. Armstrong liked it and agreed on the spot to record the song. Tying the song into the pessimism Armstrong was probably experiencing at the time was my invention. The song was released in September 1967, so a few months before the book takes place."

Perhaps the imagined scene puts the tune into a context for today.

24th December 1967

'.... He stared across the sidewalk at the electrical store. It had a wall of television sets in its windows .....The TVs were all tuned to a news program - footage of anti-war protesters, of Vietnamese jungles on fire, something about wildfires in Malibu. Louis felt a vague guilt that he was thinking about bowing out with the world in such a mess ..... The news cut to commercials - Pepto-Bismol, Saran Wrap, Cadillacs. Louis knew from having seen them all before that each one had a jazz tune bouncing along in the background. Gone were the days when jazz was banned from the airwaves, when it would only be heard in nightclubs, record shops....An advertisement for Colgate came on, set to an approximation of a New Orleans jazz standard.

Louis shook his head and looked at the envelope of sheet music in his hand, He figured he might as well get it over with. He ripped open the envelope and took the pages out. He frowned when he saw the song title - 'What A Wonderful World'. Then he skimmed his eyes over the lyrics, which had been scribbled onto the paper in pencil underneath the staves. When he looked at the sheet music itself, the music began playing in his head, just as it always did. He scanned through it all quickly and when he had the melody right, he scanned back through it again, adding the lyrics.

The syllables pulsed with his weakened heartbeat. He ran through them all the way to the end. He pondered the sentiment, how it fitted with the melody, how it fitted with the world around him, a world on fire ......

....Louis tried to find the greatness in it that Glaser had seen, but couldn't. The lyrics felt sickly sweet. Corny. Syrupy. Sentimental. .... Could Louis really bring himself to sing it? To put his weakened heart into it? .....

......Suddenly the song felt less saccharine and more wistful. There was regret in there. Sorrow. Like it was all the thoughts of an old man looking back on his life and listing all the things he would miss when he was gone.

Suddenly the song made sense. It was a lament. A funeral march. A Sunset blues. That was the point of it - that when you were faced with nothing, even this fractured world was a wonderful one. Something worth fighting for........'

This video of Louis Armstrong singing What A Wonderful World is from 1967. Four years later, against his doctor's advice, Louis played a two-week engagement in March 1971 at the Waldorf-Astoria's Empire Room. At the end of it, he was hospitalized for a heart attack. He left hospital in May, and resumed practising his trumpet playing. Still hoping to get back on the road, Louis died of a heart attack in his sleep on July 6, 1971, a month before his 70th birthday.

And so to 'take two. This is by Emmet Cohen and the Gotham Kings with vocals by C Anthony Bryant from a few weeks ago.

I really like this version with its sense of hope, and it has fine solos from trumpeter Alphonso Horne, from Emmet at the piano and from the voice of minister
C Anthony Bryant. The rest of the band are Rashaan Salaam (trombone); Calvin Johnson (tenor saxophone); Russell Hall (bass) and Kyle Poole (drums).

Emmet Cohen

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