Jazz Ensemble

Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: A Centennial Celebration of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five

After a short stint in New York with The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in 1925, cornetist Louis Armstrong returned to Chicago to perform in Lil Hardin’s Dixieland Syncopators at the Dreamland Ballroom near 35th and State Streets. Before Armstrong’s return, Hardin spoke after a show at the Lincoln Gardens with Ralph Peer, sales manager for Otto Heineman’s OKeh Records, about the possibility of recording under her husband’s name. With Amstrong back in Chicago Peer offered him some record dates at E.A. Fearn’s Consolidated Talking Machine Company at 227 W. Washington St., and the world-renowned Louis Armstrong Hot Five was born. The UChicago Jazz Ensemble celebrates the centennial of these landmark recordings with a concert of selections from across the seventy-nine Hot Five and Seven records made in Chicago from 1925–1928.

Free admission