Ricky Riccardi
speaker
185 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Ricky Riccardi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Failed musician. Let's get it right.
No, I hope I was never like that.
And I wasn't 40. So I hope there's enough distance between me and David Brent there.
You can name a million great vocalists and a million great instrumentalists, and Armstrong's the only person who totally changed the way people sang, and he totally changed the way people soloed and played music on their instruments.
I mean, for me, this is kind of everything you need to know about Louis Armstrong in three minutes. Actually, it's probably everything you need to know about him in the first 13 seconds, because that unaccompanied opening trumpet cadenza, people are still learning it.
I mean, during the height of the pandemic, there was a hashtag Louis Armstrong West End Blues Challenge, and I had musicians around the world trying to nail that cadenza. But then the rest of the recording, the way he plays the melody, the way he scat sings, the operatic trumpet playing at the ending.
It was really his announcement to the world that he is here, he has arrived, and nothing will ever be the same.
Okay.
So the records he makes in the 1920s, which are at the heart of Stomp Off, Let's Go, they were known at the time as race records, records aimed at cities and urban areas and the black community in general and a lot of blues and a lot of instrumental jazz. But West End Blues wasn't a runaway pop hit.
You know, that that was still the terrain of Paul Whiteman and Guy Lombardo and band leaders like that. But it did move the needle a little bit. People were buying it. They were listening. They were influenced. And OK Records, Armstrong's label at the time, their head A&R man, his name was Tommy Rockwell,
He was the one who kind of had the brainchild, like, man, this Armstrong guy has got something different. If we could just get him to connect with the larger public, you know, he really has a chance to be a star. And so beginning in late 1928, Rockwell starts expanding the sound of Armstrong's band, and he starts simultaneously releasing his recordings as race records and as pop records.
And lo and behold, the pop records were selling. So in 1929, Armstrong comes to New York and – begins his reign as a full-blown pop artist for OK, recording things like I Can't Give You Anything But Love and Ain't Misbehavin' and When You're Smiling. And by 1932, he's the biggest selling recording artist in the entire industry.
And so at that point, you know, the race record experiment is over and Louis Armstrong is the first black pop star.
So to my ears, and also to Johnny St. Cyr, the banjo player, he did corroborate the dropping of the sheet music things. People have always said that that story was too good to be true. But if you listen carefully, there is a little bit, I don't want to call it panic, but in the first vocal chorus towards the end, Armstrong sings something. It almost sounds like you don't debo.
It's kind of gibberish. But in my mind, at that point, he might have dropped the lyrics and he didn't quite know what to do next. But this whole concept of using his voice like an instrument, people remember that he was doing that in his vocal quartet when he was 11, 12 years old. One musician, Norman Mason, remembered him doing that on the riverboats with Fate Marable in 1920.
Another musician remembered him doing that In New York with Fletcher Henderson in 1924. So this whole concept of wordless vocalizing was something he had done and Armstrong himself said, you know, these things just come to you in a flash. So he did not spend much time planning like I'm going to do this on heebie-jeebies. But in the moment with the sheet of paper on the ground.
He just launches into this entire chorus completely wordless. And by the end, you know, he's throwing Sweet Mama and things you normally don't hear in 1920s pop music. But if you continue listening to the end of the track, there's a moment where they had worked out a thing where they would play a Charleston beat and everybody would say a line. What you doing with the Hebe's?
And Kid Ori, the trombone player, he comes in at the wrong time. And even Armstrong himself, he admitted that he thought that they would try it again. But E.A. Fern, who was the producer for OK of this particular recording, He came in and said, we're going to take a chance on this one. And so even with the imperfections and all this stuff, they knew that that vocal had something different.
And Fern was the man that Armstrong gave credit for using the word scat. And in the book, I have a cover of the sheet music from later 1926. It's spelled S-K-A-T. But even though you can find other instances of wordless vocalizing on record before heebie-jeebies, for all intents and purposes, this is the record that really put scat singing on the map.
Well, to Armstrong, he said that the concept of a trumpet player or any instrumentalist also singing was just a foreign concept at that time. People just didn't do it.
Showing 41–60 of 185 · page 3 of 10
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