Louis Armstrong's Hot Five Recordings Begin, Revolutionizing Jazz

In November 1925, Louis Armstrong began recording his Hot Five sessions for Okeh Records in Chicago, launching a series of recordings widely considered the most important in jazz history. The small-group sessions—with Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Lil Hardin Armstrong, and Johnny St. Cyr—captured Armstrong's unprecedented improvisational genius and established the jazz soloist as the central figure of the music. These recordings set the vocabulary of jazz improvisation for a century.