Fact: Some 70-plus years ago, Louis Armstrong was bigger than the Beatles. Fact: Louis' record sales provided the seed money for some of today's great communications empires. Fact: Pops' startling trumpet prowess and ingratiating vocals transformed the phrasing of every instrumentalist and vocalist on earth--and these are the sessions that started it all. Having performed as the second cornet with spiritual father Joe "King" Oliver's legendary New Orleans band, he turned everybody's head in New York during his stint with Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra in 1924. Then, at wife Lil Hardin's insistence, he returned to Chicago in 1925, which led to the first of his super sessions for the Okeh label--fronting an all-star band assembled just for the studio. Even amid the traditional New Orleans polyphony and ensemble work of "Gut Bucket Blues", the sheer power of Armstrong's cornet pulls along the rest of the band like a locomotive (and in setting the infectious closing riff, he not only anticipates the swing era but Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts"). By the time we get to the 1926 sessions, featuring his innovative "scat singing" on "Heebie Jeebies" and his dynamic stop-time phrases on "Cornet Chop Suey", Louis Armstrong is well on his way to transforming jazz into a soloist's art, and himself into the most influential musician of the 20th century. --Chip Stern