In March 1957, the student stage manager at Highland Park High School, north of Chicago, rigged two microphones over the stage, ran them into a reel-to-reel and recorded Louis Armstrong and His All Stars playing to 1,200 people in the school auditorium. Joel Goldstein held on to that tape for almost 70 years. On 13 November 2026 Verve releases it as One Night in Highland Park, and Armstrong’s biographer Ricky Riccardi calls the performance “sensational, one of his best.”
The concert took place on 19 March 1957, as a fundraiser for the Highland Park Reform Temple. It’s coming out on CD and vinyl, with “Ole Miss” already available as the first single—as you can hear below! Riccardi, who is Director of Research Collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, wrote the liner notes.
You can pre-order CD or vinyl via Amazon here.
Armstrong in early 1957
Armstrong was about as famous as a jazz musician could be at this point. His Columbia recording of “Mack the Knife,” cut in 1955, had become a hit, Ella and Louis had come out on Verve in 1956, and he had appeared alongside Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra in the film High Society the same year. The State Department was sending him abroad as an unofficial cultural envoy, and Columbia had leaned into the image with the 1956 album Ambassador Satch.
None of that stopped him taking school and civic dates. Two days before Highland Park he had played two shows at the Chicago Opera House, and he was working a heavy run of one-nighters. Asked in 1957 why he kept up the schedule, he answered simply: “I play them because I love music.”
Six months after the Highland Park concert, Armstrong made the most outspoken political statement of his career. In September 1957, talking to Larry Lubenow, a journalism student stringing for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota, he condemned President Eisenhower’s failure to act as Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock Central High School. Lubenow reported Armstrong saying that, as far as he was concerned, Ike and the government could go to hell, and he pulled out of a planned State Department tour of the Soviet Union in protest.
The All Stars on Stage
The All Stars on stage that night were Trummy Young on trombone, Edmond Hall on clarinet, Billy Kyle on piano, Squire Gersh on bass and Barrett Deems on drums. Of all the versions of the All Stars, this was the one Armstrong himself considered his favourite.
Young, a veteran of Jimmie Lunceford’s orchestra, had been Armstrong’s trombonist since 1952 and handled much of the onstage comedy. Hall had come in at the end of 1955 to replace Barney Bigard, after five years with Eddie Condon’s band and a long run at Café Society in New York. With the All Stars he had already toured Europe, Australia and Ghana and appeared in High Society. He left the group not long after this period, tired of life on the road, which makes any well-recorded concert with him in the line-up worth having.
How the tape was made
Goldstein’s setup was simple but better than most amateur recordings of the era: a pair of Telefunken mics suspended above the stage, feeding an Ampex tape machine. For the release, audio engineer Kevin Reeves took the original reel and handled the transfer, mix and mastering.
The One Night in Highland Park set list
The programme is a typical All Stars show of the period, opening with the theme “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” and moving through “(Back Home Again in) Indiana,” “The Gypsy” and W.C. Handy’s “Ole Miss,” which the All Stars had cut for Columbia on Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy in 1954. The first side of the record closes with “High Society Calypso,” straight from the film.
Side two opens with “Blueberry Hill,” his 1949 Decca hit, then takes in “Tin Roof Blues,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “Mack the Knife,” “Tiger Rag” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” before closing with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
A tape from the school circuit
Plenty of live All Stars recordings from the 1950s exist, many from concert halls, festivals or label-organised sessions. A complete show in a high school auditorium, taped by someone in the building rather than by a record company, gives a closer look at the bread-and-butter gigs that made up most of his working year.
It also adds to the growing shelf of archival Armstrong releases that Riccardi and the Louis Armstrong House Museum have helped bring out in recent years, much of it drawn from tapes that sat for decades in private hands. A student with two microphones caught one of the best nights by Armstrong’s favourite band and kept it safe for almost seven decades, which is how a good part of jazz history has survived.
One Night in Highland Park by Louis Armstrong and His All Stars is out on Verve on 13 November 2026. You can pre-order CD or vinyl via Amazon here.
