The personnel list above almost tells the whole story, what with the turnover of regular players during the 11-year period covered and the miscellaneous guest artists and interviewers. Much of the material has appeared over the decades (for instance, on the 1956 album Satchmo The Great, the posthumous Chicago Concert and the originally unreleased big-band track from the 1958 Newport Festival), but there's also much here that's new. As well as the 1947 Town Hall set which first reunited Armstrong and Teagarden, we have a previously unknown, 90-minute Carnegie Hall concert from the touring band only six months later. The rest of the material is from the mid and late 1950s and, despite being reasonably well covered by the Columbia label; here you get (depending on how you count) around 50 new tunes or takes. This might sound like material for specialists, and they would be the first to tell you that the format of most of these sets was relatively fixed. But, for listeners not steeped in the period or the material, the utter vivacity and reliability of Armstrong's own playing and singing (and the versatility of the various bands) is something to behold.