The appearance of the Armstrong All Stars at the inaugural Nice Jazz Festival in 1948 is the stuff of legend, and hitherto only a handful of tracks have appeared on obscure labels like Palm Club, taken from French broadcasts of their two-night stay. This album starts with nine tracks from those sessions, only four of which have been issued before. But nostalgic as this tape from the Louis Armstrong House Museum is, it sounds as if it was recorded underwater, and the band’s alternative versions of ‘Muskrat Ramble’ and ‘Royal Garden’ from the Boston Symphony Hall concert four months earlier are vastly superior in both sound quality and artistry. The balance of this album consists of a Berlin concert from 1952 with an indifferent line-up, but slightly better fidelity. So, as a whole, this album does one of the great small groups in jazz no favours by issuing slightly shabby recordings from Louis’ own collection. Indeed, if this was one’s first encounter with the All Stars it would be hard to fathom what all the fuss was about. So this issue – for all the surrounding hype – can be safely overlooked, and the group’s commercial records from Boston (1947) or Pasadena (1951) listened to instead for an impression of its real genius.