'Black and Blue' is one of the ultimate protest songs addressing the oppression of African-Americans through what feels so like personal pain both physical and emotional. A song that does not shy away from expressing the essential brutality of violence and pertinent like a prophesy to inform a climate shocked still by the abomination that was the killing of George Floyd and ongoing police brutality.

This version, illuminated by a strolling Reginald Veal bass riff, of the venerable piece just released scales an impossible mountain by travelling along an ascending path up from the routes of traditional jazz to a new high altitude base camp designed by hip-hop culture that seems a galaxy away. No, the version is not reached via other styles such as MBASE or free-jazz but via trad and the building blocks of jazz going back to the early 20th century and the music of New Orleans. Leading musicians from New Orleans and particularly musicians who have radicalised trad in their own often ''modern'' (hard bop or swing big band) ways despite appearances are involved including Wynton Marsalis, probably the best known jazz musician in the world today. Don't think Wynton is a radical trad artist not that this needs to be the point here but where have you been since Blood on the Fields in 1997? His wake-up satirical album The Ever Fonky Lowdown last year probably gave us more of a recent clue about long established directions in his music (Black Codes, another exemplary statement of highly considered composition) often lost in the big suits and corporate institutional bigwiggery he rolls with on a day-to-day basis and all the offputting didactism that sometimes gets in the way when it shouldn't.

From The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong All-Stars (ft. Common, Wynton Marsalis) A Gift To Pops you'll find for instance Pops in 1964 on 'When It’s Sleepy Time Down South' while Wynton guests on another radical tradster Nicholas Payton’s arrangement of 'The Peanut Vendor'.

'(What Did I do to Be So) Black and Blue' was written by Fats Waller with lyrics by Andy Razaf and Harry Brooks and was first recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1929 when America was segregated and decades away from civil rights coming into federal law. Here many years since the days of Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X after civil rights changed America for the better but with still a lot of wrongs to be righted it's Payton singing Waller’s lyrics (back in the 1990s he also interpreted the song in more trad guise all easy with Doc Cheatham) and then Common rapping 'My school of thought is black openness/To define and redefine what the culture is.” SG. Out today

Louis Armstrong photo: Jack Bradley via Verve/Louis Armstrong House Museum