Ricky Riccardi’s Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong (Oxford University Press, 2025) is not only the best jazz biography that I’ve read in recent years, it is the best biography of any kind that I’ve read in recent years. It’s well-researched and it’s well-written, with each of its 29 chapters ending in a way that makes you eager to read the next one. And Riccardi has a good feel for both Armstrong the man, and for the music that he created.
There’s no more important artist in jazz history than Louis Armstrong (1901-1971). And this book—covering his life from his birth up through 1929, in 466 densely packed pages—is a must for any serious jazz fan.
This is the third book about Armstrong that Riccardi has written. (Riccardi covered the later years of Armstrong’s life in What a Wonderful World, published in 2011; he covered the middle years of Armstrong’s life in Heart Full of Rhythm, published in 2020.) And I did not want to let it go. I did not want to leave the world of this book.
Over the years, I’ve reviewed plenty of books. But I’ve never spent quite as much time with one book that I was reviewing as I have with this one. And that’s a testament to just how rewarding this biography is. I read it through once, sometimes stopping to compare what Riccardi had written about various events in Armstrong’s life with what past biographer
