I was listening to an archival radio broadcast from the late Phil Schaap about the swing jazz band man Tiny Bradshaw. In full Phil Schaap discursive mode, he briefly detoured to describe a recording that Louis Armstrong has made of “Mack the Knife” with Lotte Lenya, the singer who’d made this song famous originally in the 1930’s as part of Threepenny Opera. Mack the Knife is a stone cold classic; I knew Louis Armstrong had recorded it, but hadn’t quite appreciated that it was his recording that put reinserted it onto the cultural agenda, and that he’d recorded a version with Lotte Lenya!
From this essay on the occasion of the Lotte x Louis recording being added the Library of Congress:
[Mack the Knife] had the makings of a hit single, but [producer George Avakian] was unable to persuade any of Columbia’s artists to play his hunch. Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, and Gerry Mulligan all turned him down flat, finding the simple tune of “Moritat” to be too repetitious.
…not too repetitious for Louis, though! His immediate reaction is “LFG”:
“Oh, I’m going to love doing this!” he told Avakian. “I knew cats like this in New Orleans. Every one of them, they’d stick a knife into you without blinking an eye! ‘Mack the Knife’! Let’s go!”
The recording he made with Lotte Lenya wasn’t itself released immediately, and Phil Schaap noted that she doesn’t quite know how to swing her lines. This version is as cute as you think it might be: