Pianist Caili O’Doherty has been recording as a leader since 2015, just two years after she graduated from the Berklee College of Music. Teaching and touring the world followed, but she may have just come into her own in the last several years. Since 2018, she has been developing a musical and educational project around celebrating the life of Lil Hardin Armstrong.
Hardin famously married Louis Armstrong in 1924 when both were playing in the famous King Oliver Orchestra during its engagement in Chicago. She was a trained musician, an excellent sight reader, and a budding composer. Hardin helped Armstrong get classical training and encouraged him to leave his mentor’s band to make his own career. The couple split and divorced in the 1930s, but Hardin’s career as a bandleader and successful composer lasted through the 1960s.
Caili O’Doherty‘s new album, Bluer Than Blue: Celebrating the Life of Lil Hardin Armstrong, is a dynamic reimagining of one of the first critical women in jazz. The band on the recording worked on this music with O’Doherty for quite a while: bassist Tamir Shmerling, drummer Cory Cox, Nicole Glover on tenor saxophone, and vocalists Tahira Clayton and Michael Mayo. The result is a nine-track voyage through vintage songs (six with lyrics, two with Mayo singing wordless vocals, one piano solo) demonstrating that Hardin’s work stands up to the finest songwriting of the Tin Pan Alley era.
This is Caili O’Doherty’s third release as a leader. Her debut, Padme (2015), included several different front lines (a sextet, a quartet featuring alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, a guitar-fronted quartet, and one track with a wordless vocal interpreting the leader’s crisp, modern original compositions. 2022’s Quarantine Dream featured the instrumental quartet (with Glover, Shmerling, and Cox) from the new record, performing originals and three jazz classics in a straight-ahead and propulsive style.
Bluer Than Blue is Caili O’Doherty’s most ambitious and bold release to date. It is not just a “concept album” built around a single composer but an act with personal and political implications. It is not a recreation of the past but a modern refraction of Hardin’s compositions that makes clear how sophisticated her vision was and the degree to which her talent remained important beyond her association with Armstrong. Any number of contemporary musicians could (and should!) have worked on a Lil Hardin Armstrong project over the last 60 years, but it makes sense that it ended up being a millennial woman who knows the barriers women face in the jazz world.
PopMatters talked to Caili O’Doherty about her new recording and career. Not coincidentally, the conversation turned to how difficult it is to make jazz in the current climate, particularly as a young woman and a mother.
This project sounds like your most intriguing and sophisticated to date. You came out of Berklee a dozen years ago, so you’re hardly a rookie. However, this seems like a vital career moment.
I believe in this project so strongly. It is a labor of love. I’ve been playing these arrangements and music since 2018 and even took it on a State Department tour overseas. It is important to shine a light on the women who paved the way for us. Lil was a feisty and fierce woman. It was her idea to market Louis as the world’s best trumpet player. She was outspoken and extremely well educated — she went to college against all odds, was fluent in reading music, and built a career doing that. She was musically fluent and knowledgeable. She was already in King Oliver’s band when Louis joined. Later in her career, she placed songs with Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and doo-wop groups.
I hope this project lets lots of people hear the music. I have high hopes.
Tell us about the genesis of making this a full album.
It started with a class I took at Queens College on Louis Armstrong with Ricky Riccardi [who is the Director of Research Collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum]. He kept mentioning Lil Hardin in passing. I was curious to learn more. The Armstrong Museum has an archive, and I found the original sheet music documenting their work together. I did a deep dive into her music and realized she was an incredible composer.
In 2018, I did a residency at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center and pitched the idea of this project. I arranged 12 songs for the residency. Several years later in 2021 I received a grant through Chamber Music America to present this project in partnership with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem as well as the Alabama Women in Jazz Festival and New Orleans Jazz Museum to record a three-part concert series centered on these arrangements. I also developed this into an education program at Jazz at Lincoln Center and beyond.
Finally, I got to make the project into a full album, recorded live at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, all in one day. By that time, the band had played the music quite a bit. We were ready.
Hardin was a songwriter in a tradition that was at its height when she was active. As a contemporary jazz musician, what makes her compositions stand up over time?
Harmonically, the chord progressions she used were unconventional. The melodies are memorable and have unique phrasings. They sound modern. And some of her lyrics are unbelievable. Even if I hadn’t arranged her compositions, they were perfect the way they were. My goal with this project was to make them more modern but keep their integrity.
The obstacle of arranging older music is not to overarrange and not to alter every single song. I have a very strong identity as a composer, and my recent recordings have featured entirely original music. I also have my own identity as an arranger. The challenge here was to do more than just play her tunes but, as a modern woman in jazz, to re-envision her music in the tradition.
Covering Hardin’s songs, it makes sense to collaborate with singers. Here you have Michael Mayo and Tahira Clayton utterly shining. You have worked with singers a lot. How did these singers become the right ones for this project?
Both have been working with the band on the project for some time. Tahira has an amazing sound and great versatility. She has an incredible gift of storytelling and makes the lyrics come alive. She makes these arrangements feel modern while honoring the originals, one foot in the present and one in the past. Michael has incredible musicianship — anything he hears, he can play. He brings a modern cool to the sound of Hardin’s melodies — he is wonderful singing lyrics, but he adds another dimension to the ensemble, generally, with little bluesy fills that are modern and chromatic but still connected to a gospel sound.
The transformation of “Let’s Get Happy Together”, featuring Tahira Clayton, is layered. It has a dreamy, sumptuous piano introduction that almost questions the song’s title, and then the band enters in a slippery, jagged time signature.
The band enters in 7/4 time, and then the bridge swings in 4/4. The lyrics are interesting — a bit dark and cynical. Lil’s lyrics are often sassy. They could almost sound corny unless they are made more complex or given a different meaning through the arrangement. The vamp for this arrangement shifts between diminished and major chords, so it is both dark and happy.
The stop-time breaks you use in the arrangement of “Happy Today, Sad Tomorrow” seem like a tribute to the old Hardin/Armstrong recordings of the 1920s. However, you improvise with another 100 years of jazz piano in your head. You play the breaks, then Nicole Glover steps in and sounds like Coleman Hawkins one moment and Sonny Rollins the next, with her modern twists and turns.
That is a perfect observation of how I toe the line between the history of these songs and making them contemporary. We improvise based on modern harmony, but the stop-time hits are an homage to the old recordings. Nicole is super versatile in how she can play modern music while honoring the history of this music.
Nicole and I grew up together since we were 11. We both studied with Thara Memory as part of his American Music Program, a youth jazz orchestra based in Portland, Oregon. He had unconventional ways of teaching and of having us study this music. For example, we frequently went as a band to the home of a great Ghanaian drummer, Obo Addy, and learned African drums. He also took us as a band to a salsa dance class.
You play the most iconic Hardin/Armstrong tune, “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque”, as a solo piano performance. Talk a bit about Hardin’s pianism and this recording.
Lil, as a pianist, is not easy to talk about. There isn’t much audio of her stretching out. I wanted to imagine what she would sound like if she had been given more room. On this track, I was trying to reclaim this famous composition as something that she wrote on the piano. Also, this track contributes to the album’s variety of band sounds: the trio with two different singers, some with lyrics and some without, the addition of tenor saxophone on some tunes, and solo piano as well.
Making a living as a creative musician has never been easy. Tell me about how you are negotiating your art and economics at a moment when there is no single path to making music that you believe in and connects to the jazz tradition.
It is difficult, but you get into a rhythm. I was recently commissioned to arrange the music of another under-recognized woman in jazz. I teach at The New School, I teach online, I play gigs, I get grants, I have done US State Department tours. In 2026, I will release a new work, “Suite for Gearoidin”, through another Chamber Music America grant. You keep the wheel moving.
Recordings just cost so much money to make. Bluer Than Blue was funded in part by a grant specifically for making videos of our performances, but they also allowed us to turn it into a recording. However, to fund the radio and publicity for this, I did a fundraiser. The creative projects we do are mostly self-funded. You pay to create your art rather than make money from it.
I am a new mother, too. My husband is Cory Cox, the drummer on this new record. Having a baby adds another challenge. Before, if I booked a tour, it was relatively simple. Now I have to manage childcare and travel with a baby. Trying to be a working woman, a mom, and a jazz musician is a huge challenge. Before I was a mom, it felt possible to tour and manage it all, but there is no support for women musicians and no funding for childcare. The gigs and tours don’t pay enough. Everything comes down to time. I think there needs to be more financial support put into musicians who are mothers.
My husband and I are not starving artists. We live in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is a bit more affordable than New York City, and we are homeowners. But the short answer is: you work really hard.
