The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with pianist, composer, arranger, and educator Caili O’Doherty. Her new album, Bluer Than Blue, out 7 March via Outside In Music, celebrates the legacy of pianist, composer, and arranger Lil Hardin Armstrong. Bluer Than Blue features bassist Tamir Sherling, drummer Cory Cox, and special guests in tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover and vocalists Tahira Clayton and Michael Mayo. Links to Outside In’s website, and to O’Doherty’s, can be found at the end of this article.
At this point, most serious jazz fans are familiar with Lil Hardin, and the impetus to elevate her as a musical figure beyond her husband, Louis Armstrong. Let’s drill deeper: as a pianist, when Hardin’s music is under your fingers, what jumps out?
That’s the first thing I asked Caili O’Doherty. “I think she really shines as a composer,” she replied. “I think a lot of people unfairly judged her piano playing; she had a lot of negative criticism [on that front].”
Did this mean she was a weak pianist? Absolutely not, O’Doherty says.
“I think what is reflected is that they didn’t give her a lot of opportunities to improvise. There aren’t a lot of [recorded examples] out there of her actually improvising, shining through the arrangements as a piano player. I think she really shows her lyricism, and how melodic she is, through her writing and compositions.”
From ‘Let’s Call it Love’ to ‘Happy Today, Sad Tomorrow’ and ‘Just For a Thrill’, O’Doherty and company, richly recorded, illuminate a jazz figure overshadowed by Pops for too long, even as she was instrumental in his evolution via her membership with cornetist and bandleader King Oliver.
Read on to learn how O’Doherty came to pay a full-album tribute to Hardin.
UKJN: What was your gateway to Lil’s music?
CO’D: I got into her through Louis Armstrong. I took a class at Queens College on the history of Armstrong, and her name kept coming up.
It wasn’t the first time I had heard of her – I had heard of her many times throughout my undergrad – but she never came up about her piano playing or anything. She was just always taught about in the context of Louis Armstrong’s group, the Hot Five.
[Louis Armstrong historian and author] Ricky Riccardi taught the class. He obviously included Lil in the conversation, although there wasn’t much dedicated to her; he was mainly talking about Louis Armstrong.
But he has since pointed me in the direction of tons of amazing content. I read her unpublished autobiography that they have at Queens College. He’s given me a bunch of interviews to listen to, where she talks about her early life: growing up playing in the church, and being raised by her grandmother.
When she started getting into jazz music, her mom in particular was terrified, because the shows were really late at night, and they were in speakeasies – environments that they didn’t want her in. They were very hesitant of her going out and gigging and stuff.
UKJN: What happened next?
CO’D: Learning about her in class, I became more and more curious. I went into the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College, and started digging through some of the charts – and I found a bunch of charts in her handwriting. I was like, Did she write these tunes?
As I dug deeper and researched her and her tunes more, I realized a lot of people actually recorded them – Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin. So, I just fell in love with her compositions.
UKJN: Are there any other Lil Hardin tribute albums out there? I’m not aware of any.
CO’D: I don’t think I’ve seen one, yeah. But since I started this project [highlighting Hardin’s music in performance and on record] in 2018, I’ve played around with it – and now, colleagues have started to play some of her music, which has been really cool.
I did an album release show at the Stanford Jazz Festival [in California], and the trumpeter Andrea Motis was on the project. After we finished, I was so amazed by her music; I had never heard of her. So then, she started including Lil Hardin’s music in her shows.
I’ve worked with different people, and they’ve been exposed to her music and are starting to cover it. I know [vocalist and composer] Thana Alexa covered ‘Clip Joint’, and reached out to me about that. So, through the project, people have started to play her music. That’s the goal, for more people to learn about her music.
UKJN: How did you choose these Hardin tunes?
CO’D: I wanted to [highlight] a wide variety of her career. So, I chose some more popular tunes, like ‘Struttin’ With Some Barbecue’ and ‘Just For a Thrill’, [the latter of which was] made famous by Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles.
But I wanted to pay homage to tunes that people had never heard of, like ‘Let’s Call it Love’, ‘Let’s Get Happy Together’, and the title track, ‘Bluer Than Blue’. I wanted to dig into her lesser-known charts that people hadn’t been exposed to before.
UKJN: What do you have coming up?
CO’D: My next project is called Suite for Gearoidin. It’s a 13-part suite that I wrote with my quartet for my mom. Instrumental, very original music.
Some of the pieces are very short. They carry through seamlessly without a lot of pauses. There are not a lot of starts and ends; they just kind of trickle into each other. We recorded that last April, and it will come out in 2026.
UKJN: What inspired you to pay homage to your mom?
CO’D: My mom had a really long battle with cancer, and she passed away last May. Toward the end of her life, I wanted to create something for her that was hopeful and uplifting, something that could be a soundtrack for all the things that she was navigating.
Through the process, I found that a lot of people can relate to that. Music, for me, is very healing and therapeutic and calming. It allows me to express what I feel.
In performing the body of work, even now that my mom passed away, I think a lot of people resonate with using music as a tool for healing or dealing with something that life throws at you that is overwhelming.
