Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong grew up poor in New Orleans, learned cornet in the Colored Waif’s Home, and apprenticed in the city’s street bands and on Mississippi riverboats before following his mentor King Oliver to Chicago in 1922 — one musician inside the Great Migration’s millions (Gioia 2011).

The Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925–28) are the pivot on which jazz turned. On “West End Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” and his minor-key reading of “St. James Infirmary,” Armstrong demonstrated that a single improvising voice — rhythmically free, harmonically daring, operatically expressive — could be the center of the music. His trumpet rewrote the soloist’s job description; his gravel voice and scat singing did the same for popular singing, teaching Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday and everyone after them to phrase behind the beat (Gioia 2011).

Armstrong spent the next four decades as jazz’s global ambassador — so universally famous that later generations sometimes mistook the smiling entertainer for the whole man, missing both the revolutionary musician and the occasions, as in his blunt 1957 denunciation of Eisenhower over Little Rock, when the geniality dropped.