Louis Armstrong: The Emperor of Jazz

From the very beginning, Louis Armstrong has helped to cultivate and give birth to jazz music. His career started in the beginning of the 1920s, which was the time when jazz music had mostly been formed. Louis’s career in jazz music has spanned over 5 decades, one can almost say that he was the bookends to the rise, growth, and diminishment of jazz music. Without Louis much of the jazz forms, styles, and improvisation would not exist today. Louis was the great muse for jazz musicians across all styles and periods in jazz history. His contribution is profound, and his ability to perform, entertain, and create music that speaks to the soul is forever apart of American and global history.

For Louis Armstrong’s life circumstances, and the political time period he was born into the fact that he lived to be a grown adult is considered beating the odds. Louis was born and raised in one of the poorest parts of New Orlean, he was raised by his mother after his father had abandoned them at a very early age. He was given odd jobs to do while growing up by a kind Jewish family, it was this family that gave Louis his first cornet which he played all the time. After a small incident with a shot gun Louis Armstrong was sent to the Waif’s house, a place for troubled children like an orphanage, it was there that music really became his life and saved his life.

In the Waif house the strict discipline helped to inspire Louis to become a master on the cornet and when he was released from the Waif house, he was considered to be a promising musician. He idolized another New Orleans cornet player, Joey Oliver. Oliver became a father figure for Louis and helped him land a spot in Kid Ory’s pacesetting band. It was there that Louis really grew as a musician and learned to read music. He developed a beautiful tone and wide range and really came into his own as a jazz musician as soared far above the Joey Oliver and captured the attention and eye of pianist Lil Hardin.

From then on there was no stopping Louis, he later moved the New York and started to revolutionize the way jazz was performed and improvisation. Before louis most jazz soloist accentuated staccato phrases, stayed rather close to the melody, and punctuated their solos with double-time phrases that were full of effects and repetitive. Then Louis came along and changed all of that, instead of staccato phrasing he practiced legato, he made every not count, used space for drama, and built up his solos to a climax and focused on telling a story in his music. He focused on putting in a blues feel into every one of his songs. His style was expressive and voice like and his tone was so beautiful that it helped to define the sound of the trumpet itself.

Louis’s style of jazz improvisation became the new mold that every other jazz musician after him, until the bebop era, strove to emulate. Louis Armstrong switched over permanently from the cornet to the trumpet in 1926 and from then on, he became one of the greatest trumpeters that ever lived. During the late 1920s Louis did many recordings with his bands and it was in those recordings that he also developed as a singer far different from any other jazz vocalist ever before. His gravelly tone was so distinctive, and he phrased all of his melodies like one of his horn solos. It was during one of these recording sessions with Ella Fitzgerald that he invented scat singing, which are basically nonsense syllables singing the horn line. It worked out so well that from then on Scat has become a key part and defining characteristic of Jazz music.

Not only did Louis Armstrong play, perform, and compose, classic jazz standards but he also took famous American songbook pieces and musical theatre ballads from Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, and Rodgers and made them his own through jazz interpretation. His pure ability to entertain mas matched by no other, he was both comedic and serious. He toured all over Europe and become an international sensation and household name. In some ways Louis, and other black Jazz musicians after him, preferred to perform and live in Europe since there were far less racial prejudices and persecution.

One of the main contributing factors for Louis Armstrong’s success was he manager Joe Glaser. It was a very smart move for Louis to hire a white manger, who also had ties to the mob rule, as his manger because in the day and time Louis was working and playing in a white America where most of the time black people had the worse luck and were constantly discriminated against. Because of Joe Glaser Louis Armstrong was able to become a very wealth and successful musician throughout his working life and after he passed. Most other black musicians, such as Joey Oliver, did not have that luxury and ended up dying poor and destitute.

In conclusion, Louis Armstrong will forever be known as one of the most prolific jazz composers and performers in history. He greatly influenced many jazz soloists during his time and after, he changed and helped to create jazz improvisation with his own unique style and approach to both instrumental and vocal improv. He was known to be a cheerful and optimistic man who chooses not to dwell on the negative in life but look at the beauty that surrounds us in the world, hence why I believe one of his most iconic and favourite works, “What a Wonderful World” still chines on brightly today.