The Gift of Jazz: Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

Recently, I mentioned to a colleague that though Sarah Vaughan was my favorite female jazz singer I thought that Ella Fitzgerald was the greatest.

He then asked me: Who is the greatest male jazz singer?

My answer: Louis Armstrong.

I’d even argue that Louis Armstrong is the greatest jazz singer ever, male or female. 

Armstrong—beloved as “Pops”—wasn’t the first jazz musician; Buddy Bolden has that honor. But there are no extant recordings of Bolden.  

Here’s the bottom-line: Louis Armstrong was the major stylistic influence on American music—instrumental or vocal—in the 20s and 30s, when American music became a fine art via jazz. My mentor Albert Murray thought that the United States registered its strongest impact on aesthetic procedure through Louis Armstrong’s definitive influence on jazz.

Billie Holiday is considered by most who study jazz to be the first great female jazz songstress. Her major influence: Armstrong.

Armstrong embodied and exemplified the rhythmic force of jazz, swing. His swing was so compelling, so entrancing, so alluring that big band sections modeled their style after him.  

He was of course a master of the blues, with its (according to Ralph Ellison) tragi-comic sensibility.

Pops originated scatting, which Ella extended and elaborated like no other. But the innovation began with Pops.

He rendered New Orleans culture, with its French, Spanish, and African influences. He drank in the opera influences of his birthplace too. 

When Armstrong used to say, “They all know I’m there in the cause of happiness,” nobody seems ever to have been inclined to insist otherwise. Because nothing was ever more obvious than the fact that he had come to town not to complain about the presence of the blues but to blow them away and hold them at bay—always with more subtlety and elegance than power, as overwhelmingly powerful as all of those astonishing high C’s always were.

—Albert Murray

Here are several examples: For the sake of contrast give a listen to Hoagy Carmichael's own version of "Stardust" from, reportedly, sometime in the 1950s.

Then check out this magnificent version by Armstrong from the early '30s.

Perhaps the best word to describe how radical his approach to singing the lyrics to “Stardust” is, as Wynton Marsalis once declared: avant garde. Add his trumpet playing and the word that arises is: transcendent.

Then check out the album Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson, with earphones to drink in every nuance. 

And then listen to Pops with Ella.

Once these examples are given a close listen, you’ll know why I rest my case.

In this season of giving, let’s appreciate the gift bequeathed by the paterfamilias of the jazz idiom, Louis Armstrong.