Louis Armstrong: trumpeter of angels

It's a rare case indeed when I hear a performance that is so magnetic that it turns me on to an entire genre of music. Louis Armstrong's done that for me for jazz. I always dismissed jazz as something cool and cerebral; it's true that certain veins of it still come off this way to me. But Louis Armstrong's jazz is so far from that. He plays with the most exuberant tone I have ever heard produced on ANY instrument. His sound is full of joy, life, and soul. It effects me spiritualy as well as physically. (The physical part comes from his superb rhythmic sense. Whether he's singing or trumpeting, he makes the music swing like no one else).

A listen to the tune Muggles, 1928, makes his abilities easy for non-jazzers to quickly appreciate. The tune begins with an okay clarinet and trombone solos, but when Armstrong comes on, everything changes. The rest of the band momentarily drops out because his sound is so electric. It's on a different rhythmic and emotional plane. The tempo picks way up, while his solo introduces an intense swing. His bandmates join in after a chorus, and the band is instantly cooking. One man did that!

Armstrong transformed not only that track, but jazz music itself. Everyone wanted to swing like him. Arrangers like Fletcher Henderson and Benny Moten picked up on the swing, creating big band swing music. Other innovations attributable to Armstrong include scat singing and the idea of a jazz as a soloist's art. Before him, jazz was characterized by collective improvisation and polyphony, ie, the "New Orleans" sound. Because his solos were so amazing, though, the genre changed to accomodate him by featuring him as a single soloist. Other players soon picked up on this, and viola, the concept of the virtuoso soloist was born.