Louis Armstrong Biography
If Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) had stopped making music after the 1920s, he’d probably still be the most important musician in jazz history. Armstrong (known as Pops to his friends and Satchmo to the rest of the world) was jazz’s first important soloist, and remains the most influential trumpeter of the 20th century. An innovator on both trumpet and cornet, Armstrong emerged early in his career as a crucial catalyst in jazz’s shift from emphasizing collective improvisation to spotlighting individual soloists. His early recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven ensembles pointed jazz towards the future with his sophisticated, emotion-charged improvisations.
Armstrong was also nearly as influential in his parallel career as a singer. With a distinctive gravelly foghorn tone that became one of the most familiar voices of the 20th century, he was a deft vocal improviser, adept at bending a song’s melody or lyrics. He was also a skillful scat singer, and one of the first to popularize that style on record.
Beyond his musical talents, Armstrong’s warm, effervescent personality made him one of his era’s most beloved and recognizable entertainers, and his popularity played a crucial role in expanding jazz’s audience. His spirited persona also helped Armstrong to become a late-blooming pop hitmaker at the height of Beatlemania. But even without his mainstream hits, Armstrong’s five-decade body of recordings is incredibly large and richly diverse.
The grandson of slaves, Armstrong was born into poverty and grew up in a rough neighborhood of uptown New Orleans. His father abandoned the family shortly after Louis’ birth, and he was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother. As a child, he became fascinated with his hometown’s musical styles, which had yet to be named “jazz.” He taught himself to play cornet, purchasing his first instrument with money borrowed from the Karnofskys, a Russian-Jewish immigrant family who had given him employment in their junk-hauling business. As a pre-teen, he spent a year and a half in reform school after being caught firing a gun during a New Year’s Eve celebration; his confinement instilled discipline and allowed him to develop his musical skills. After his release, Armstrong honed his talents playing in local nightclubs, in brass parade bands and on riverboats, and was taken under the wing of the great New Orleans cornetist King Oliver.
When Oliver moved to Chicago to start his own band in 1918, Armstrong inherited his mentor’s spot in Kid Ory’s band. By that point, Armstrong’s musicianship had matured to the extent that he became one of the first New Orleans musicians to engage in extended solos, building his own unique sound and injecting his own personality into his playing. He moved to Chicago to join Oliver’s band in 1922, before relocating to New York to join Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. During his year with Henderson’s popular big band, Armstrong switched from cornet to trumpet, the instrument with which he would be identified for the rest of his career. Armstrong’s distinctive approach became a major influence upon the other players in Henderson’s band, particularly saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.
Armstrong made his first recordings as a leader for the OKeh label in November 1925, fronting studio groups (including Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Earl Hines, Johnny St. Cyr and Lillian Harden Armstrong) billed as the Hot Five or the Hot Seven. Those recordings, including such hits as “Potato Head Blues,” “West End Blues,” “Muskrat Ramble” and “Heebie Jeebies,” were both extremely popular and highly influential, thanks in large part to Armstrong’s innovative solos. “Heebie Jeebies” was also one of the first prominent examples of Armstrong’s masterful scat singing. In early 1927, Armstrong had his first major vocal hit with “Big Butter and Egg Man,” scoring subsequent vocal hits with his readings of his friend Hoagy Carmichael’s tunes “Stardust” and “Lazy River.”
After several years of hiring existing combos to back him during live engagements, Armstrong formed his own popular big band in July 1935, and continued to score hits steadily through the end of that decade. When big-band swing began to decline in popularity in the late ’40s, he disbanded his orchestra and formed a smaller group he dubbed the All Stars, which at various times included the likes of Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, Barney Bigard, Arvell Shaw, Big Sid Catlett and Cozy Cole. Armstrong continued to maintain a busy touring regimen, often playing more than three hundred gigs a year, a pace that he would continue for much of the rest of his life.
In the ’50s, Armstrong embraced the long-playing album format, with considerable success. In 1964, he scored a surprise Number One pop hit with the title song of the Broadway hit Hello, Dolly! It became the biggest-selling release of Armstrong’s career, knocking the Beatles from a 14-week run at the top of the charts. Four years later, he scored an international smash with “What a Wonderful World,” which hit Number One in the U.K. in April 1968. Armstrong would continue to tour actively until a few years before his death in 1971, and would become America’s foremost musical ambassador, successfully touring Africa, Europe and Asia under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department.
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