Louis Armstrong

Before Louis Armstrong, jazz was a group sport – everybody playing together, nobody really stepping out front. Armstrong changed that almost single-handedly. He grew up dirt poor in New Orleans, learned cornet in a home for troubled boys, and by his twenties was playing with a freedom nobody had heard before. He pulled the soloist out of the band and made improvisation the whole point.

His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s are the big bang of the music. You can hear musicians figuring out, in real time, what jazz could be. The rhythm loosened. The phrasing got conversational. He’d bend a note, hold it, let it swing behind the beat – and the modern feel of jazz was born right there.

Then there was the voice. Gravelly, warm, instantly his. He more or less invented scat singing and turned his own raspy sound into one of the most beloved instruments in American music. By the time he hit “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World” he was a global star, the friendly face of jazz to people who’d never heard a Hot Five side.

Some younger players grumbled that the showmanship was a sellout. It wasn’t. The grin was real, and so was the genius under it. Armstrong spent fifty years making the hardest thing in music – swinging, joyfully, every single time – sound easy.