Bing Crosby described Louis Armstrong as "the beginning and end of music in America." Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's dictum, "No him, no me," remains true and it is often forgotten that Armstrong was not only one of the world's most charismatic and best loved entertainers for fifty years, but, the mythical Buddy Bolden notwithstanding, was also the first rung of the jazz ladder. He possessed a technical brilliance that fuelled a fierce individuality, and if individuality is the cornerstone of jazz creativity, its early flowering in the hands of Armstrong took the primitive jazz form by the scruff of the neck and gave it direction. He straddled two genres effortlessly, and if it was once held in haughty critical circles that Armstrong peaked in the late 1920s, that his career thereafter strayed from the true jazz fold and amounted to a series of embarrassing (if genial) comic routines, it should be remembered that Armstrong, like early jazz, was rooted in vaudeville, his aim was to entertain and his music walked always this undeviating path. Armstrong's hankering after popularity is often put down to his humble background; but humour and joy were the heart and flesh of his music (and a companion to his own feeling for life), and it remains true that humour is often so much more telling than more profound utterances. Armstrong breathed and encouraged vitality and wellbeing, and this persona was streaked in both vivid and delicate flashes across his music.

EARLY YEARS

Armstrong's birth has been the subject of debate, but 4th August 1901 is now accepted following the discovery of a baptism certificate in 1988. Born in the poorest part of New Orleans amongst the brothels and dance halls of 'Black Storyville', Armstrong's early life embraced poverty, deprivation and music. Once a major port feeding the heartland of America, New Orleans was in decline, its prosperity curtailed by the Civil War and the onset of the railways. An embroiled social and racial web had been spun, and from its melee of conflicting class, altered custom and differing musical traditions came the early strains of jazz. "Jazz and I grew up side by side… We were poor and everything like that, but music was all around you."

His father, a jobbing labourer, left the family around the time of Louis' birth, and his mother was a domestic and, in all probability, an occasional prostitute. Louis was left in the care of his paternal grandmother when his father returned briefly to the family; upon starting school he returned to his mother, younger sister and a round of stepfathers. From the age of seven until he was twelve, he was taken under the wing of an immigrant Jewish family, the Karnoffskys, who fed him and put him to work, initially selling coal in the streets. They also provided him with his first musical instrument, a tin horn, and enabled him to buy his first cornet from a pawnshop when he was eleven. Having already dabbled in petty street crime, he was charged in January 1913 for firing blanks from his stepfather's pistol into the air. This incident that was to be the making of him: he was sentenced to serve an unspecified period in the Home for Colored Waifs where his interest in music was to blossom. Having already developed his musical ear singing in a street barbershop quartet as a younger child, he progressed via rudimentary music theory lessons and instrumental tuition to play cornet in its band, whose repertoire included the popular march and ragtime tunes of the day.

THE HOT FIVE AND HOT SEVEN RECORDINGS

LIL HARDIN ARMSTRONG

Almost immediately upon his return to Chicago, the OKeh record company contracted Louis to record with studio based bands comprised of well-known musicians familiar with the New Orleans style of collective improvising, including Kid Ory, clarinettist Johnny Dodds and pianist Earl Hines. With Louis as the marketed name, these so-called Hot Five and Hot Seven sides were aimed at the vast numbers of Southern blacks who had migrated northward during and after World War One. Recorded over a period of three years and with each musician paid only 50$ per session, these are perhaps the most influential batch of jazz recordings ever made and changed absolutely the jazz environment. Tracks like Potato Head Blues and West End Blues, flawless and unparalleled, set the new standard: they not only highlighted Armstrong's brilliant playing but also delineated the soloist's role in jazz, which was not merely to paraphrase the melody but to improvise above a set of chord changes. With Armstrong as the new figurehead of jazz improvisation, cliché gave way to invention and imagination as Armstrong streamlined his style with his use of time and dramatic pause, and drama was complemented by an emotional purport (especially in the recordings after 1927), and surprise and variety came to the fore. Armstrong had never relied on virtuosity for its own sake (Oliver had told him that "if a cat can swing a lead and play a melody, that's what counts") and his ostentatious technique was employed in a more sparse and controlled context, to telling effect.

Armstrong, accidentally dropping his lyric sheet while recording Heebie Jeebies, gave scat singing - a rhythmic, percussive, wordless and improvised vocal style - its first popular airing (although it was first used by Don Redman in 1924!). Now a bandleader, Armstrong's voice would be heard regularly on his own records, stemming, so Louis claimed later, from Henderson's reluctance to let him sing. Heebie Jeebies, recorded in February 1926, was Armstrong's first hit, selling 40,000 copies within a few weeks; it was coupled with one of the most enduring of all Dixieland-style tunes, Muskat Ramble, based on an old folksong and written by Kid Ory, although Louis claimed later that he had penned it ("Ory named it, he gets the royalties, I don't talk about it"). But the most influential track for musicians of the 1920s was Cornet Chop Suey: its exhilarating sixteen bar stop-time solo work and ornately phrased eight-note figures demonstrate how far Armstrong was beginning to move away from the New Orleans ensemble interplay of cornet, clarinet and trombone. As an ironic twist, when its test pressing was discovered in 1940, "recommended for rejection" was found to have been scribbled on the label!

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

The most popular of the sides recorded by the Hot Seven group was Potato Head Blues, which is not in fact a blues at all but a military theme evoking the brass tradition of New Orleans jazz and constructed like a popular song. Wild Man Blues, a collaboration between Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, truly relegated the ensemble to a supporting role behind the soloist. Guitarist Lonnie Johnson joined Armstrong in late 1927, and he imparted a sense of urgency and drive to the music, as in Hotter Than Hot (a theme based on the final strain of Tiger Rag) where during its climax Louis hits twelve high Cs over eight bars in his final solo. Pianist Earl Hines was one of the few players in the 1920s to match Armstrong in technique, invention and rhythmic drive, and their jousting culminated with superb renditions of Basin Street Blues, noted for the depth of emotion in Armstrong's vocal, and West End Blues, which opens with a brilliant cadenza made more dramatic by Louis' restrained solo, a scat conversation with Jimmy Strong's clarinet and Hines' reflective solo.

THE BIG STAGE

By the late 1920s, Armstrong's star was shining bright. Henderson's attempts to entice Louis back into his fold served only to boost his salary from his regular broadcasts from the Savoy alone to 200$ per week. His 'circus' trumpeting with its bravura passages set alongside sweet melodic lines, his sense of musical stage drama with resounding fortissimos and focal points, his singing, his radiant smile and energetic personality were what the white, middle-class theatre and nightclub goers wanted. If Armstrong ever attracted criticism for this, it can only be argued that many of the careers of his fellow jazz stars of the 1920s had, by this time, faded into obscurity.

In March 1929 Armstrong recorded two sides with Luis Russell's band, including I Can't Give You Anything But Love, the first time he had recorded a popular song with an accompanying orchestra. This recording provided a template for future Armstrong performances: an opening trumpet solo, a vocal, a brief instrumental chorus followed by a final trumpet chorus and closing stratospheric cadenza, peppered with climactic high notes. Louis' jazz credentials still shine through as liberties are taken with the beat and phrasing, but from now on he was to rely less on tunes from the black jazz tradition (like Mahogany Hall Stomp) and more on new tunes from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley (such as Body and Soul, All Of Me and Stardust). Hereafter Louis was the star of every show and nearly all of his subsequent recordings highlight his performance and offer limited exposure to his sidemen. Armstrong travelled to New York soon after to play and sing in Fats Waller's revue show Hot Chocolates, which soon transferred to Broadway. His rendition of Ain't Misbehavin' (a hit when recorded later in July) created a sensation, and this marks the point when Armstrong's career in show business as an entertainer takes off, sometimes at the expense of jazz content. This trend is reinforced with his appearance in feature films - Pennies From Heaven in 1936 with Bing Crosby, for instance, Every Day's A Holiday in 1938 with Mae West, or Going Places in 1938, where he is featured singing Jeepers Creepers to a horse! In all, Louis appeared in thirty-six movie roles throughout his career, although some were not particularly memorable.