To celebrate Seven Days of Satch, a week-long virtual festival produced by French Quarter Festivals Inc., OffBeat is republishing decades worth of Louis Armstrong content! For Day Five of our retrospective, we bring you an article by John Swenson first published in 2012 in which he spoke with Ricky Riccardi, curator of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York and author of a great book which refutes much of the standard critical thinking about Armstrong, What A Wonderful World.
Louis Armstrong’s Musical Ideals
Louis Armstrong is an American icon whose music and persona still resonates throughout the world 41 years after his death. His initial popularity ushered in the jazz age. His revolutionary trumpet playing created the idea of the jazz solo. His creative and thoroughgoing rhythmic sense suffused both his singing and playing, defining the notion of what would eventually be called swing. He moved effortlessly from heading the compact traditional New Orleans jazz group into leading a big band, then after World War II establishing a small band concept that influenced the R&B and rock ‘n’ roll combos that followed in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Armstrong virtually invented popular music as we know it today. As a vocalist his phrasing and rhythmic sense were the model for subsequent pop icons like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and countless other singers who went to school on his relaxed, seductive vocal style. But that was only one aspect of his singing. Armstrong’s approach to scat singing invented a new musical language, a vocalese that in effect added a new instrument to jazz orchestration. Add in the growls, distortion and exclamations of delight he employed and you’re really looking at a contemporary musical thinker.
